Tag Archive for: Japan

Japan holds firm, admits only TINY number of refugees

I haven’t written about Japan for awhile, and since we have so many new readers, I figured it was time to point this out (again)—Japan only takes a tiny number of refugees!

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President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

And, consequently, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has been haranguing Japan for years to open its doors (and begin diluting their culture!) to the masses of Middle Eastern and African (mostly Muslim) migrants on the move around the world.  Japan has resisted.

And I have not seen the UNHCR harangue China, Saudi Arabia or some other Middle Eastern countries in the same way they nag Japan.

Here is an activist from the UK badmouthing Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, at The Diplomat:

When asked for his view on the U.S. president’s executive order to ban the entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s response was very disappointing.“We are not in a position to express the view of the Japanese government,” he said at the Upper House on January 30. Not surprisingly, he did not bring up the travel ban’s issue when he met President Donald Trump earlier this month.

In contrast to the clear disagreement with the travel ban expressed by other world leaders, the Japanese leader’s response received criticism from the opposition and civil society. Many theorized that the prime minister had avoided criticizing the new U.S. president in order to protect Japan’s national interests, in particular its economy and security. Yet others pointed out a more fundamental problem: Japan cannot point its finger at any other country’s immigration policy.

Japan’s record on immigration and refugees is not something that the country can be proud of. In 2016, Japan granted refugee status to only 28 people out of 10,901 applicants. In other words, 99 percent of applications were rejected.

It is not enough for the nags that Japan is one of the world’s top contributors to the UNHCR:

Japan is one of the top donors to the UN Refugee Agency (UNCHR). It contributed $164,726,114 in 2016, making Japan the fourth largest donor after the United States, European Union, and Germany. Yet instead of turning this generosity to welcome refugees on its soil, Japan crosses its arms to those who actually arrive on its doorstep. On January 30, when discussing the U.S. travel ban, Abe added after his response, “At any rate, we believe the international community should jointly cope with refugee issues.”

To learn more about Japan’s limited involvement with ‘welcoming’ disparate cultures to the country, read on.

So far, Japan’s leadership is smart enough to look around the world and ask—why should we invite the problems we see in Sweden, Germany, France, The Netherlands and the US to our tiny country?

For my previous posts on Japan, go here.

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Islamic Terrorism Not A Problem In Japan

It is hard to find a country in today’s world that isn’t experiencing an uptick in violent Islamic terrorism. Surprisingly Japan is not one of those countries having to deal with the aftermath of mass shootings, beheadings, or other known-wolf attacks on their citizens.

According to the authors of Immigrants of Doom, and their research on The National Counterterrorism Center’s unclassified report,

“In 2011, Sunni Muslims accounted for the greatest number of terrorist attacks and fatalities for the third year in a row. Over 5,700 incidents were committed by Sunni Muslims, responsible for nearly 56 percent of all attacks and about 70 percent of 12,533 fatalities. Another 24 percent of the fatalities are on Shi´a Muslims. So in 2011, Muslims were responsible for 94 percent of the fatalities in terrorist attacks. Since 2011, with ISIS on the scene, the number of the fatalities –victims of the Muslim terrorist attacks- sharply grew, together with Muslims´ share in the world terrorism that is steadily closing in on 100%.”

Even with those statistics Japan has been able to stay above the fray, and the reason is their immigration policy towards Muslims. Japan is a country who is proud of their heritage, and would like to see it remain intact. Understandably the only Muslims they allow in their country are for business purposes. The article goes on to state,

“And Japanese society expects Muslims to pray at home: no collective “prostrating” in the streets or squares; in Japan, for such “shows” the actors can get pretty high fines, and in those cases Japanese Police consider “serious”, the participants can be deported.”

There is only one Imam in all of Tokyo. The few thousand Muslims that do live among the roughly 127 million Japanese are encouraged to worship in their homes versus being allowed to build huge mosques throughout the country.

