Long Live The Sar

Thursday - Back in Tokyo and making moves. This was our day of meeting with the big government machas, so we brought our A game. The day's first meeting was with the former PM Yoshihiko Noda, who led a main opposition parties before losing in a landslide to Shinzo Abe's LDP party in December 2012. One of the first questions dealt with the rapid turnover of Prime Ministers and its effect on policy continuity in Japan (avg. duration of prime ministership is ~2yrs). He answered with a cute story about attending an international meeting and the other world leaders greeted his translator, who had worked for many of his predecessors, before greeting him since they were always meeting knew Japanese Prime Ministers. I asked him a question about the future of Japan-South Korea relations in the face of a rising China in the west and America's pivot towards the Pacific in the east. After an initial, "Hm, that's a hard question" (1 pt for Sar), he gave a surprisingly

--> Wednesday   - It was a day relatively light on meetings but punctuated with long bus and train rides. When Kazu (one of the trip leaders) woke me up for breakfast, the only thing I noticed was that he was wearing a yukata (a traditional leisure robe). Assuming that everyone else in the hotel would also be wearing their yukata to breakfast, I grabbed mine from the closet and headed down. Of course, I was the only person wearing a yukata at breakfast other than Kazu. After breakfast we drove to Chuson-Ji temple (home to a gorgeous gold-leaf plated Buddhist shrine from the 9 th century) and did a quick drive-by of the classic garden at Motsuji Temple. The main activity of the day was meeting with the mayor of Minami Soma City and touring the exclusion zone(s) affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The mayor has been a strong critic of nuclear power. We asked him a few questions about TEPCO’s potential use of poor, disadvantaged citizens for the most dangerous clea