This short piece on the meaning and implications behind Japan’s Prime Minister Koizumi’s upcoming historical trip to North Korea is by Professor Victor Cha of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Cha asserts that while Koizumi’s trip to North Korea this month appears to be a positive development aimed at reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula and a step toward convincing the Bush administration’s skeptics to press forward with engagement, the mission could end up reinforcing hawk perceptions in Washington that engagement with the DPRK is a necessary, albeit, fruitless exercise, doomed for failure. Professor Cha is also director of the American Alliances in Asia Project at Georgetown University

The essay below is by Yoshikazu Sakamoto who is Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University. Sakamoto argues that the United States occupation of Iraq is not true democratization. Democracy in Iraq will only take root through autonomous opposition to the occupation. Postwar democracy in Japan was not a direct consequence of democratization from above but through spontaneous opposition to the policy of the anti-communist occupation force. The administrations of the U.S. and Japan need to learn from this paradoxical lesson.

This is a slightly revised version of the article appeared in The Japan Times, January 1, 2004.