Little attention internationally was paid to the agreement signed in February, 2009 between the newly commissioned Obama government in the US and the declining and soon to be defeated Aso government in Japan - the Guam Treaty. Many commentators drew the bland conclusion that by choosing Tokyo as her first destination Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was merely showing how highly the Obama government intended to regard the Japan alliance. Another view, advanced in these pages, was less benign. (See “Hillary in Japan - The Enforcer “ 22 February 2009) It was that Clinton went quickly to Tokyo fearing the Aso government might collapse in order to tie it and any successor government to the extraordinary deals that had been done between the Pentagon and Japanese governments over the preceding years. The Guam Agreement was the culmination of those deals, Okinawa the sacrificial victim.

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“Speaking of wartime Ueno Zoo, what comes to your mind? ‘The elephants were killed! ‘Yes, that's right.” So begins Sayōnara Kaba-kun (Farewell, Hippo; Saotome, 1989), a picture book for grade school children.

There are numerous Japanese depictions and stories of the wartime slaughter of animals at Ueno Zoo: from the enormously popular and influential picture book Kawaisōna Zō (The Pitiful Elephants) (Tsuchiya & Takebe, 2009)-originally published by Tsuchiya Yukio as a short story for children in 1951, then as a picture book in 1970 with 163 editions to date-to the recent TV drama Zō no Hanako (The Elephant Hanako; Kōno & Terada, 2007). The story has also travelled outside Japan, with two English and one French translations of Kawaisōna Zō. Most of these depictions portray the slaughter of the animals as motivated by the wish to protect humans from more or less immediate danger and accept the starvation of the elephants as unavoidable. Scholarly studies have been published so far only in Japanese and tend to be critical only in some points (e.g., Hasegawa, 2000; originally published in 1981), if at all.

The September 17 Nikkei Ecolomy (an ecology-oriented publication of Japan's business daily, the Nikkei) carries a Japanese article, “A 25% Cut is Both Possible and Desirable,” by Iida Tetsunari, head of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Tokyo. Iida is an important figure in global climate change policy, being a contributor to the IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change), REN21 (Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century), IRENA (the International Renewable Energy Agency), and other major international bodies. He is also a central figure in domestic policymaking networks, working on METI and Environment Ministry committees, advisory organs in Tokyo and Yokohama, and as a policy advisor to key Diet members. His role is almost certain to be enhanced by Japan's recent “regime change” election, since the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is eager to expand the share of renewables in Japan's energy mix. The DPJ's policy commitments in the environmental and energy fields are generally first-rank, and in sharp contrast to the weak and largely voluntary targets of the defeated LDP and its collaborators in the bureaucracy and big business.

On the eve of the Copenhagen conference, a group of scientists has issued an update on the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the face of an incredible din of disinformation from climate deniers, they have mustered the latest and most credible evidence to inform global leaders and attentive publics just how perilous our present situation is. Among other dire warnings, they conclude that the icecaps at both poles are melting faster than predicted, that claims of recent global cooling are false, and that world leaders must act fast if steep temperature rises are to be avoided.

The report, and Elizabeth Kolbert's assessment, were issued just prior to proposals for greenhouse gas reductions by the world's two leading emitters: China and the United States, whose proposals emerged from a summit meeting of the leaders of the two countries. Together, the US and China account for fully forty percent of global emissions. Their proposed reductions appear to have renewed hopes for the December 7-18 Copenhagen talks. But the non-binding character of the proposals also shows how far we remain from reaching an agreement anywhere close to the scale that the science tells us is essential.