How did Japan's 135-year-old liberal flagship end up in the crosshairs of neo-nationalists?

Before last year it is doubtful that many Japanese knew the location of Glendale, California – an L.A. suburb with a population of 200,000 known for its large Asian population and the Big Boy fast-food chain. That's changed, thanks to an unimposing bronze statue of a young woman installed last year in a local park that has become a microcosm of the toxic history war between Japan and South Korea.

Japanese multinational construction giant Komatsu is a front-runner, in Japan as well as globally, in the development and deployment of renewable energy, efficiency, automation and robotics. It is also a repeat winner of the coveted Deming Prize and numerous other awards for excellence, innovation and environmental protection. It is important to stress that Komatsu has a history of impressive achievement as preface to suggesting that, on January 20, it held a possibly epochal press conference. Komatsu's presser unveiled a new paradigm of “smart construction,” one aimed at revamping the construction industry with a robotics revolution. Komatsu staged its announcement in Shibuya's capacious Hikarie Hall, a focal point and showcase of Japanese rail and real-estate conglomerate Tokyu Corporation's smart city strategies. With a GPS and camera-equipped drone hovering overhead, Komatsu CEO Ohashi Tetsuji declared that, from February 1, his company would begin offering smart construction options at its 123 sales outlets within Japan. Komatsu calculates that its smart approach can cut project costs by at least 20-30 percent through the use of robotics, including the multi-sensor drones; cloud computing through its “KomConnect” platform to process the massive flows of information; and further automation to displace reliance on scarce labour while increasing precision and decreasing waste. Komatsu, the world's second largest manufacturer of mining and construction equipment (behind Caterpillar), and the biggest in Asia (including China), also intends to make smart construction a global product by March of 2016.

An article in the Hankyoreh a few months back caught my attention. The story is about Ko Kang-ho and Ri Mi-oh, a married couple of Zainichi Koreans living in Kyoto. Recently Mr. Ko had filed a lawsuit in Seoul City Court requesting that his South Korean nationality be annulled. Ko had become a South Korean national upon his parents' acquiring that nationality after the 1965 normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and the ROK. Now he has chosen to become stateless, the option which in theory is available to Zainichi, who were completely stateless between the years 1945 and 1965. Thereafter, only those who acquired South Korean nationality (including Mr. Ko's family) obtained permanent residence in Japan, leaving a large number of Zainichi continuing to be stateless, the situation only to be addressed in the 1990s. In 2012 this unprecedented request was denied in the Supreme Court of South Korea. Mr. Ko's action was inspired by his wife, Ms. Ri, who has lived all her life stateless: she has no nationality, retaining only the Chōsen identification in her Japanese alien registration.