Viet Nam’s indigenous environment has long played a key role in its history and culture. My new book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, begins with a quotation: “‘Mountains are like the bones of the earth. Water is its blood,’ wrote a Vietnamese geographer in 1820. Lowland Viet Nam is aquatic.”1

Nearly five years ago The Asia-Pacific Journal published an early chapter from my translation of Tachibana Takashi's Tennō to Tōdai (The emperor and Tokyo University [Bungei shunju, 2005]. The full translation is now available for free download here. Herewith a second, late chapter, from that translation.

Tachibana Takashi (b. 1940 in Nagasaki) is one of Japan's leading independent researchers. He has dozens of books to his credit: on Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, the Lockheed bribery scandal, near-death experiences, space travel, cancer. He has also been a figure in radio and TV journalism and has acted on TV.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has made Work Style Reform (hatarakikata kaikaku) part of his core policy agenda, promising above all to remedy the Japanese way of work's two greatest problems: dangerously long work hours and grossly unequal wage gaps between regular and non-regular workers. However, critics charge that the proposals will likely aggravate these problems, given that labor policymaking is dominated by conservative business and political leaders bent on deregulation. This paper examines the current Work Style Reform proposals, explaining howthe work hour reduction and equal pay for equal work proposals are being promoted to the public, and why they ultimately fail as reforms from the worker point of view. Despite these serious problems, the government's effective marketing has helped to defuse potential resistance and the reform plans may become law in 2018.

In November 2017, US President Donald Trump visited East Asia. In Japan, the country where he first stopped, he first played half round of golf with Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo as if he and Mr. Abe wished to show this visit was nothing but an expression of peaceful friendship. They talked about the North Korean issue for “a great deal of time”. The content of their talks was not disclosed. In the final press conference after the Summit Prime Minister Abe stated that he and President Trump “were in complete agreement as to the measures to be taken upon the analysis of the latest situation of North Korea”. He said,

2017 and talk of war games is all around us. When The New York Times reported on 10 July of this year that India, the U.S. and Japan had begun “war games,” surely very few readers thought of these war games as actual games. After all, they were designed to have submarines slide unannounced into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean in order to silently take positions near the Indian coastline. When, about a month later, according to The People's Liberation Army Daily China's army commanders declared that the mobile phone game Honor of Kings endangered national defense, they were not joking either. They appeared convinced that the game had infiltrated soldiers' and officers' daily lives and that their addiction to the game would undermine their combat readiness. Around the world, many similar, and often contradictory pronouncements are made daily.