Incidentally when Muslims build mosques it is a way for them to declare victory in the area in which they have colonized. This is happening all across Europe and now in America, silent and stealthily our government works to bring new Islamic immigrants into our midst while forbidding anyone of the Christian or Jewish faith to dare mention the thought or idea of a loving God to them.

Quietly, but surely, they build their barracks and battalions among our neighborhoods. It is from these mosques that most, if not all, of the terrorists get their teaching from the Quran to go out into our communities and kill or maim the non-Muslim.

But, our government knows best and anyone who speaks out about curbing the number of Islamic immigrants is called unfeeling, a racist or a bigot. The Japanese see the Islamic ideology as strange and one that doesn’t make sense. They simply do not want Islam to play any part whatsoever in their rich culture. And what is wrong with wanting to keep your nations culture alive?

In America, we now have teachers who have their students practicing Arabic writing by copying the Shahada in class, which is the  Muslim conversion prayer. Our students are also being told to throw a burka and/or a hijab on for good measure too, just so they can feel like what it is to be a Muslim woman.

Excuse my language, but what the hell are we doing here? Japan has no problem saying to the Muslim, “Your ways are not our ways, and don’t think for a second your kind is going to come into our country and change it.” Why aren’t we screaming this from our rooftops? Have Americans lost their voice? At what point are we going to make our legislators understand the peril in which they have placed the country, all in the name of multi-culturalism.

Trump made a statement several months ago about barring Muslims from this country, and people all over the world practically had an aneurism over it. This policy  makes perfect sense in a climate where practically 100% of terrorist attacks are attributed to Muslims.

Japan obviously couldn’t care less what the world says about their policy. Apparently they aren’t swayed by the political correct crowd that our leaders bow to. They can sit back and enjoy their sushi, sake, and plum wine while the rest of the world burns.

Maybe with a new administration, schools would once again be encouraged to teach the historical truth about our country and we could start to instill a sense of pride in a country that once respected God and celebrated the traditional family.

I believe we are all ready to find out who that one nominee will be for the presidential race. Regardless of who it is, we better all be ready to stand behind them 100%. Hopefully the next president could look at Japan’s stance on immigration and glean some wisdom from it.

RELATED ARTICLE: Canadian Iranian: “I feel betrayed”; waves of migrants endanger Western societies

Is the North Korean Satellite Launch a Game Changer?

FoxNews reported these developments following the success of North Korea’s satellite launching confirmed by the Pentagon:

We’ve been able to determine that they were able to put a satellite or some space device into orbit,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said.

He said the Pentagon will, in light of this, begin “formal consultations” with South Korea over improvements to their own missile defense systems.

“We’d like to see this move as quickly as possible, but we’re beginning the consultations now in the coming days with the South Koreans and we expect that this will move in an expeditious fashion,” Cook said.

The U.S. and other world powers have condemned the launch of a long-range rocket, describing it as a banned test of ballistic missile technology.

At an emergency meeting Sunday of the U.N. Security Council which includes the U.S., all 15 council members approved a statement condemning the launch and pledging to “expeditiously” adopt a new resolution with “significant” new sanctions.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power said a new U.N. resolution targeting North Korea over its rocket launch and recent nuclear test must be adopted very quickly and include “unprecedented measures” that its leader, Kim Jong Un, doesn’t expect.

The United States and China have been trying to agree on a new sanctions resolution since North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Jan. 6.

Gordon Chang in a Fox News interview said the North Korean satellite launch is something to worry about. Chang is a veteran North Korea and China analyst, Forbes columnist  author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World.  He said the Hermit State “demonstrated the mastery of missile technology.” He was referring to the three stage Unha-3 space vehicle launcher (SLV) that successfully placed a satellite in orbit. Chang further commented that the North Koreans demonstrated they have the means to successfully develop a true ICBM. An ICBM  , as we wrote in an NER/Iconoclast post, yesterday, that  both North Korea and its ready customer Iran could use at attack both coasts of this country. Where yesterday, we posted the news of the North Korean satellite launch with the question“is this a game changer?”  Chang’s comments and the reaction from the Obama White House suggest maybe it is.  US UN Ambassador Samantha Power, called it a missile launch because the SVL and a true ICBM she shared the same technology. That meant in the Administration’s view the successful satellite launch violated UN sanctions against missile testing. However, given the track record will the UN Security Council do anything about this latest North Korean action?

