Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Last week, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the country's main governmental agency for international development, announced that it was scrapping what it called the Africa Hometown Initiative. The initiative was originally intended as a city-to-city economic development partnership, with four Japanese regional governments being respectively paired with an African counterpart, so that Japanese resources and know-how can be shared at the grassroots level more efficiently and directly. The more bottom-up approach to international development promised an alternative to JICA's usual ways. It did not take long for the country's right-wingers to spread false information about how the initiative would be a beachhead for millions of Africans to swamp Japan. By focusing on the use of the word "hometown," these individuals easily played into the growing fear among the Japanese public about the country becoming less Japanese over time through a surge of non...

After years of popular films that portray Chinese patriotism in contemporary settings, China's film-makers finally turned back to the past, namely World War II, for more inspiration. Two recent films,  Dead to Rights (南京照相馆) and 731 , respectively depicting the plight of Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre and the biological weapons experiments in Northeastern China, hit theaters. It is a rather opportune time for the pivot. The Chinese government had just concluded a massive military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, reminding people to not forget a painful past.