ASIA’s 50 Best Restaurants Unveiled

Les Créations de Narisawa, a Tokyo restaurant that applies French technique to local Japanese ingredients, topped the inaugural S. Pellegrino Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list, announced Monday night in Singapore.

NE ASIA: Permanent Dokdo Exhibition to Open in Beijing

A permanent Dokdo exhibition will open at the Korea Center in downtown Beijing early next month to publicize Korea's sovereignty over the islets.

Korean overseas missions and cultural centers have distributed PR booklets on Dokdo, but this is the first permanent exhibition.
The mov...

AUSTRALIA: Sydney's small bar scene takes off

Leave the big pubs to the gamblers. Drinkers looking for an intimate Sydney watering hole have more choices than ever

TRAVEL: Air travel and the sequester

THE sequester is looming. Big cuts to America's federal budget are set to take effect automatically on Friday March 1st, unless Congress can agree on a new budget deal. If it does not, $85 billion will be cut from the 2013 budget and $1.1 trillion over the next decade. The axe will fall mainly on the defence budget, from which 8% will be chopped, but 5% must also be found from non-military programmes. One of those, says the government, is air travel. Last week Ray LaHood, President Obama's transportation secretary, warned Americans that the sequester could lead to massive air travel delays across the country.Mr LaHood said that about 10% of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which monitors air traffic safety in America, would be given a day off without pay ("furloughed") on any given day after the sequester hits. The FAA faces around $600m in cuts over the rest of the fiscal year, and would be forced to eliminate midnight shifts at over 60 air traffic control towers around the country. The FAA is even considering closing many other facilities entirely.Many of the facilities that would be closed, or where midnight shifts would be eliminated, are not crucial transit hubs. Air traffic control at New York's JFK, Chicago's O'Hare, Washington's Dulles, and many other enormous airports would be unaffected. But many business travellers rely on small ...

JAPAN: Post-Summit Decisions for Prime Minister Abe

Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, returned to Tokyo this weekend after his first summit meeting in Washington, DC, with President Barack Obama. Post-summit, Abe faces two important economic decisions. The first is his nomination for the next governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ). The second is whether Japan’s prime minister will urge his party onwards to participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). To succeed, Abe now has to confront some political hurdles at home.

The lack of a majority in the Upper House will mean Abe needs to ensure his BOJ head passes muster with his political opposition. Nominations for a new BOJ governor require approval from both houses of parliament. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has a firm majority in the Lower House after its sweeping victory on December 16, but the last time the LDP sought to replace the head of Japan’s central bank it ran into paralyzing opposition in the Upper House. In 2008, the LDP sought to replace then retiring BOJ governor Toshihiko Fukui with Toshiro Muto, a former vice minister of finance, but the opposition-controlled Upper House voted him down. This forced then prime minister Yasuo Fukuda back to the drawing board, and in the end, the current BOJ governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, then a vice governor at the BOJ, became the acting head.

This time round Japanese and global media have been full of speculation ever since the prime minister publicly called for a much more aggressive use of monetary instruments to end Japan’s deflation. Inflation targeting by the BOJ is one of Abe’s preferred policy goals, a core idea in what is now widely referred to as “Abenomics.” Kikuo Iwata, a professor from Gakushuin University, was seen as a bold choice for Abe, according to Bloomberg, since he has called for “a ramping up in Japan’s monetary base to end deflation.” But the name that has recently emerged as the likely pick is a man that was also a contender in 2008, Haruhiko Kuroda, the current head of the Asian Development Bank. Kuroda served in the Ministry of Finance where he managed currency policy from 1999 to 2003, and is on record arguing then that the BOJ should introduce inflation targets. Interestingly, even when LDP-DPJ bickering was at its worst, Kuroda managed to still attract DPJ support. The political calculus may win out, however, as leading media reports emanating from Tokyo today suggest that a compromise solution of picking the more experienced and internationally well-known Kuroda as governor, while nominating the more academic and policy aggressive Iwata as vice governor, is the most likely.

On TPP, the politics seem more precarious for the prime minister. In an unusually terse Joint Statement after the Abe-Obama meeting, the two governments confirmed their understanding of the terms of Japan’s participation:

Recognizing that both countries have bilateral trade sensitivities, such as certain agricultural products for Japan and certain manufactured products for the United States, the two Governments confirm that, as the final outcome will be determined during the negotiations, it is not required to make a prior commitment to unilaterally eliminate all tariffs upon joining the TPP negotiations. [The full statement is available here.]

