Glyn Ford - The Japan Times

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Glyn Ford

For Glyn Ford's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 6, 2003

British National Party must be stopped

BRUSSELS -- There has been a step-change in the activity and success of the British National Party. It is now a serious element in electoral politics. Driven by new ways to attract voters, party members no longer cry "repatriation." Instead, their slogan "pensioners before asylum seekers" is aimed at latching on to the immoral panic engulfing white communities. To combat them, antifascist and antiracist groups must restructure their activities and widen their base.

COMMENTARY / World

Aug 27, 2003

Machiavelli on the Mekong

BRUSSELS -- In the West, Cambodia is synonymous with the horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. David Puttnam's film "The Killing Fields" seemed to tell it all. Towns and cities were emptied into the countryside and the population enslaved and brutalized. "Luckier" intellectuals were quickly murdered for merely wearing a watch. Those less fortunate were sent to the torture center of Tuol Sleng, where they suffered long and hard before the mercy of death came.

COMMENTARY

Jul 5, 2003

'Neocon' recipe for disaster

BRUSSELS -- Newspapers are awash with speculation as to the likely outcome of the Korean Peninsula's nuclear crisis. Will it be the United States that blinks or North Korea? Nobody knows. What is clear is that while North Korea and the world wants and needs a solution, opinion in the U.S. is sharply divided between doves and hawks, between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The former wants to negotiate away North Korea's nuclear arsenal, and buy out its missile sales -- both of which were nearly achieved by Bill Clinton at the end of his presidency and only stopped by the chads hanging on Florida's voter punchcards.

COMMENTARY

Feb 19, 2003

Missile defense is an offense

BRUSSELS -- It is difficult to understand the Bush administration's determination to deploy a national missile defense system, or NMD. All test launches to date -- to prevent theoretical nuclear missile attacks -- have been either failures or "partial successes."

COMMENTARY

Feb 6, 2003

Misperceptions fuel Korean crisis

BRUSSELS -- The crisis in Iraq overshadows everything. Yet far more dangerous is the Korean crisis. At worse, the Iraqi crisis will lead to a conventional war with tens of thousands of casualties. In contrast, millions of lives could be at risk in the Korean crisis -- triggered by U.S. revelations that North Korea has uranium-enrichment technology -- if North Korea makes good on its threat to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire" and as a last resort decides to "go nuclear" and randomly strike Japan with missiles.

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 13, 2003

Britain's far right poses a rising threat

BRUSSELS -- The press in England has had a field day over the past 20 years chronicling the rise of the Continent's far right. The first chance came in the early 1980s with the emergence of France's National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man who believes the Americans built the gas chambers in the Buchenwald concentration camp after the war. Next came the re-emergence of the Italian neofascist Moviemento Sociale Italiano, or MSI, and the birth of the German Republikaner.

COMMENTARY / World

Nov 2, 2002

Back to the future via broken promises

BRUSSELS -- Next year's crisis on the Korean Peninsula has come early. The year 2003 was to see an explosive conjuncture of events: a change of regime in South Korea, markedly less sympathetic to engagement with the North than that of current President Kim Dae Jung; the final failure of the United States to deliver the North two promised nuclear- power stations; and the expiry of North Korea's self-imposed moratorium on missile testing. All were pre-empted by North Korea's admitting that -- aided by Pakistan -- it has been engaged in a clandestine program to produce enriched uranium since the end of the 1990s, breaching agreements made with the U.S. in 1994.

COMMENTARY

Jul 26, 2002

Iran's reformers need support

BRUSSELS -- Images of Iran seem stuck in a time warp that dates back to the early 1980s, when the country was considered to be one of the world's "rogue states" due to its militant standoff with the United States and its state support of Islamic terror groups. Now it is a flawed democracy -- with a distinctly patchy record on human rights -- trying to break free from the chains of a theocratic constitution that gives the clergy a veto over the decisions of elected politicians and allows it to control key appointments to positions of power.

COMMENTARY

Apr 26, 2002

Le Pen's success is no shock

BRUSSELS -- Last Sunday's results from France saw Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right Front National, finish just behind French President Jacques Chirac, eliminating Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin from the May 5 second round of voting and prompting him to retire from politics. Yet the result has been misread by Europe's press and politicians.

