Russia's foreign ministry said Friday that it's lodged a formal protest with the United States over this week's incident in the Sea of Japan, calling it a "provocation designed to disturb the peace".

Russia further said Friday it's military won't hesitate to "respond" the next time the US Navy brazenly violates its maritime borders. During the Tuesday encounter a Russian warship was described as chasing the US destroyer out of the area.

"We warn the US not to repeat the violation. We reserve the right to respond in the future," a foreign ministry statement said.

The incident happened Tuesday and involved a Russian destroyer threatening to ram the USS John S McCain warship which the Kremlin alleged violated sovereign Russian waters by up to 2km:

The department clarified that the US Navy destroyer went 2 km beyond the border line, invading the territorial waters of the Russian Federation. The Russian military warned the Americans that they were ready for a ramming maneuver.

"The Admiral Vinogradov, a large anti-submarine ship of the Pacific Fleet, which is directly tracking the American destroyer, warned the foreign ship through the international communication channel about the inadmissibility of such actions and the possibility of using a ramming maneuver to force the intruder out of the territorial waters," the Defense Ministry said.

After that, the John McCain immediately went into neutral waters: "the American destroyer did not make repeated attempts to enter them."

Watch footage of the rare confrontation in the Sea of Japan below:

After his self-proclaimed victory as the new president-elect of the US, Joe Biden was congratulated by some heads of state and government. In this regard, on Wednesday (November 11), the Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga, telephoned Biden with the intention of congratulating him on his victory and during the conversation they discussed several matters of strategic importance for both nations.

The American Democrat has strongly stated his commitment that the US will support Japan’s claims on the disputed Senkaku Islands. Biden and Suga also agreed to coordinate joint efforts related to several global challenges, such as combating the new coronavirus pandemic and global warming, as well as other environmental issues. However, the most important point is the issue of the islands due to the delicacy of the topic, which involves an old dispute between Japanese and Chinese.

Two weeks ago we detailed the latest flare-up in maritime tensions between Japan and China after Chinese ships intruded into the Japanese-claimed Senkaku Islands area in disputed East China Sea waters, staying for a record amount of time according to Japan's Defense Minister, who previously called the situation "intolerable".

The stakes have now been raised as of early this week given the head of US forces in Japan has said the Pentagon could send American troops to defend the Senkaku Islands from future Chinese aggression.

Host to 31 U.S. military bases, Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, is no stranger to the risks of bearing the burden of the U.S.-Japan alliance. In 1959, the U.S. military accidentally shot a nuclear rocket into a local harbor; six years later, it lost a hydrogen bomb in nearby seas; then in 1969, a leak of nerve agent on the island so shocked the world that President Richard Nixon was forced to renounce his nation’s first-use policy on chemical weapons.

But these incidents pale compared to what Okinawans are facing today: the U.S. military has polluted the drinking water for 450,000 people – a third of the prefecture’s population – in the worst case of environmental contamination in the island’s history.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued his crusade against Beijing on Tuesday in a meeting with representatives from Japan, India, and Australia in Tokyo. Trump administration officials are openly considering formalizing an alliance with the four nations, known as the Quad, to counter China in the Pacific.

Ahead of the meeting, Pompeo delivered a speech directly calling out Beijing, something the representatives of the other countries avoided in their remarks.

“As partners in this Quad, it is more critical now than ever that we collaborate to protect our people and partners from the CCP’s [Beijing’s] exploitation, corruption and coercion,” Pompeo said. “We see it in the South and East China Seas, the Mekong, the Himalayas, the Taiwan Strait.”

Trump Administration officials have been saying this for weeks, but on Friday reiterated their intentions to try to enforce a UN Security Council resolution that includes broad sanctions against Iran. Officials say they expect every nation to comply.

The glaring problem with this is that the resolution doesn’t exist, at least not as an active resolution the US wants. The P5+1 nuclear deal gave the US the authority to reimpose sanctions on Iran, but the US had withdrawn from that pact years ago. Though the Trump Administration argued that didn’t matter, the UN has virtually unanimously rejected their interpretation, and rejected the UN Security Council resolution. The US believes the resolution becomes active Sunday, but the reality is it just doesn’t exist legally.

North Korea’s economic plight in the wake of the new coronavirus pandemic and natural disasters may give Japan’s next prime minister a chance to meet with the nuclear-armed country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, foreign affairs experts say.

As the global virus outbreak has stifled North Korea’s trade with its major economic ally of China and massive flooding triggered by powerful typhoons has devastated the agricultural sector, Kim could extend an olive branch to Japan to receive aid to rebuild the stagnant economy.

Outgoing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has failed to resolve the issue of North Korea’s abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s, but his successor, Yoshihide Suga, might push forward negotiations on it in a better way than his predecessor has done.

Outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has taken the Japanese defenses policy away from its post-war pacifism to a growing military with an increasingly loose sense of self-defense. A week before stepping down, he’s talking taking it a step farther.

Abe now says he wants Japan to have “first-strike” capabilities to attack enemy bases around the area. Abe argued that would increase deterrence, meaning this is the ultimate extension of “self-defense,” where the nation would be flagrantly attacking other countries and claiming defense.

Abe suggested intercepting missiles was no longer sufficient, and called for a new revised defense policy. With Japan’s two main rivals being China and North Korea, any Japanese first strikes would likely start a major war.

Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe bowed in apology today as he announced his resignation on health grounds after a record eight years in power.

