Soon after last year's Sept. 11 attack on the United States by Islamic militants, I got into a debate with a hawkish member of the private consultative committee set up by then-Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka. He was demanding angrily that Japan should help eliminate something called global "terror." I tried to get him to define the word.
Were the Irish Republican Army attacks in Northern Ireland an example, I asked? Yes, he said firmly, with no hint that he realized how even British conservatives had come to rethink rights and wrongs in that dispute.
Sri Lanka, where the minority in revolt have had even more reason to complain of discrimination? That, too, was terror, he said unblinkingly.