21ST-CENTURY GEOPOLITICS OF JAPAN

An excellent geopolitical and analytical tour de force! I hadn’t come across Andrew Korybko before — and should probably be ashamed to admit it. I was highly interested in his discourse about the Ryukyu Islands/Okinawa (my passed wife’s birthland). I think it unlikely that the RI will disengage from Japan in a dramatic way, but who knows?–it has been pulled and pushed between China and Japan for centuries. I’m mildly puzzled that Mr. Korybko didn’t address the Korean Peninsula as a regional and potential wider-field player. Finally, I read a decade or more ago (book “Apres L’Empire”?) that Japan’s complex and too-often-obtuse, indecisive language itself would prevent any serious emergence of Japan as a front-rank world power across the full “power”-ways spectrum, and I wish Mr. Korybko had gone there…but overall I’m in awe!