Word: mori
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Acronym alert: The Japanese hosts wanted to make this an Internet summit (even though Prime Minister Mori only learned to use a mouse a few months ago), so the summiteers issued an Okinawa Charter on Global Information Society and promised to do more to wire the developing world. Beforehand, U.S. officials stopped talking about bridging the "digital divide" that threatens to separate rich countries from poor, but instead started pushing the idea of creating more "digital opportunity" for developing countries. Reason: At Okinawa, they announced they were forming a new Digital Opportunity Task Force, or DOT Force...
...some moments of inexplicable silliness. This summit's contribution to the genre: the leaders "planting a tree" by each throwing a shovel of dirt on a pine tree that was already planted, and dutifully examining with feigned interest a new high-tech voting machine that Japan's Prime Minister Mori was quite proud...
...bound to bring up such questions--although one cannot be sure that curator Robert Rosenblum was eager to raise them. Most of the fashionable art of our fin-de-siecle is just as lousy as the worst stuff here, and done at a far lower level of skill. Memento mori, and send not to know for whom the bell tolls: cracked though it is, it tolls...
...Though Mori was known as a skilled debater at Waseda, he has lately distinguished himself more for loose lips than silver-tongued oratory. For example, he has inelegantly described Osaka as a "spittoon" and "a dirty city that thinks only about making money." Last January, reflecting on the difficulties of campaigning in enemy territory, he said that "all the farmers in the field ran away as if someone with AIDS was knocking on their door." In February, he asserted that the Americans had all "bought guns" in preparation for the Y2K bug "because when electrical power fails...
Coincidentally, Okinawa will be the site of Mori's first major international appearance when he is host of the G-8 summit in July. That leaves him just three months to hone his diplomatic skills and demonstrate his potential as a national leader before he sits down with the heads of the industrial world's most powerful countries. On that occasion, his peers will be watching closely to see if Japan's new leader-by-default is anything more than a successful party infighter...