Word: worldly
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...that proved incapable of reversing the slow-motion decline of Japan's economy and global influence, a phenomenon the Japanese call "Japan passing." Thirty years ago, Japan was much like the China of today, an up-and-coming global power with an economy that was the envy of the world. Japanese companies such as Sony, Toyota and Honda shoved aside their competition from the West. By the late 1980s, Americans came to see Japan's economic firepower as arguably a bigger threat to U.S. global dominance than the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. Today, however, no one is scared...
...says Sheila Smith, senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "They're working it out as they go." Nowhere has that been more apparent than in Hatoyama's handling of the status of American bases on Okinawa. That southern Japanese island, a famous World War II battleground, still hosts roughly 25,000 troops, almost all of them Marines, and the local Okinawans have long resented the heavy military presence. In 2006, the U.S. and Japan reached an agreement to move a Marine air base on Okinawa to a less populated part of the island...
...even confrontational, relations in recent years, due to lingering anger among Chinese over Japan's brutal invasion of their country in the 1930s and 1940s. But Hatoyama has defused tensions by promising not to visit Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which is dedicated to Japanese war dead, including some convicted World War II war criminals. Regular visits by Hatoyama's predecessors had been a regular irritant in Japan-China relations. In contrast to Gates' testy visit, Japanese officials rolled out the red carpet in December in Tokyo for Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who was granted an audience with Japan...
...also makes clear that by forging warmer ties with China, he's not downgrading the alliance with the U.S. "We are always watchful of the rapidly rising military capability [of China]," he says, but "closer economic ties between China and Japan will be beneficial for the prosperity of the world and for stability in Asia." Better relations between the U.S., Japan and China "would be a win-win sort of relationship," he says...
...Juba's five tarred roads and a small clutch of bars to soak up those expat salaries. But it hardly suggests the improbable reality now dawning on the place: barring war, famine or genocide - and all are possible - in 10 months this sweltering, malarial shantytown will become the world's newest capital city in the world's newest country, South Sudan...