First Post – An Introduction

Welcome to the first post of my blog.

Here, you will find posts focused on Asian politics. My goal is to write about issues and opinions that can’t or won’t be published as full-fledged op-eds. Think of it as a space for posts that aren’t quite ready to be articles. 

There are three sections to my blog: Tokyo Observer, Asia Watch, and Books. 

Tokyo Observer will focus on Japanese domestic and foreign policy. For the time being (~July 2020), the majority of posts will be about the Tokyo gubernatorial race. The aim of this section is to provide an overview of Japanese politics using both Japanese and English sources. 

The goal for the upcoming gubernatorial election project is to 1) aggregate information on candidates and their positions on issues on one website and 2) simplify campaign promises into words any person would be able to understand. 

I think this is important because I voted without researching candidate positions in the 2019 upper-house election. Party ID is always the easiest, least costly way of choosing a candidate to vote for. 

I plan on helping readers (and myself) learn about candidates by reducing the burden of having to search each candidate up. This blog will run both English and Japanese posts to ensure even readers who aren’t fluent in Japanese can vote with ample knowledge of the candidates. 

Asia Watch will focus on other Asian affairs, especially the Koreas, China, and US foreign policy in East Asia. Through internships and coursework, I am most familiar with matters regarding these countries. I hope to utilize my knowledge and provide insight into issues that may not be as heavily covered in major outlets. There will also be posts recommending websites to visit and summarizing government + think tank reports. 

Books will be a series of posts recommending books on politics. This section will run both English and Japanese posts because some books are written in Japanese. I intend on writing English reviews for English books and Japanese reviews for Japanese books. 

I hope this is a sufficient summary of my blog, and I hope you’ll be back soon for more content!

Please feel free to leave a comment regarding this post.

Rintaro.