TPR News is coming soon, as is the second interview with Debito Arudou.  (In case you missed it, the first one is here.)  We’ve also recently welcomed our very own Jimmy Olsen, Sam Porter (except for his not being a kid or a copy boy, that is.  Really he’s just younger than us.)  Sam, a Bostonian, will be keeping us posted as he goes to a Japanese high school for a year.

I didn’t check the news last night and woke up late this morning and was late coming to some interesting news: Defense Minister Yuriko Koike has announced her intention to resign.  She did it at a press conference in India where Prime Minister Abe had recently triumphantly spoken of an Asian “NATO” and inked a free trade agreement, escorted by about 250 wealthy buddies.

As we get original material together, though, here’s a brief rundown of some of what we’ve been reading on other sites:

Tobias Harris at Observing Japan beat us to the punch in writing about Koike’s announcing her intention to step down at a press conference in India.  Ms. Koike said she wanted to take responsibility for the leak of Aegis destroyer information that had occurred before her tenure at MOD, but Mr. Harris puts it quite well when he said many people must have been thinking:

I have to imagine that she has lost the confidence of the ministry, making her position untenable. The MOD/JDA has struggled for years to develop its own base of talented personnel after decades of having its top officials seconded from MOFA and MOF, and I can’t imagine that long-serving ministry officials are particularly fond of Minister Koike after her attempt to bring her own deputy in from outside the ministry — breaking standard operating procedure to do so.

He’s also been getting dirt under his fingernails digging through the inta-LDP shifts, the DPJ’s growing into its new role, and all of the other ins and outs of Japanese politics.

Adding to the list of bloggers who woke up earlier than me (or stayed up later), is MTC of Shisaku fame, who concurs with Observing Japan and hits the nail right smack on the head with this breakdown:

The reason Koike is being fired is simple: she has made too many enemies.

1) She has risen farther and faster than her status within the LDP warrants. Having leaped from party to party with the agility of a gibbon, finally landing in the Cabinet with a hugely important post after only a smattering of elections under the LDP flag, leaving a lot of the lower downs in the LDP feeling slighted.

2) She upbraided Ozawa, calling him out-of-date, in a seeming attempt to mollify and encourage her American hosts when she made her run to Washington after the election. Only one problem with that–she would have needed his total cooperation if anything was to be done about the November expiration of the legislation sanctioning the Indian Ocean deployment. Ooops.

3) She has the Defense Ministry bureaucracy up in arms for her spectacular but unwise dumping of Vice Minister Moriya Takemasa. Oh, if she had only not selected a National Police Agency guy to replace Moriya…

Of his reasons, I’d say #2 was the greatest factor - the point soon to be of pressing urgency.

Over at GlobalTalk 21, a personal favorite of mine, Jun Okumura has been following and, of course, commenting on President Bush’s less-than-insightful comparison of Iraq and Vietnam and his downright asinine comparison of pre-War Japan with al Qaeda.

(After this post, on the same topic, you can see one of the reasons I no longer identify with American conservatives in the form of a truly dimwitted comment, handled with aplomb and good humor by Mr. Okumura.)

In short, there really can’t be any serious doubt about George Bush’s lack of intelligence and failure to grasp what’s going on now and what has happened in the past.

Mr. Okumura has also written a few illuminating posts on the factional shifts within the LDP.

Over at The Marmot’s Hole, there’s a look at South Korea’s Air Force upgrades and who they seem primed to face down - possibly Japan.  Give it a look, you can learn interesting things I didn’t know, such as South Korea’s F-16s only being able to stay over Takeshima (Dokdo) for eight minutes, whereas the ASDF’s F-15s would be able to hang out for 45.  As far as I’m concerned, Japan has a huge advantage over South Korea in that spat, namely in that it seems far less willing than the ROK to let the uninhabited rock and its attendant fishing rights cause it distress, much to fight over the thing.

It’s one thing to make yourself feel better and stand up for yourself by carrying on a one-way rivalry, quite another to spend money on it or allow it to affect your defense posture.

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OK, that’s far from an exhaustive list, but it’s stuff that’s caught my eye and that I think will be of interest to TPR’s readers and listeners.  I recommend all three of the aforementioned blogs.

In other news, blogger Okojo has done me the honor of translating about the first two thirds of my editorial on HR 121 and posting it on his blog 「おこうじょの日記」 (Okojo’s Diary).  I don’t know if he ran out of time, disagreed with the end of my editorial, or just got tired of it (I can see that), but I appreciate it just the same and recommend stopping by his blog if you read Japanese.  To my knowledge, he’s the first person to translate any entire article from TPR.