Chang holds that sanctions don’t work with North Korea. Instead He suggested that we might control the aid to North Korea endeavoring to separate the people from the autocratic ruling Kim family. He also suggested that South Korea move 143 companies out of the Kaesong industrial shared with North Korea.  He noted that after the January 6, 2016 nuclear test, no further sanctions were proposed at the UN because China would effectively block them. China he pointed out does a fair amount of banking with North Korea.

The success of the North Korean orbit prompted GOP hopeful Texas Senator Cruz at Saturday night’s to raise the question of whether we should pre-emptive attack North Korea’s missile launches.  Ironic, as this proposal was suggested by the current Administration Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and former Clinton Pentagon Chief William Perry, a decade ago.

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The Administration is scrambling now that the Pentagon confirmed that the North Koreans successfully launched a satellite. Launched in a southerly direction, the 200kg.observational satellite is in polar orbit. That means it passes over the US every 95 minutes, perhaps providing imagery and GPS coordinates for possible later use. Yesterday, it missed the window of opportunity, by an hour, to pass over the stadium for 50th Super Bowl Championship game with tens of thousands of fans intent on watching the Denver Broncos beat the North Carolina Panthers for the title.

The Pentagon is talking about providing South Korea with Theater High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system to complete the shorter range missile defense umbrella that the Republic of Korea has in place.

As we said on the Sunday Lisa Benson Show yesterday “it’s great that the U.S. has THAAD and ship borne X band radar floating in the Pacific and both ship and shore based Aegis installations in Eastern Europe (Romania) protecting us from missiles fired towards the East Coast. However, we have nothing in place to provide missile defense our vulnerable Gulf of Mexico coast.”  Ambassador Hank Cooper, the Reagan era SDI chief, warned about the absence of Aegis missile defense installations on our Gulf coast in November 2015 and most recently in a Feb.2, 2016 High Frontier alert. He argues that that our ballistic missile defense shield  on the Gulf coast lacks  the means  to combat the threat of a possible North Korean bomb in a satellite (Fractal Orbital Bomb) or missiles launched from either ships in the Gulf or those silos that allegedly Iran has been building in the Paraguana Peninsula in Venezuela. Ex- CIA director R. James Woolsey and Dr. Peter Pry discussed  in a July 2015 article the threat from FOBS that could trigger an Electronic Magnetic Pulse (EMP) effect over the US sending us back to the dark ages of the 19th Century before the advent of electricity.

This issue came up in the ABC GOP New Hampshire debates, Saturday night. Sen. Cruz raised the matter of a preemptive attack against a future North Korean ICBM launch during those debates. We may have had a hand in prompting it. A twitter rally was held last week by the Nation Security Task Force of America (NSTFA) of the Lisa Benson Show on the missile defense issue. The twitter rally sent out messages at the rate of 400 an hour, one of which caught the attention of a South Carolinian with a close connection to the Senator’s campaign staff. Another NSTFA twitter rally is on deck this Thursday night on the same issue.

The irony is the preemptive attack proposal originated a decade ago in 2006 in a Time Magazine article co authored by then Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, now Pentagon Chief and former Clinton Pentagon chief William Perry. Four nuclear and several space launches and missile tests later, we have a President whose response is to hold more UN sanctions talks with China at the UN that North Korea continually violates.

