James Montgomery, the News Editor of Photovoltaics World, suggests in his January 14 “Are Japan's Megasolar Plans Falling Apart?” that Japan's renewables revolution is stalled and its feed-in tariff (FIT) “an awkward parting gift” of former PM Kan Naoto. Montgomery's article seems to be a near verbatim copy of a January 9 piece that's presently behind a paywall in Japan's Nikkei Weekly, the Japanese version of the Wall Street Journal. The Nikkei article was titled “Son's grand megasolar plans stall as governors direct attention elsewhere.” Both articles insist that Son Masayoshi, the chairman of Softbank and Japan's most wealthy and innovative capitalist, has run on the rocks in his plan to drive a renewable energy revolution in Japan. Moreover, the title for Montgomery's now widely circulated article (being copied to thousands of sites just 19 hours after upload) clearly implies that the core of Japan's renewable energy shift as a whole is in question.

Attention in Japan and elsewhere has focused recently on the seaside village of Henoko (Ryukyuan: Hinuku) in northern Okinawa where a powerful protest movement has stymied the Japanese and U.S. governments from building an offshore air base. Attempting to ameliorate outrage in Okinawa after three U.S. servicemen raped a twelve-year-old schoolgirl in 1995, the governments in Tokyo and Washington announced an agreement in 1996 to close Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, located in the middle of Ginowan City. However, the agreement stipulated that a “replacement facility” be built in Okinawa “within five to seven years.” Yet, after more than fifteen years and numerous bi-lateral declarations reiterating the two governments’ determination to build the base, construction has yet to begin. In 2006 they announced a related agreement to transfer 8,600 of the 18,000 Marines in Okinawa and their 9,000 dependents to Guam, but this is conditioned on relocation of Futenma MCAS to Henoko and remains on hold.

Ever since German and Japanese leaders were prosecuted, convicted, and punished after World War II at Nuremberg and Tokyo, there has been a wide split at the core of the global effort to impose criminal accountability on those who commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes on behalf of a sovereign state. The law is always expected to push toward consistency of application as a condition of its legitimacy. In the setting of international criminality the greatest danger to widely shared values is posed by those with the greatest power and wealth, and it is precisely these leaders that are least likely to be held responsible or to feel threatened by the prospect of being charged with international crimes. The global pattern of enforcement to date has been one in which the comparatively petty criminals are increasingly held to account while the Mafia bosses escape almost altogether from existing mechanisms of international accountability. Such double standards are too rarely acknowledged in discussions of international criminal law nor are their corrosive effects considered, but once understood, it becomes clear that this pattern seriously compromises the claim that international criminal law is capable of achieving global justice.