Europe

  • Where the Space and AI Investment Frenzy May End Up: Lessons from Britain’s Railway Mania

    Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public on June 12, raising the equivalent of roughly $80 billion in a single IPO. Although its share price has eased somewhat since then, the company’s market capitalization still stood at about $1.8 trillion in mid-July, making it one of the seven to ten most valuable companies in the world. For comparison, the ten largest companies…

  • Japan should avoid unnecessarily provoking China－On the Occasion of the Renewal of the National Security Strategy

    Akio KawatoFormer Ambassador to Uzbekistan; Former DCM, Embassy of Japan in Russia . (Japan is currently conducting its once-every-few-years review of national security policy. As a result, the country’s three core strategic documents—the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the Defense Buildup Program—are being revised. Recently, the Research Institute for Peace and Security (RIPS) published a collection of…

  • In Japan innovations occur within companies rather than by loners

    Japan’s public broadcaster NHK airs a program called Project X. Each episode tells the story of people who joined forces to develop a new technology or build something remarkable—a massive dam, the QR Code, a lunar exploration robot (tiny ones), and many others. One of the pleasures of the program is that the people who actually did the work return…

  • The Hollowing Out of American Pop Music

    　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Akio KAWATO Lately, pop music in many advanced countries seems increasingly mechanical, standardized, and overly technological. It feels very different from the American pop music of the late 1960s—artists such as Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King—or from Japan’s City Pop scene of the 1980s, represented by artists such as Eiichi Ohtaki, Minako Yoshida, and Taeko Ohnuki. The…

  • Why Are Environmental Activists So Quiet in This Heat?

    It’s been scorching hot day after day. People say that if you fall on the pavement, you can suffer serious burns from the heat of the asphalt. Even the cicadas seem to have disappeared. These days, their larvae may be cooked underground before they ever emerge, and summer arrives with hardly a chirp. . Come to think of it, it’s…

  • From Network-Centric Warfare to AI Warfare

    In the 1990s, under the guidance of thinkers such as Andrew Marshall and Arthur Cebrowski, the U.S. military developed an advanced operational concept known as Network-Centric Warfare. The idea was to connect large reconnaissance and strike drones such as the Predator, cruise missiles, ground forces, and other military assets through communications networks. Information from the battlefield would be gathered and…

  • Has the Japanese Economy Really Been Shrinking?

    (This column originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of my newsletter “Kaleidoscope of Civilization.” The basic situation has not changed much since then, so I am reposting it here.) . .Akio KAWATO Ever since the 2010 publication of the book The Real Cause of Deflation: Economies Move with Population Waves, a powerful idea has taken root in Japan: that…

  • “Civilizational Rupture”

    About twenty-five years ago, I published a collection of essays titled Toward a World Where Meaning Disintegrates. It traced the social transformations unfolding in Russia, Western Europe, the United States, Uzbekistan, and Japan. What I tried to argue there was that several of the core values that had sustained the modern world were beginning to lose their absolute authority. .…

  • Inequality? Perhaps. But the Rich Already Pay Most of the Income Tax

    　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　.Akio KAWATO In today’s advanced economies, discussion of “inequality” has become almost constant. Manufacturing has declined, while finance, IT, and other sectors increasingly concentrate income in the hands of a relatively small elite. . In the United States, the top 10 percent of earners now receive roughly 45–50 percent of national income. In Britain, the figure is around 35–40 percent;…

  • Comedic Variants for European Serious Operas

    The other day I went to see Wagner’s Lohengrin—performed by the Nikikai Opera Company with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. The performance itself was magnificent. But the opera? The libretto struck me as Wagnerian in the worst sense: childish, contrived, and absurdly solemn. And musically this is still early Wagner—endless repetitions of the same booming triads: do-mi-sol, so-shi-re, over and…