Probe into Dreamliner continues

Kyodo

Japanese and U.S. aviation authorities Tuesday continued their probe into GS Yuasa Corp., the maker of lithium-ion batteries used in Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliner jets grounded after a series of recent mishaps.

They are looking into whether the batteries were designed in line with Boeing’s order by checking documents at the Kyoto-based manufacturer and the maker’s quality control for the batteries, according to the transport ministry.

The probe is being conducted following an emergency landing last week involving a Dreamliner operated by All Nippon Airways Co. at Takamatsu Airport in Kagawa Prefecture after smoke appeared inside the aircraft.

Transport minister Akihiro Ota told reporters the Japan Transport Safety Board planned to conduct a computed tomography scan of the aircraft’s charred battery at a Tokyo facility of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency on Tuesday afternoon.

The battery analysis will be observed by a U.S. National Transportation Safety Board official, who is visiting Japan for as part of the NTSB investigation into an electrical fire aboard a parked JAL 787 at Boston’s Logan Airport earlier this month.

Separately, transport ministry officials were sent Tuesday to the British maker of a fuel cap valve linked to fuel leaks on a JAL 787, first at Boston, then at Narita International Airport on Jan. 13.

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Local reaction: Reporters outside JGC Corp.’s headquarters in Yokohama ask an employee to comment Tuesday morning about the deadly Algerian hostage crisis. KYODO

JGC workers angered by hostages’ deaths

Employees past and present worry future attacks possible

Kyodo

Employees of plant engineering firm JGC Corp. as well as relatives and friends of workers expressed anger and dismay after the government confirmed Monday that seven Japanese were killed during the hostage crisis at the Ain Amenas gas complex in Algeria last week.

In front of JGC headquarters in Yokohama on Tuesday morning, a 33-year-old employee said he was worried that he may someday be sent to work abroad.

“Setting aside Algeria, there are countries where the security situation is volatile, and how to ensure the security of plant construction sites in these countries remains a big problem,” said the employee, who has worked at the firm’s overseas plants.

The Algerian military ended a four-day standoff with militants at the gas complex in the Sahara on Saturday by launching an assault that left scores of hostages from various countries and their Islamist captors dead.

The government and JGC have not disclosed the names of the seven victims out of consideration for their families.

Another worker said the company could have taken precautionary steps after France conducted military intervention in Mali against Islamic insurgents. The militants who attacked the gas complex said they did so in retaliation of France’s actions.

“It is regrettable the company failed to foresee this kind of incident after we saw the French military going into Mali,” he said. “I hope the company will take more steps to ensure the safety of its employees based on this lesson.”

Retired JGC workers also expressed grief and disbelief.

A former employee in his 70s who had been involved in plant construction in Algeria was at a loss for words.

“The engineers have done nothing wrong. I hate the terrorist group,” he said.

“It is regrettable that (my juniors) had to be involved in this kind of incident,” said Yoshio Oh, a former JGC worker who now lives in Yokohama. “I want as many people to survive,” said Oh, 76, who worked from the mid-1970s in a division that handled construction of overseas plants and was in charge of places such as Algeria.

Oh voiced regret at the turn of events, remarking how JGC valued its work in Algeria and had built up over the years a “relationship of trust” with local people.

“Taking someone’s life in this manner is unacceptable,” said a former junior high school teacher of one of the missing, an on-site leader at the gas plant.

While a 64-year-old former JGC worker expressed his understanding of Algeria’s handling of the crisis, another man criticized the Algerian government for undertaking the military assault without notifying the countries whose nationals were among the hostages, saying, “I guess (for Algeria) the plant came before human beings.”

A man whose relative is believed to be one of the missing said, “It just seems so surreal. . . . I cannot bring myself to feel what is happening.”

Crisis plan review urged

The government will ask companies operating in developing countries to enhance their crisis management plans in the wake of the Algerian hostage crisis, but the incident will not prompt a drastic change in Japan’s overseas expansion strategy, industry minister Toshimitsu Motegi said.

“I want Japanese companies to review their crisis management manuals . . . but I don’t think this situation will bring an about-face to Japan’s international expansion strategy,” Motegi said Monday at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo.

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How the Vietnam war will shape Obama’s second term

By FOUAD AJAMI

The Washington Post

STANFORD, California — The men who fought in Vietnam, a war that symbolizes America’s overreach and failures abroad, haven’t ascended to the presidency in the way that the World War II generation did. But now, under President Barack Obama, Vietnam veterans Chuck Hagel and John Kerry could get a chance to pull America back from its foreign entanglements.