Meanwhile the North Korean satellite launch coupled with the January 6, 2016 nuclear test exposes the vulnerability of the US to possible missile attack by rogue regimes like North Korea and ally Iran. The lack of a Ballistic Missile Defense demonstrated by this latest successful North Korean satellite launch now vaults the issue to the top of national security issues along with Islamic terrorism for serious discussion in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Watch, the Fox News report with the Chang interview:

RELATED ARTICLE: In One Graphic, What Countries North Korea’s New Missile Could Hit

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Japan wants to preserve its distinctive culture by limiting Muslim refugees

They give generously to humanitarian causes around the world, but do not want to dilute their culture by admitting refugees.  We have written many times on Japan, but once again as the Syrians are invading Europe, the Japanese are being called unwelcoming.

From USA Today:

TOKYO — It came as no surprise when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced a major increase in financial support last week for migrants flooding into Western Europe — but no change in his country’s restrictive policy toward those seeking refuge in Japan.

For decades, Japan has been one of biggest contributors to international relief organizations, spending billions of dollars to help people fleeing wars, poverty and natural disasters worldwide.

Yet Japan also has been one of the least welcoming nations to refugees. Of 5,000 foreigners who requested political asylum in Japan last year, only 11 were granted safe haven, an acceptance rate that is 1/100th of the world average.

By comparison, the United States granted asylum to nearly 70% of 63,000 people who applied last year.

Refugee advocates say Japan’s reluctance to accept asylum seekers stems from a combination of factors: geographic isolation, language and cultural barriers, and a historical wariness of foreigners and a lack of interest in foreign affairs.

Somali rejected!

In one case cited by Watanabe, a Somali man’s asylum application was rejected after immigration officials concluded that while the man’s father and brother were murdered by al-Shabab terrorists, the rest of his family was not murdered and the asylum seeker remained in Somalia for several months before fleeing. The reviewing officer concluded: “We do not find that you have fear of being persecuted required by the refugee convention.”  [I’ll bet a buck that the Somali asylum seeker couldn’t even prove that his father and brother were killed by al-Shabab!—ed]

There is more, continue reading here.

For American readers, just so you know, as the UNHCR is sending Somalis back to Somalia from its Kenyan camps we admitted 8,858 Somalis to the U.S. in FY 2015, here (many from the Kenyan camps!).

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Thinking About China

Napoleon Bonaparte purportedly said “Let China sleep, for when China wakes, she will shake the world.”

Cover - China ChallengeAs Thomas J. Christensen, the author of his recently published “The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power”, reminds us, “For millennia China was arguably the greatest civilization on the planet and for many previous centuries its most powerful empire.”

China is no longer an empire, but it remains a huge nation geographically and huge in terms of its population.

From the website worldometers.info, we learn:

Christensen is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Currently he is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics and director of the China and World Program at Princeton University. After reading his book, you might well conclude that there is little about China and Asia he does not know.

We are mostly dependent on various news stories about China to have any idea what is occurring, but the fact remains that just as the U.S. has its optimists and pessimists, conservatives and liberals who influence policy the same exists for China, so a lot depends on who is being quoted. Generally, though, it is only the top leaders who are. That means we are getting the Chinese “party line” and the occasional general or admiral warning against any aggression.

China did not begin to awaken as a modern nation until after the death of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, a Communist with a capital “C.” Christensen notes that, while keeping its political ideology, the leader that followed him made a “peaceful transformation launched under CCP leader Deng Xiaopping in 1978 and the collapse of the superpower Soviet Union thirteen years later that made China appear to stand tall again among the great powers.” The transitition was to a capitalist-based economy.

These days the Chinese and the Russians are making efforts to achieve areas of cooperation and, in particular, their militaries. They hold drills together for common defense strategies.

Christensen believes that “China’s return to great power status is perhaps the most important challenges in twenty-first century American diplomacy”, but to put that in context he points out that “China’s per capita income is only one fifth that of the United States” and “though a true trade superpower, many of its exporters are controlled at least in part by foreign investors.”

