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Glass Ceilings, Iron Ladies
We're witnessing "a new dawn for Japanese policymaking."
So said Fumitake Fujita of the Japan Innov
I welcome and appreciate any international economic and political coverage you deem important enough to cover…
Yeah, the “deem important” part is critical. Because it’s played out over a decade — i.e., because it was very gradual — the “polishing” process of the site, inclusive of article structure, editorial cadence and so in, is often lost on long-term readers, I think. People will occasionally ask, for example, why I don’t do as much coverage of Turkey these days. But if you actually go back and read the articles from 2017 and 2018 (and even into early 2019), it was much more haphazard and scattershot. That has its benefits (it gives the impression to readers that you’re covering everything all at once), but I had to learn to pick my spots as the site matured, because at the end of every day, I have to be satisfied completely with what I’ve put out there. Even short articles have to be structured, thought out, have a definitive beginning and end and so on.
The strategy I employed in the early days was basically just, “If I see it, say something about it,” which on some days would result in as many as 10 mostly unstructured pieces of content. Readers were fine with that, but ultimately those weren’t “articles” on any strict definition of the term. The more obsessive I got over the years, the more determined I became that if I’m going to put it out there, it has to be a complete thought, and that rules out covering everything, everywhere all the time.
Bottom line: When people come here in the evenings to catch up, I don’t want them to feel like they’re just reading the rapid-fire musings of a news junkie, which is how it probably felt in the early days.
So when it comes to stuff like the latest twist in France’s crisis of government or a new Japanese PM, I have to wait for something definitive to happen that I can capture in a way which makes the average reader think to themselves, “Ok, this wasn’t exciting to read, but it was worth my time because it was succinct, complete and I understand why I needed to be informed about it.”
That, as opposed to the situation I’d put people in ca. 2018 when it wasn’t always clear why I chose one topic over another. You could imagine a new subscriber asking, back then, “And why did I just read about the Turkish lira for the fifth time this week?” No one’s going to remember this article about Japan, but on the other hand, no one who reads it is going to wonder why I wrote it. It’s plainly important, exciting or not.
I also remember some 3 day holiday weekends where you put out prodigious content, and I remember being pretty blown away…long live the quantity vs quality dynamic and balance in the HR…
I’m debating about re-subscribing to Nikkei Asia again, but finding out (here) that Takaichi is an Abe disciple successfully explains a lot (and for the cost of your subscription, much appreciated). I wish Takaichi-san (-sama?) well.
Takaichi-shucho if you’re being formal, -hancho if you’re being informal. And yes, that’s where the phrase “head honcho” came from.
She was an interesting choice. But really not all that surprising. The mainstream LDP has rightfully been losing relevance but opposition groups have only been able to enjoy fairly brief tastes of power.
In the last few years the dissolutionment among the notoriously uninvolved electorate has grown enough to challenge the LDP machine. It seems they opted to what they believed was the safer choice = a hard right candidate to fend off the challenges from small right-wing populist groups.
Perhaps that was the safer short-term choice, but by failing to choose on the the two more dynamic “younger faces,” they may well have sentenced themselves to increasing irrelevance.
That said, it is yet another example of the populist wave sweeping the globe. Something which suggests why some deluded people have quietly been buying gold and crypto.
https://metalinjection.net/news/japans-new-prime-minister-sanae-takaichi-is-a-metal-fan-drummer?utm_campaign=feed&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=later-linkinbio
She’ll do just fine with the President