Russia

  • Putin’s Visit to Japan’s Northern Territories

    Yesterday, Putin visited Japan’s Northern Territories—the islands north of Japan that the Soviet Union seized by force at the end of World War II, expelled their Japanese residents from, and has refused to return ever since. The Japanese media went into an uproar. . It is embarrassing. All Japan accomplishes by making such a fuss is to advertise to the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Shoot the Pianist: The Fate of Today’s Central Banker

    The Bank of Japan is widely expected to raise interest rates to 1 percent at its policy meeting on the 15th. Inflationary pressures have been building, and the widening interest-rate gap between Japan and the United States has helped push the yen into what often seems like an endless decline. . Then, today, came a surprise: BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda…

  • The Summer Russia Chose Freedom

    . 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Akio KAWATO When people think of Russia today, they usually think of dictatorship, imperial ambitions, and the long shadow of Vladimir Putin. Yet there was a time when things looked very different. . After Mikhail Gorbachev launched his reforms in 1985, Soviet and Russian society began moving toward openness and democracy. That process reached its peak in August 1991,…

  • 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…

  • “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. .…

  • Gulf Security After the Iran War

    Akio KAWATO . Back in March, the American geopolitical analyst Andrew Korybko wrote something interesting. Citing a report by Reuters, he argued that the Gulf states — having been drawn into a war with Iran without prior consultation and having suffered both economic and military damage in the process — were beginning to question whether they should continue relying on…

  • “From ‘Markets = Wealth’ Back to ‘Territory = Wealth’”

    Watching the way Trump and Putin speak and act, one cannot help but feel how fundamentally different their mindset is from ours. Seizing land through connections, force, and money, then developing it for enormous profit—Trump seems to view the world with the mentality of a ruthless land developer, which he really is. It is like a schoolyard bully who never…