The 2009 extraordinary Diet session, the first under the leadership of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's cabinet, opened Monday with a speech by Hatoyama to a Diet populated by an overwhelming majority of parliamentarians from his Democratic Party of Japan...

More often than not, it is overseas factors that have the largest influence on trading in Japan...

Lunch with the Central Intelligence Agency is always interesting, although five guys built like brick shithouses staring at me intently didn’t help my digestion...

The DPJ has pushed on Futenma — and the Obama administration, in the guise of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has pushed back...

Nope, RF(P) stands for Request For Proposal, but there are monsters at this mash.

To those with the attention span of a candy-corn (me included), this aint just paperwork, so pay attention.

This brief post was inspired by a Bloomberg story on Asian currency strength — a good read, by the way...

It is undoubtedly all over the web, the news reported by Bloomberg that The (aptly named) Galleon's been hit sending her and her booty plummeting to the icy depths...

The market has only had eyes for the federal deficit and may have ignored the continued flat to weak data coming from Europe and this risks a rebound in the dollar - but cause the Yen to strengthen against the European currencies.

After a nice and entertaining week in Barcelona where I had the privilege not only to hold a seminar at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, but also to meet a host of interesting people, I thought that it would be about time that I finished my piece on the latest data from Japan which admittedly will be a bit backward looking, but hopefully interesting nonetheless...

Busy with the hard work of introducing a new policymaking process, rewriting the 2010 budget from scratch so to make room for the programs promised in the DPJ's election manifesto, and finding a way to extract concessions from the Obama administration on the realignment of US forces in Japan, it is understandable that the Hatoyama government has been relatively silent on the question of defense ministry reform...