“Still, the pessimists do not give enough credit to the sustainability of U.S. leadership in Asia,” says Christensen. “For example, they often underestimate the value of American’s unparalleled network of allies and security partners.” You can be sure that the Chinese leadership does not.

They also have, as one would expect, concerns about U.S. military power in their area of the world, but they feel the same about Japan and South Korea as well. “China is not currently an enemy of the United States,” says Christensen, nor is it likely to be for a long time to come.

“It does not need to be contained like the (former) Soviet Union. Nor should China become the kind of regional or global adversary that we have faced in the past, although that outcome, unfortunately, is still a distinct possibility.” That possibility depends on China’s leadership now and in the future. For now they are concentrating on their economy and are likely to do so for many years to come.

Chinese Money“China’s economic clout is real and growing rapidly, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. China has been the main engine of growth for the world’s economy since that time and, by some measures, has become the world’s number one trading state.” There is only one reason why the U.S. has not yet recovered from the financial crisis and his name is Barack Obama.

I suspect that Obama is held in disdain by the Chinese leadership despite all the public handshakes. For one thing, China weathered the financial crisis far better than the U.S. “One of the burdens the new Obama administration inherited in early 2009 was a China bearing a mix of cockiness and insecurity that would negatively influence its policies in 2009-2010,” says Christensen and as the U.S. foundered in Afghanistan and Iraq “American power inspired less awe.”

“Sometime in 2012, the ‘Asia pivot’” of the Obama administration “would be jettisoned in Washington for the more subtle ‘Asia rebalance.’” If you get the feeling that the Obama administration has no real China policy or one that will have little influence, you are right.

With regard to China, It likely does not matter what the Obama administration does for its remaining one and a half years in office.

Various scholars and diplomats will continue to keep a watchful eye on China and most surely many corporate leaders and U.S. entrepreneurs will do so as well given its huge population as a marketplace. It’s already a great tourist destination.

Napoleon was right.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

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Crunch-Time for the Coalition

What has Japan done?  Most of us can agree that for years Western European and North American democracies have received a considerable degree of criticism – and applied a considerable degree of self-criticism – based on our recent and far-distant historical actions. In Britain and France the carving up of the Ottoman empire keeps coming back to us. In America its post-World War II engagement in the Middle East has been the focus.

But as Islamic State (IS) paraded its two Japanese hostages on camera this week there should be some reflection on this. Since 1945 it would be hard to find a more pacific and careful nation in foreign policy, let alone expressions of national exceptionalism, than Japan. It is an important economy and an important voice in the family of nations. But if there was a country at the opposite end of the spectrum of ‘world policeman’ it would be post-World War II Japan.

And yet here this week were two of their nationals prone in precisely the same gruesome position that American and British hostages, among others, have found themselves in recent months.  This time it was their government having demands made of them and their leaders receiving the disorientating IS mixture of medievalist behaviour communicated via the most up-to-date technology.

As foreign ministers met in London to discuss how to deal with the IS threat this is a question worth mulling on. In the West we have media organisations and universities packed with people who wish to mull on our own foreign policy mistakes before mulling what to do about actual visible threats. A degree of self-criticism is of course a vital thing, and something which has distinguished our societies for centuries. Yet there is a time when such self-criticism becomes self-doubt, and self-doubt becomes a bar to action even in the easiest cases.

Such is the case with IS. President Obama has famously talked of containing IS, but as more and more nations around the world come face-to-face with the barbarism of IS it is easier than ever to gather international opinion to treat IS not as a problem that should be contained but as a threat that must be eliminated. It is very rare in international affairs to be able to single out any group or any action which is genuinely an affront to the entire international order and the whole community of nations – with their competing and international horse-trading arrangements. But IS is such a threat and such a challenge and it must be hoped that the foreign ministers meeting in London recognised that and can build a proper coalition to address that fact.

RELATED ARTICLE: ISIS Says Countdown For Japan’s Hostages has Begun