Obama In Asia

The President spent the week of May 27 in Asia, and got quite a bit done.  He first went to Southeast Asia to promote trade with the US, and in the process announced that he would lift the arms embargo against Vietnam.  By Thursday he had gone to Japan for the G-7 summit in Ise, Mie Prefecture and on Friday made a side-trip to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, becoming the first American President to visit Hiroshima.  Lifting the arms embargo is a big, but the visit to Hiroshima is easily the bigger story.  Or the more dramatic one, at least.  There is a lot to say about both legs of the trip, but they connect through the President’s policies.  Obama has always accepted the wisdom that the 21^st century will be “the Asian Century;” due to the continuing improvements in the standards of living around East and Southern Asia, and the increasing economic importance of the continent to the rest of us.  This trip, which I believe will be his last to Asia as POTUS, makes for the perfect finale.

Learned Helplessness

On December 14, 2012, a crazed knife wielding man stood outside Chenpeng Village Primary School in Henan Province, China, and stabbed 24 people before the police overpowered him.  All of the victims, 23 children and 1 elderly woman (from whom the attacker originally stole the knives) eventually recovered.  Does any of that sound familiar?  The Sandy Hook tragedy occurred on the same date, hours later.  The disparity of death toll (0 in Henan versus 20 in Connecticut) has already been remarked upon in the past four years.   It shows that policy can mitigate the effects of violent outbursts.  China is not the only Asian state to have knife-rampages.  Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other countries experience them too.  The attacker in Chenpeng did not have access to a firearm, so he used knives.  It is difficult-to-impossible to prevent these rampages, but with different policy choices, they can be mitigated. 

Two high profile gun rampages within a week.  A lot has been said.  Every once in a while, when one of these makes the news overseas, my Japanese friends ask me to explain what the hell is even going on.  I do my best, I don't know how well my answers work for them.  My friends ask me these questions because mass shootings really do not happen in Japan.  Japan does have the occasional knife rampage, vehicular homicide, and gangland shootings, but not the kind of seemingly random events of violence we Americans deal with.   They do have very strict weapons control.  Almost nobody in Japan owns a gun and the police rarely carry them.  But that does not mean that Japan has no interest in weaponry.