Obama’s nominations of these men, and the world’s disenchantment with this president, signal that in his second term, the United States will have a less zealous mission in the world. The mantra isn’t quite the late U.S. Sen. George McGovern’s “come home, America,” but we are not far from that Vietnam-era weariness of distant lands and causes. And who better than a president with a foreign pedigree and two combat veterans from the Vietnam war at the helm of the Pentagon and the State Department to give this retrenchment a sense of legitimacy?

All three men would disavow the charge that they are “declinists” who believe that American power is past its zenith, but there is an unmistakable pessimism at the heart of their worldview: We are flat broke, with pressing priorities at home. Foreign engagements begin well and end in futility. We don’t know enough about the inner workings of these distant places to help more than harm. And besides, our embrace can suffocate those whose causes we might take up.

Syria burns, but we should hold steady and aloof, Obama’s approach has made clear, because we have no way of divining the motivations of the rebellion — or the kind of society the rebels would build if and when the Assad regime falls. The law of unintended consequences haunts our deeds; we know well that American blood and treasure can be wasted at the altar of ideology.

The U.S. isn’t that exceptional to begin with, this triumvirate believes. Hagel and Kerry have forthrightly said so on many occasions,while Obama has had to be more circumspect. In his first campaign for the presidency, he drew a distinction between good wars of necessity and bad wars of choice. But there is no mistaking the worldview of the politician who rose, unexpectedly, amid economic distress, to the height of political power.

The French have a fitting expression for the Obama phenomenon that broke out abroad, like a fever, in 2008: trompe l’oeil, a trick of the eye. Weary of the assertive nationalism of U.S. President George W. Bush, Europeans and the Arab world welcomed Obama as a break with the “war on terror” and the American sense of embattled certitude. But the crowds in Paris and Berlin, not to mention Karachi and Cairo, mistook the animating passion of the candidate they had fallen for; they thought of him as a cosmopolitan man at home in the world. While he had lived in Jakarta as a boy, and had a Kenyan father and an Indonesian stepfather, he cut his teeth as a politician in the most American of cities: Chicago.

To the extent that the ideology of such a nimble man can be divined, the mission of his presidency has been the redistributive state at home. His legacy, as he sees it, will be his signature legislation, Obamacare. Yes, Osama bin Laden was killed on his watch, but the rescue of General Motors seems closer to his heart.

Two years or so into his presidency, the world caught on: Underneath the exotic name and the speeches referring to American follies abroad was a president who holds the foreign world at bay. The spell of his stirring speech in Cairo, in June 2009, has been broken. Instead of being taken in by Obama’s magic, Muslims are burning him in effigy in Karachi. His approval rating among Pakistanis is as bleak as that of Bush.

Obama can live with the foreign world’s disenchantment with him. He has a domestic agenda to focus on, and has two combat veterans from the Vietnam war to scale back American commitments abroad.

“How many of us really know and understand Iraq, its country, history, people and role in the Arab world?” Hagel said on the Senate floor in 2002, in the debate that preceded and authorized the Iraq war. “The American people must be told of the long-term commitment, risk and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets.”

The Nebraskan was speaking of Iraq, but the war in Vietnam has haunted and defined him. He cast a vote authorizing the use of force for the new war, but it didn’t take long before the former infantryman with two Purple Hearts gave voice to his disillusionment. As is well known, Hagel served alongside his younger brother, Tom, in Vietnam; both were wounded.

“We are each a product of our experiences, and my time in combat very much shaped my opinions about war,” Hagel said in an interview with Vietnam Magazine last fall. “The night Tom and I were medevaced out of that village in April 1968, I told myself: If I ever get out of this and I’m ever in a position to influence policy, I will do everything I can to avoid needless, senseless war. I never forgot that vow I made to myself, and I tried to live by it during my time in the Senate.”

By Hagel’s moral code, his vote on Iraq was clearly a lapse in judgment. The passion with which he would speak about the war two or three years later, and his attack on the troop surge as a monumental error, felt like the penance of a man who believed he should have known better than to ever have supported the invasion.

If Hagel for years remained convinced that the Vietnam war was a noble cause badly executed, Kerry’s path after his service as a navy lieutenant was markedly different — as different, perhaps, as Nebraska and Massachusetts. His 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has trailed Kerry ever since. He spoke of American soldiers who had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads … randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”

It had been idle to launch that war, for there was “nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America.” The U.S. had gone there with lofty notions of freedom, but the South Vietnamese “only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart.”

