Japan's energy policy regime appears dangerously adrift in the context of accelerating climate change. The core problem is agency. On the one hand, Japanese PM Abe Shinzo and the nuclear village appear obsessed with nuclear power restarts and 20th century paradigms of the power economy. On the other hand, Japan's anti-nuclear civil society lacks the political vehicle to force a combined nuclear pullout plus drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Some anti-nuclear forces do not yet understand the urgent need to reduce emissions, and are content to burn coal, despite of the patent threat of climate change. This is precisely what Japan has done in the wake of 3.11. The Abe cabinet is focused on getting restarts and a nuclear-based energy plan. Yet the scope for restarts is surprisingly limited and - incredible in this era of multiple crises and revolutions - the draft new energy plan lacks concrete numbers. The country needs better leadership on smart growth, in the context of what McKinsey specialists refer to as a “resource revolution” and MIT economists depict as “the second machine age.”

Below are translated excerpts from Yoshiko Sakumoto Crandell's autobiography, Tumai Monogatari: Showa no Tamigusa (Tomari Story: My Life in the Showa Era), published by Shimpo Shuppan in 2002. The translation is by Mieko Maeshiro. Born in 1931, the 6th year of Showa, the author was raised in Okinawa's famous port town of Tomari, a section of Naha City, the prefectural capital. Her father worked as a ship-builder and her mother made Panama hats, a major export from Okinawa at the time. The portion of her autobiography presented here describes her harrowing experiences during the Battle of Okinawa, in which she was wounded by shellfire and narrowly avoided rape by an American soldier. It concludes with her internment in a refugee camp during the battle's chaotic aftermath. In the early months of the 27-year-long U.S. military occupation of Okinawa (1945-72), the author worked briefly for the American forces in food service and laundry, and later for the Ryukyu Life Insurance Company. In 1969 she married an American in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Okinawa. They live today in Newport News, Virginia.

I have been writing about deep politics since 1993, when I gave the example of how the United States after World War sent American mafia figures to fight communism in Italy, thereby creating a corrupted politics that was soon out of control - as bad as the influence the mafia once possessed in cities like Marseille, or Chicago.

Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her expansive analysis of the development and spread of totalitarianism in Europe in 1951, in the aftermath of the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism, the Holocaust, and the violent destruction of life, community, and nation left both in the wake of World War II and amidst Stalinism. Her analysis rooted firmly in Europe, she commented in the preface that, “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and selfinterest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards or other centuries.” Over sixty years later, noted Thai historian Nidhi Eoseewong picked up Arendt's work to write two articles about the forms of creeping totalitarianism emergent in Thailand in the long aftermath of the 19 September 2006 coup. 2 While the points of difference between interwar Europe and present-day Thailand are as multiple as the points of resonance, the shape of totalitarianism itself is very similar. By threading his analysis of changes in Thai society over the last ten years through a reading of the chapters on the mass and dictatorship in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Nidhi provides a broad context and framework for understanding present-day developments in Thailand, which mitigate against the very isolation he and Arendt argue is a key feature of totalitarianism. In what follows, I offer an account of the current crisis in Thai politics informed by Nidhi's essays. The translation of the two short essays, “Totalitarian Dictatorship,” and “The Great Mass of the People,” originally published on Prachatai, an independent Thai news and commentary site, follow my account.