Word: days
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first day of class in Iran comes with its own traditions, designed to help students ease into the academic year. First-graders have it the best. The children are designated as shokoofeh (literally, blossoms), and the teachers give each child a stalk of a fragrant flower. The principal raises a microphone and calls all of the kids into rows, regimented by grades. Then, at exactly the same time across the country, an official strikes a metal plate with a small hammer, the aural signal for the year to begin. The kids pass under a Koran and into their new classrooms...
There is comfort in these rituals, in knowing what the first day will bring. But this year will be different, the opening-day rituals troubled by the events of the past summer. This was not a good summer. For many, school will be the first time to confront in a formal social setting what has happened to the country since the controversial presidential election in June. As the principal of a Tehran high school put it to me in his own understated way, "We will surely have problems." (See pictures of the turbulent aftermath of Iran's presidential election...
...because what has happened is not over. Not with show trials being broadcast on state television, the cautionary call of a worried regime, met every night by the response across rooftops, "Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar" (God is great, God is great). Not with every holiday, religious event and memorial day an opportunity, a possibility, for protest. Things are not yet over in Iran. The phrase "Atash zire khakestar" (There is yet fire under the ash) is heard a lot these days...
...comparison with China is inevitable. Many U.S. businesses have seen Japan's companies as rivals in international and American markets. But in the case of China, the business relationship is quite different. China does not yet have many obvious competitors to U.S firms, though one day it will. At present, not only is China itself a huge and growing market for American firms, but those businesses increasingly source their goods in China - in a way that few have in Japan. That has created a "thickness" to the economic relationship with China of a sort that has not been so marked...
...inevitable that the appointment looked like an opportunity missed. The U.S.-Japan alliance really has been important to stability in Asia, but its foundations, in my view, have never been quite as secure as its boosters have liked to assert. The Japanese election - it becomes clearer every day - represents a real sea-change in politics there. If the alliance is not now to drift into irrelevance, or worse, some high-level attention to what its purposes might be in the new world is needed...