NOT SINCE THE FAT MAN SANG:

Does Japan still matter? (Fred Hiatt, December 11, 2009, Washington Post)

U.S.-Japan relations are in "crisis," Japan's foreign minister told me Thursday -- but I would guess that few Americans have noticed, let alone felt alarm. As China rises, Japan's economy has stalled, and its population is dwindling. The island nation -- feared during the last century first as a military power, then as an economic conqueror -- barely registers in the American imagination.

But Japan still matters.

That's the great thing about Realists, even after conceding that it's a dying nation you still have to pretend it matters...because it used to....

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2009 7:21 AM