There would be no taking back these words. In the eyes of Kerry’s detractors, combat, three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star would not fully acquit him. Emotionally tighter and more inhibited than Hagel, Kerry has put Vietnam at a good remove from his public persona. He has become a troubleshooter, traveling to foreign places but mostly to the chancelleries, to meet leaders and heads of state. Discretion is his code, since the attacks on him by Vietnam veterans during his presidential bid in 2004 rendered him a more cautious man. From his perch in the Senate, he has avoided controversies and redefined himself as an experienced mediator.

Kerry promises to be no more powerful at the State Department than Hillary Rodham Clinton has been. This president, in the mold of Bush, is the “decider” on the crucial issues of our engagements abroad. Kerry won’t challenge or resist the White House’s primacy.

The world needn’t worry about the assertiveness of U.S. power under Obama, Kerry and Hagel. It is people in distress — who might recall a different era when American armor and boots on the ground spelled the difference between rescue and calamity — who must come to terms with the near-certainty that the cavalry will not turn up.

Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey.”

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Spring is in the air: Two of NTT DoCoMo’s new products — the Sony Xperia Z smartphone and Xperia Tablet Z — are unveiled in Tokyo on Tuesday. The smartphone will go on sale on Feb. 9 and the tablet in mid-March. KAZUAKI NAGATA

DoCoMo pins hopes on a glitzy spring lineup

By KAZUAKI NAGATA

Staff writer

NTT DoCoMo Inc. on Tuesday unveiled its new products for the spring, vowing to catch up with rival carriers by releasing high-spec gadgets and promoting its shopping and content-related services.

The new products include a tablet device called the dtab, which can be bought for less than ¥10,000 and is designed mainly for home use to access DoCoMo content such as e-books and movies. The product lineup also features Sony’s new flagship smartphone Xperia Z, which generated a lot of buzz at the world’s biggest trade event for gadgets, the International Consumer Electronics Show, recently in the U.S.

“We have been in a tough competition, but with the new products for spring, we will roll again,” said DoCoMo President Kaoru Kato, who reiterated that the carrier still has no plans to add Apple’s iPhone to its lineup.

Kato, however, said DoCoMo may release handsets powered by a new operating system called Tizen, which DoCoMo and Samsung Electronics Co. are reportedly working on together along with other firms and hope to launch this year.

DoCoMo, while still boasting the most cellphone subscribers in Japan, has focused on Google’s Android OS but has been unable to keep customers from switching to KDDI Corp.’s au and Softbank Corp., both of which provide iPhones.

Last year, Softbank saw its mobile subscriptions grow by 3.48 million while KDDI added 2.51 million, both topping the increases they had the previous year. DoCoMo meanwhile increased its total subscriber base by only 1.36 million in 2012, a significant drop from its growth of 2.4 million the year before.

At the press event held in Tokyo, DoCoMo boasted that five of its nine new smartphones in particular are cutting edge and come with the full high-definition displays.

The carrier was especially pushing the Xperia Z, which has a 5-inch screen, a quad-core processor chip and Sony’s latest camera sensor for mobile phones.

To get its new WiFi-only tablet off the ground when it debuts in March, DoCoMo will offer the 10.1-inch dtab at a special rate of ¥9,975 to smartphone users who subscribe to a monthly ¥500 video content service. This special deal will run six months.

With the growth of smartphones, carriers are losing grip of their own sales strategies. The main players are OS providers like Google and Apple. In response, DoCoMo has been strengthening businesses like its shopping site and e-book and video market over its own platform.

By providing a cheap tablet, the carrier aims to increase the customers who use these shopping and content services.

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Murray unaware of boycott talk

AP

MELBOURNE, Australia — Andy Murray says he hasn’t heard of any plans for a boycott of the U.S. Open over an added day without extra compensation.

The tournament is moving to a Monday men’s final.

“I know that the ATP are not particularly happy with the Monday final. I know that’s an issue because however much revenue they make from having an extra day on their tournament hasn’t really reflected in the increase in the prize money,” Murray said Monday after his fourth-round win over Gilles Simon at the Australian Open.

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Join TPP talks by May, Keidanren chief tells LDP

Jiji

Keidanren Chairman Hiromasa Yonekura said Tuesday Japan must join the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations no later than May.

Lobbying effort: Keidanren Chairman Hiromasa Yonekura meets with Liberal Democratic Party executives in Tokyo on Tuesday. KYODO

If substantive TPP talks, currently being held by 11 countries led by the United States, are supposed to end in October, Japan has to join in the next four months, Yonekura told reporters after a meeting between senior officials of the nation’s biggest business group and the Liberal Democratic Party.

