At first glance, the Liberal Democratic Party's decades-long denial of clear evidence revealed by the U.S. government that it had secret agreements allowing the introduction and stationing of US nuclear weapons in Japan appears absurd. This was the reality, however, for the nation that long proclaimed the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles,” barring the production, possession or importation of nuclear weapons, as a bedrock of national policy. With the fall of the LDP looming in the September 2009 election, several former top officials of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who were well informed of these secret deals, came forward to disclose the deal. Their motive was not protection of Japan's “Three Non-Nuclear Principles.” To the contrary, their view is that, as the “Three Non-Nuclear Principle” did not effectively prevent the entry of nuclear weapons into Japan, they should be scrapped.

Take a man-made island, roughly the size of London's Hampstead Heath. Fill it with state-of-the-art schools, hospitals, apartments, office buildings and high-end cultural amenities. Import architectural features from around the world, including New York's Central Park and Venice's canals, make English the lingua franca, and hang a sign at the gates that says: “Open for business.”

Every generation of historians rediscovers and then forgets the history of Western views of China: the slow process in which the admiration of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Jesuit missionaries and other European visitors to China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire turned to contempt as nineteenth-century Europe gained the upper hand in world politics and economy. Many negative perceptions - that China was weak; the government despotic and venal; the people supine, hypocritical, and dirty; and that nothing in China ever would change without European intervention - were inversions or new readings of material the more admiring Jesuits and others had put forward. To tie them to sharper observation of Chinese realities, as scholars do when they speak of the “revelation” of Chinese weakness, of “a new literature of hardheaded appraisal,” or of “new information” and “a fresh domain of realistic reportage,” is to buy into the discourse’s own representation of itself as Did reality inform imagination or vice versa? In his history of the Chinese revolution, John Fitzgerald presents Defoe’s claim that “One English, or Dutch, or French, man of war of 80 guns, would fight and destroy all the shipping of China” as a result of the real experience of buccaneer Captain George Anson’s successful bullying of Canton’s officials to let him into the port proper, while merchants were limited to the outer harbor, on his way home loaded with Spanish gold in 1743. But Crusoe’s Farther Adventures had appeared in 1719 (and Defoe died in 1731). It is more likely that Anson’s presentation of himself as a firm, manly Britisher rightfully opposing the obstructionism of timorous Chinese officials with pathetically insufficient arms was shaped by Defoe’s fiction, and by the basically Sinophilic Le Comte. The French Jesuit’s letters on China (based on a ten-years’ stay) had appeared in English in 1737, and included the observation that if only “Lewis the Great” were not so far away in France, he could easily conquer the Chinese empire, for the Chinese are “but mean soldiers.” Since Anson was specifically instructed by George II, when he set out in 1740, to come home by way of China if convenient, it is highly probable that his reference material included Le Comte’s book; indeed one of the early, unofficial accounts of his voyage drew heavily on it. Perhaps Le Comte’s observations and Defoe’s literary spleen were what gave Anson the confidence to confront the Cantonese authorities with the unequivocal demands to let him into the port - if that is even what really happened. For Anson’s bluster, expressed in his statement that “the Centurion alone was an overmatch for all the naval power of that Empire” is mitigated by the details of his account: his strident demands were accepted only after he had earned the Viceroy’s gratitude by helping to put out a fire.

One of Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's first public acts, in September, was to propose a 25% cut in the country's carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, relative to 1990 levels. This forthright declaration from Japan, long a laggard in dealing with climate change, captured world attention in the fraught lead-up to the December 7 to 12 Copenhagen meeting. The Obama people may yet fail to deliver, but unlike the Bushies they won't have a slavish Japan backing them up. Hatoyama's policy announcement has also earned the wrath of Japan's emissions-intensive industries, hitherto largely left to design their own voluntary agreements. They and their allies in the media and academe insist there is no hope for achieving such a cut without ruining the economy.