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Chalmers Johnson
For Chalmers Johnson's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 3, 2002
Apologies to Seoul and Beijing
SAN DIEGO -- When it comes to the histories and cultures of the countries of the Pacific, the U.S. president either received a lousy education at Andover and Yale or else failed to study.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2000
High time Japan said 'No'
More than a decade ago, the current governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, and the late Sony Chairman Akio Morita wrote a best-seller urging their fellow Japanese to just say "No" to the Americans. This was in the context of a wide-ranging trade dispute in which the U.S. was pressuring Japan to curb its exports and allow more U.S. products into Japan. Ishihara and Morita argued that Japan had plenty of potential leverage because it manufactured sophisticated microchips and other products without which the U.S. military arsenal would collapse. I did not think very much of these arguments at the time because I believed (and still believe) that Japan is too dependent on its exports to the U.S. market to risk endangering them. But I agreed with Ishihara and Morita that Japan needed to assert itself more in the very unequal, unbalanced relationship it has had with the United States ever since the Occupation.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 3, 1999
The autonomy imperative
In these post-Cold War days, the governments of the United States and its allies still routinely expose their citizens to the risks of death and destruction in the name of national security. The people of northern Italy complained for years about low-flying U.S. military aircraft, but Rome simply ignored them. In February 1998, when a U.S. jet sliced through a ski-lift cable and plunged 20 people to their deaths, the pilots argued that their charts were inaccurate, their altimeter did not work, and they had not consulted U.S. Air Force units permanently based in the area about hazards. They hit the cable at 108 meters, whereas they were supposed to maintain an altitude of at least 300 meters (600 meters according to the Italian government). They were also not supposed to go faster than 827 kph but were actually traveling at 993 kph. Nonetheless, the American court-martial exonerated everyone involved and called it a "training accident."

Longform

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