Japan needs to express its intention by early February to join the talks, Yonekura told the LDP executives, including Vice President Masahiko Komura and Secretary General Shigeru Ishiba.

Procedures in the U.S. require at least 90 days before Washington will permit a new country to join the negotiations.

Ishiba told reporters that while LDP and Keidanren officials held discussions on the TPP, that “this does not mean a direction has been set.”

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Washington’s tangled foreign policy problems

By JIM HOAGLAND

The Washington Post

STANFORD, California — The desert sands of Mali and Algeria provide an unlikely arena for an existential challenge to the global alliance system the United States has managed since World War II. But the hesitant and timid U.S. and European Union responses to the crisis in northwestern Africa drip like acid on the rock of alliance cohesion.

The Obama administration’s self-described preference to lead from behind in messy conflicts in the Islamic world has much value for war-weary, financially strapped Americans. But great care must be taken with that approach to avoid driving U.S. leadership into a strategic dead end.

After days of very public hesitations by Washington and Brussels to provide even nonlethal help — such as in-air refueling — to France’s reluctant intervention in Mali, the U.S. and the 27-nation European Union committed just four transport aircraft to the effort. That will intensify doubts abroad about the administration’s intentions and effectiveness in getting others to step forward again.

Those doubts, and the turmoil in Mali, are an aftermath of the international intervention in Libya in 2011. Washington sharply curtailed resources and involvement there after helping overthrow Moammar Gadhafi.

Instead of mission creep, the Obama administration pursued mission shrink in a country it had just helped liberate, and inadequate security contributed to the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, last fall.

Now, Tuareg mercenaries who fled Libya with extensive arms after the downfall of their patron threaten to take full control of Mali. The Islamist rebels’ thrust south triggered French President Francois Hollande’s dispatch of warplanes and the Foreign Legion to his country’s former colony — and his appeals for help from allies.

Hollande expected to spend last week swaddled in the glory of celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Elyse Treaty of cooperation between France and Germany. Charles de Gaulle conceived that document as the foundation for France’s exit from its colonial past into a European future built on French-German partnership.

Instead, Hollande grimly dealt like the Lone Ranger with a desperate post-colonial expedition totally at odds with Germany’s hypercaution on foreign military involvement. Growing divergences between Paris and Berlin in economic policies and performance also undercut the joint vision and commitment needed to maintain European unity.

The Obama administration appears to give insufficient weight to the complex interaction of the many moving parts in international relations as it rolls out one tactical response after another on Syria, Iran, and China and now to justified requests for quick help from a European ally willing to lead from the front.

This strategic insouciance lies at the heart of a gathering crisis of alliance management. For what it is worth, I approve of many of the individual decisions and policies of President Barack Obama. Getting others to take on more burden and expense of leadership is far from dumb. Moving with great caution on Syria — ditto.

But I am increasingly worried by the lack of a strategic relationship between the individual tactical decisions, which often seem based largely on Obama’s needs, ambitions and/or prejudices (see “pivot to Asia”).

Worse: The problem may be even larger and more insidious. Interlocking modern revolutions in instantaneous global communications, social media, trade and means of warfare have created a world that increasingly grants neither the time nor the space leaders need to develop and implement coherent strategic options.

That concern was repeatedly voiced in two recent days of private discussions held at the Hoover Institution among some of the leaders who crafted the most durable foreign and national security U.S. policies of the past half-century.

“The world is awash in change,” former secretary of state George Shultz said as he opened those discussions. By the end, it seemed to me that the world may have already been submerged by those changes.

The taking of U.S. and other hostages by Islamic extremists in Algeria in the wake of France’s intervention in Mali underscores how complex and tangled our “foreign” problems have become.

The best chances of countering the atomization of foreign policy begin with a U.S. leadership that enunciates and pursues a clear national purpose uniting American actions abroad. Pursuing liberation in Libya and then standing aside or waffling when NATO allies such as France and Turkey are the targets of hostile actions disrupts badly needed alliance cohesion.

A West African diplomat with whom I discussed U.S., British and French involvement in Libya nearly a year ago put it more succinctly: “We saw what you could do militarily in Libya. But we are not impressed by the after-sales service.”

Jim Hoagland, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is an associate editor, senior foreign correspondent, and columnist for The Washington Post.