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 14, 2002

Britain and the euro: victory for the brave

BRUSSELS -- The introduction of the euro in 12 of the 15 member states of the European Union has been an unqualified success. The changeover had none of the hitches and glitches that many -- including myself -- thought would mar its early days.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 2, 2001

Uptick noticed in N. Korean economy

LONDON -- There is a bustle on the streets of Pyongyang that has been sorely missing for at least five years. The shops -- never consumers' havens -- have some goods on the shelves. Restaurants on Changgwang Street, North Korea's pale equivalent of Tokyo's Ginza, are open and serving. Even street vendors have a market for their wares. Things are beginning to move.

COMMENTARY / World

Nov 8, 2001

Taxing currency speculators

LONDON -- The decision by European economy and finance ministers in Liege on Sept. 23 to commission a study of the effect of "Tobin-style" taxes on currency transactions indicates a new and surprising high-water mark of support for taxation on speculative capital flows.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 28, 2001

Now it's time for New Labour to deliver

BRUSSELS -- The historic second landslide election victory for the Labour Party has given Tony Blair an opportunity that no Labour prime minister has had before -- a second term of office. For the first time in history, a Labour government can build on its work and set in place radical reforms to realize its long-term ambitions. And the government is clearly determined to get cracking with its challenging legislative program, much of it controversial.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 15, 2001

Heading off the MD disaster

BRUSSELS -- The argument for missile defense is based on a series of misunderstandings and exaggerations. The claimed threat is neither real nor credible. Yet U.S. President George W. Bush is using it to underpin the United States' deployment of MD in the interests of the arms industry and to the detriment of world peace.

COMMENTARY / World

Jun 23, 2001

Learning the lessons hidden in victory

It was a stunning night for Labour June 7. British political geography has been permanently transformed. Yet learning the lessons of defeat is comparatively easy. British Conservatives are already starting to learn those lessons.

COMMENTARY / World

May 31, 2001

Europe seeks more equality with the U.S.

Relations between Europe and the United States are at a watershed. The post World War II global settlement is no longer anchored in contemporary economic and political realities. The Soviet Empire has crashed and burned. Emerging from the ashes, Russia is barely more than a Third World country with nuclear weapons. In Asia, Japan's new postwar generation of politicians increasingly demands that Japan become "a normal country" as China emerges from the shadow of the Soviet Union and threatens to become the East's counterweight to the U.S.

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 26, 2001

Nice Treaty upholds Britain's interests

BRUSSELS -- A "stronger Britain in a wider Europe" has been the vision of a succession of British governments but increasingly this debate on the future of Britain in Europe is one in which the media is having to place severe constraints. The strong tradition of English exceptionalism and isolationism that underpins the Euroskeptic press leads it to try to brake any progress on European cooperation and integration, including a visceral opposition to the Treaty of Nice. This relentless Europhobia does not derive from any considered response to the content of the treaty itself but from a dogmatic refusal to contemplate any constructive debate involving Britain's future and further role in Europe.

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 9, 2001

Hope fades for reconciliation in Kosovo

The West's intervention in Kosovo was a reaction to the Serbs' final solution to the problems of the recalcitrant province. The Serbs attempted to drive out the Albanian majority using soldiers and civilians for mayhem and murder. It was not an arbitrary, irrational act, merely a final inhuman escalation of a conflict lost in the medieval clashes between Islam and Christianity, whose increasingly secular descendants wage the same war, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing in seven centuries.

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 15, 2001

Tory grip on rural areas must be broken

With a British general election schedded for May 3 or earlier, the party machine is geared to turn out again those who gave us victory in 1997 -- traditional Labor voters and those who voted Labor for the first time -- to win that elusive second term. Yet this is not enough. We must also win the battle to replace the Tories as the natural party of government.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 17, 2000

Strong pound strangling British industry

BRUSSELS -- Britain's exclusion from the single European currency and the resulting high pound has led to a bleeding away of jobs in manufacturing. Day by day, the press publishes the casualty figures as stories of closures, amalgamations and redundancies, for in manufacturing the high pound is a weakness and the low euro a strength. The only advantage to workers is cheap foreign holidays on their redundancy pay. For every one step forward there are two steps back, as divisions and companies in Britain lose the battle to compete within and between European industrial conglomerates.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.

The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

A young restaurant leads the way in Karuizawa

A young restaurant leads the way in Karuizawa

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