they don’t have to go to the Horn of Africa. The waters off China and the narrow passages of Southeast Asia have a lot of piracy. We just don’t hear as much about it.

for addressing their own economic interests and attempting to do something about it. I hope they succeed in legislation.

The U.S. can’t police the world’s oceans alone and nor should we. A lot of people don’t realize that our U.S. Navy and our Navy Seals are a scarce and precious commodity. They are Supermen but can’t be everywhere to save the day.

I’m waiting for a bold statement of U.S. policy on this issue.. tick, tick, tick….

The reasoning behind the different houses of Japanese parliament is that while the Prime Minister and the lower house are of the center-right Liberal Democratic Party, the upper house is controlled by the center-left Democratic Party of Japan, which has trended more leftwards in recent decades by absorbing the failed husks of the former Communist and Socialist parties.

If they can get this through without the upper house’s approval, that may cause some interesting fireworks in Japanese politics… we’ll see what happens when it comes to that point, and especially what might happen in the lower house (as LDP’s coalition partner Komeito tends to not be so prolix about projecting force).

nt

Please remember that all of this is taking place in the context of a nation with a constitution that expressly renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation” and forbids the maintenance of “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential”.

In other words, this is not simply an issue of the Japanese people not being willing to pull their fair share of the weight in providing for their own defense. They have to walk a very fine line to stay within the bounds of their own constitution as it was adopted after World War II or they have to go through the wrenching public debate that would be necessary to change their constitution.

While a number Japanese Supreme Court decisions have upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese maintaining defense forces, the projection of force outside of Japan has been a much more contentious issue. The bill, cited above, proposing the use of force “for more than just self-defence purposes” would definitely fall in the latter category.