While it leaves much to be desired in terms of syntax, it was apparently enough for most of Japan’s media to believe that their prime minister had just received a major concession from the White House. All of Japan’s major newspapers reported forward momentum coming out of the summit meeting for the prime minister’s TPP decision-making, and a meeting with coalition partner Komeito president Natsuo Yamaguchi on Monday suggested this interpretation was an accurate reflection of LDP intent. Moreover, on Monday evening (Tokyo time), Prime Minister Abe received his party’s approval for his government to make the final decision on when to participate in the TPP. Expectations now are for an announcement at the beginning of March.

Whereas the BOJ nomination may provide some short-term political feuding, it is unlikely to be a protracted conflict, and indeed may offer little dispute at all. The DPJ leadership has already indicated it understands the public will not be forgiving if politics were to leave the BOJ position unfulfilled for any length of time. The real political risk will be the prime minister’s decision on TPP. With an Upper House election in July, the broader question is what cost could accrue to the prime minister and his party at the polls when some key supporters, most notably the agricultural cooperatives that benefit from government protections for their activities, remain adamantly opposed.

Opinion polls suggest that anywhere from 60 to 65 percent of the Japanese people support participation in TPP, and the prime minister is gaining in public support (70 percent and rising after his Washington trip). Japan’s business leaders also openly call for Japan’s participation, and Abe seems buoyed by the stock and currency markets’ response to his “Abenomics.”

In Washington, Mr. Abe declared that “Japan is Back!” It may be too early to declare economic victory, but politically, he has certainly changed the tenor of Japan’s domestic debate. With a TPP decision seemingly forthcoming, it seems Mr. Abe is gambling on boldness. Let’s see if he can carry his nation—and his party—with him.

VLADIVOSTOK: At Least 17 Amur Tigers Dead in Russia's Far East in 2012

At least 17 Amur tigers died in Russia’s far eastern territories over the past year, most of them due to human actions, local wildlife experts said on Monday.

CHINA: The Bo Xilai Saga Continues

Disgraced former Politburo member Bo Xilai has refused to cooperate with Chinese authorities and has staged two hunger strikes, Reuters reported on Thursday citing two independent sources with ties close to the Bo family.

Once seen as a rising star and future Politburo Standing Committee member, Bo was ousted from the Communist Party last year after his recently dismissed police chief, Wang Lijun, sought asylum in a U.S. consulate, telling American diplomats there that Bo’s wife had murdered British businessman Neil Heywood. As the drama unfolded a series of other allegations emerged against Bo and his family, including that he wiretapped the phones of senior CCP officials.

Although Wang and Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, have both been tried and convicted of their crimes, Bo himself has yet to be formally charged but is presumed to be in CCP custody. He was last seen in March of last year.

According to the Reuters report Bo is causing party officials nearly as much trouble in detention as he was causing them in power. Both sources confirm he has gone on a hunger strike with one saying “He was on [a] hunger strike twice and force fed." Although he had not been tortured, according to the source, Bo had apparently grown so weak while in custody that at one point he was hospitalized in Beijing.

One of Reuters’ sources also said that Bo had refused to shave while in detention and now had a chest-length beard. The source went on to say that he was refusing to cooperate.

This would be wholly consistent with how Bo acted throughout his career. The Princeling son of Bo Yibo, one of the Eight Immortals who ruled China during the Deng Xiaoping era, the younger Bo is said to have, like many Princelings, seen it as his birth right to rule China. Bo's rapid rise through the CCP was partly attributable to his father's myriad connections. These included, among many others, General Secertary Jiang Zemin whom the elder Bo had helped come to power after he played a role in ousting his two immediate predcessors– Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.

From the time he was mayor of Dalin in Northwest China, the younger Bo flaunted CCP protocols against self-promotion and personal extravagance. On Bo’s time in Dalin, John Garnaut has written, “It was his personal trophy town. It wasn’t long before he could control the colour of the water fountains and the accompanying soundtracks.”

Later, as Mayor of Chongqing, Bo shrouded himself in neo-Maoist populism as concentrated power in his office. His so-called “Chongqing Model” achieved high rates of economic growth but his personal governing style and disregard for the party hierarchy and the law made Bo a lot of enemies, including Premier Wen Jiabao. In stark violation of CCP protocol, for instance, Bo often seemed to be publicly campaigning for a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee, which he had been passed up for in 2007.

So while Bo’s current antics may come off as Martyr-like given his current state of limbo in CCP detention,  they are little more than Bo’s life-long sense of entitlement and superiority in a new guise.
Particularly revealing was how one of Reuters’ sources described Bo’s actions towards his interrogators: “He wouldn't answer questions and slammed his fist on a table and told them they were not qualified to question him and to go away [emphasis added].”

Zachary Keck is assistant editor of The Diplomat. He is on Twitter: @ZacharyKeck.