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 ...

Wow, what a busy 4 days! Sorry for the delayed update but we were traveling for two days and then two packed days in Tokyo. Tuesday -   We took the bullet train north towards the areas hit hardest by the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in March 11, 2011. Our first stop was the Tokai Shinpo newspaper. In 1953, the town was hit by a tsunami triggered by an earthquake in Chile, which destroyed the paper’s offices at the time; the current building is built on a hillside above the town with backup generators for the printing machines. The paper was able to publish an edition on   3/12 thanks to this contingency planning even though nearly every person on the staff had lost their homes and loved ones. Over the next few weeks, the paper took the lead helping survivors find family members and focused on writing the paper with a theme of “children smiling.” Not having lived this disaster, I can’t criticize the decision but it makes me wonder when peopl...

Sunday – Our last morning in Kyoto commenced with a trip to the Fushimi Inari shrine. On the outskirts of Kyoto, a wooded hillside hosts 4km of trails that are covered by traditional torii gates (exquisitely painted in Princeton orange and black). The trails are dotted with small cemeteries and shrines and I wish we had a few hours to get lost among the trails, but alas, we had to catch our train to Tokyo. One bullet train later, we arrived in Tokyo and met up with the group in time for our welcome dinner. My words could not do justice to the 8 course feast we enjoyed, suffice it to say that it included lots of fish, pickled veggies, a plethora of alcohol, and many mystery foods. And we were on the 42 nd story of the building, enjoying the Tokyo skyline. Too tired to go out, we tucked in to rest up for Monday’s full day. Monday – I apologize for the journal nature of this article but there is simply too much that happened for me to fully unpack it right now....

Good morning Japan! I have been in the country for ~48hrs and can confidently say that it is unlike anywhere else I've been. This post is a journal of the first 36 hrs but if you just want general initial impressions, skip to the very bottom. The trip started with a healthy dose of excitement when I caught the last train from the airport -> Tokyo -> Kyoto with 2 minutes to spare. Close but I won in the end. I arrived in Kyoto around 11pm and managed to get to the Airbnb I'm sharing with Simon, a trekmate who's an MPA at the Kennedy School. We ambled down the street in search of food and drinks at midnight and happened upon a great local spot. To Simon's chagrin, they had no ramen but we settled on two soups - one spicy with tofu and one mild broth with peanuts and veggies. Both were super yummy.[DISCLAIMER: I may talk a lot about food during this trip. The only piece of advice I received before coming was 'eat everything,' so I feel justified]. I then s...