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Cavaliers’ Varejao done for season

AP

CLEVELAND — Cleveland Cavaliers center Anderson Varejao will miss the rest of the season because of a blood clot in his lung.

The team said Monday that he is expected to fully recover but will need to take blood thinners for about three months. Varejao has been in the hospital since Thursday and will likely remain there for several more days of treatment.

The 208-cm Brazilian was averaging career highs of 14.1 points and 14.4 rebounds this season. The 30-year-old Varejao missed the final 41 games with a broken wrist last year.

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Bhutan eyes Japanese ‘soba’ skills to keep buckwheat culture alive

Kyodo

AOMORI — A Bhutanese farm official visited Japan last summer to learn about techniques for cultivating and processing buckwheat, a former staple in the tiny South Asian country’s highlands — and the key ingredient in “soba” noodles.

Cutting edge: Gaylong, a Bhutanese farm official, cuts up “soba” noodles in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, in August. KYODO

The Bhutanese government hopes to apply that knowledge toward its efforts to raise production of buckwheat products, including soba, said Gaylong, an Agriculture Ministry official who like others in the country goes by only one name.

“It’s hard to cut,” he said as he struggled to cut the noodles with a knife at a restaurant last August in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, a region known for its soba culture.

In tiny Bhutan, particularly its dry mountainous areas, buckwheat was widely grown and once served as the main staple in regions where rice cultivation was difficult.

Gaylong explained that in his country, buckwheat is roughly grounded and dough is pressed and cut into noodles with a pressing tool instead of knives. The noodles, called “puta,” are usually served with hot chili peppers.

But growing buckwheat has become less popular as people’s diets change. An increasing number of farmers have chosen to cultivate potatoes, which are more profitable, Gaylong said.

To keep the noodles in the mix, Gaylong has been teaching people in the central region of Bumthang how to grow buckwheat for the past several years.

His products have gradually gained acclaim, with pancakes made from local buckwheat even served at the October 2011 wedding ceremony for King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and Queen Jetsun Pema, who visited Japan the following month.

Gaylong said that during his one-week stay in Hachinohe, he picked up a lot of useful tips for making, processing and marketing products in his country.

“I didn’t know that you can freeze the noodle,” he said. “There are many ways to process buckwheat in Japan.”

Soon after returning to Bhutan, Gaylong started developing new buckwheat products — including bread and raw noodles with long shelf lives.

“The domestic market is still small. We want to produce something that foreign tourists will buy,” Gaylong said, adding that he eventually wants Bhutanese farmers to train in Japan.

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Profound impact: Marvin Miller, seen here in his office in 1972, earned great concessions from baseball management during labor negotiations in his years as head of the Major League Baseball Players Association. He died last month at 95. AP

Former players want Miller in Hall

AP

NEW YORK — Baseball players urged that Marvin Miller be put in the Hall of Fame as they spoke Monday night during a memorial for the union leader.

In an auditorium filled with Hall of Famers, dozens of retired and current players, baseball officials, agents and labor lawyers, 13 speakers praised the former baseball union head, who helped players gain free agency in the 1970s and created the path to multimillion-dollar salaries. Miller died in November at 95.

“It is a travesty he is not in the Hall of Fame,” former major league player and manager Buck Martinez said during the two-hour program.

Miller has been turned down five times by various Hall of Fame committees that considered baseball executives.

Former pitcher and author Jim Bouton, who entered the majors in 1962 with the New York Yankees, was critical that Bowie Kuhn, baseball’s commissioner from 1969-84, is in the Hall but Miller has been kept out.

“I think Bowie Kuhn was 0 for 67″ against Miller, Bouton said.

Miller is next eligible to appear on a Hall ballot this December.

Former stars Dave Winfield and Joe Morgan were among those who spoke before a crowd of about 450 at New York University School of Law’s Tishman Auditorium.

Reggie Jackson, Keith Hernandez and MLB executive vice president Rob Manfred were in the audience along with the head of the Japanese baseball players’ association and George Cohen, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Winfield, who used free agency to sign a record-breaking contract after the 1980 season, said Miller taught him life lessons he still thinks of. Winfield addressed the five active players in the audience, who included Andrew Bailey, Craig Breslow and Micah Owings.

“Anything you do in life, know where you’ve come from, where you are and where you’re going,” Winfield said. “Know how you got to where you are today.”

A former economist for the United Steelworkers Union, Miller spent 16½ years as executive director of the Major League Players Association, starting in 1966.

During Miller’s tenure, the average major league salary increased from $19,000 to $241,000.

It was $3.2 million last year.

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