Abe, 65, revealed he had suffered a relapse of a chronic bowel condition - saying he had 'lost a lot of my energy and strength' and would need regular medical treatment that would prevent him from tackling the coronavirus crisis.

'I have been struggling with my illness and I have to get treatment. Poor health should not lead to wrong political decisions,' he told a press conference, offering his 'sincere apology' for abandoning ship during the pandemic.

Japan has scrapped the deployment of a multi-billion-dollar anti-missile system, the government confirmed Thursday, days after saying the program had been suspended.

Interceptors for the Aegis Ashore system were to be placed in two regions under the costly and controversial program.

But the government reversed course under pressure from local residents concerned about the risks posed by a missile defense system in their backyard.

Japan's asteroid-sampling mission is officially clear to return its precious cargo to Australia in December, according to statements from both countries' governments.

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft is trekking back to Earth with a sample capsule full of material snagged from a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which runs the mission, has long planned to deposit that capsule in the vast desert of Australia, but the new announcement marks that country's official approval of the plan.

In an implicit message to China, the Japanese and U.S. militaries teamed up this week for a number of joint exercises involving warships, heavy bombers, advanced fighter jets and an aircraft carrier in the waters and airspace near Japan.

The scale and tempo of the multiple joint exercises was noticeably large and came as Sino-U.S. tensions continued to spiral over security, economic and human rights concerns.

The United States and Japan are to jointly build a network of small satellites capable of detecting new missiles, as Tokyo warns of increasing threats from North Korea.

The purpose of the satellites would be to complement the currently existing system of missile defense, which includes Japan's PAC-3 missile interceptors, the Nikkei reported Wednesday.

A new defense white paper published by the Japanese Ministry of National Defense takes aim at Chinese expansionism and North Korean weapons tests, claiming they pose major threats to Tokyo. The paper claims Beijing is taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to further its regional ambitions.

The annual white paper, which the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe approved on Tuesday, criticizes Beijing for “relentlessly” challenging Tokyo’s control over the disputed Senkaku Islands, which China claims are its own and calls the Diaoyu Islands.

“Despite protests by our country, Chinese official ships repeatedly intruded into our territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands,” the paper said, according to Kyodo News Agency.

Joint exercises by the Indian and Japanese navies in the Indian Ocean at the weekend suggest the two countries are drawing closer to face what they perceive as a common threat from China, analysts say.

While joint military exercises involving the two countries are not uncommon, the latest activity comes amid tensions both are experiencing with Beijing.
Indian and Chinese troops remain locked in a face-off along the disputed Himalayan border where 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a recent clash with their Chinese counterparts, while Japan and China are locked in a war of words over a Japanese move to change the administrative status of the Senkaku Islands, which China claims and refers to as the Diaoyu Islands.

okyo has aborted plans to go ahead with the Aegis Ashore missile defense sites, having deemed them both unsafe and too costly. Its alternative to the defensive option is quite the opposite: striking enemy firing positions first.
Following “deliberations” at Japan’s National Security Council, the government decided “to cancel the [Aegis] deployment in the Yamaguchi and Akita prefectures,” Defense Minister Taro Kono told ruling Liberal Democratic Party members on Thursday.

He said it had borne in mind the ballooning costs of the $4.1 billion contract signed with the US to build, supply, and maintain the two Aegis Ashore sites during their 30-year lifespan. The central government also seems to have listened to the views of local politicians and residents in Akita and Yamaguchi, who feared the Aegis launch sites would make their neighborhoods the target of a retaliatory strike in an all-out conflict.

Japan is about to hit Covid Cover Uppers China with a massive manufacturing exodus following the Coronavirus pandemic that has brought the world to its knees.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has proposed “building an economy that is less dependent on one country, China, so that the nation can better avoid supply chain disruptions.” reports Nikkei Asia Review.

Hospitals in Japan are increasingly turning away sick people as the country struggles with surging coronavirus infections and its emergency medical system collapses.

In one recent case, an ambulance carrying a man with a fever and difficulty breathing was rejected by 80 hospitals and forced to search for hours for a hospital in downtown Tokyo that would treat him. Another feverish man finally reached a hospital after paramedics unsuccessfully contacted 40 clinics.

The Japanese Association for Acute Medicine and the Japanese Society for Emergency Medicine say many hospital emergency rooms are refusing to treat people including those suffering strokes, heart attacks and external injuries.

Long gone are the days when central banks pretended they aren't in the business of propping up the stock market.

A week after we reported that the BOJ had bought a record amount of ETFs in a desperate attempt to stabilize its illiquid stock market, where the central bank now owns over 73% of all ETFs, Kuroda bought a whopping 121.6BN yen of ETFs on Tuesday, the most on record, and just one day after the BOJ doubled the upper limit of ETFs it can purchase to 12 trillion yen, without however answering where it will get all those ETFs from.

The purchases in its core ETF program jumped by 20% to 120.4BN yen from the previous record of 100.2BN yen; while ETFs bought in the BOJ's "physical and human capital" program - whereby the BOJ directly admits it is rewarding companies for pursuing policies that it finds appealing such as higher jobs - remain at 1.2b yen. Finally, the BOJ's J-REIT purchases rose to 1.5BN yen from 1.2BN yen.

Japan's Olympic torch relay may be scaled back because of the coronavirus outbreak, organisers admitted today amid growing doubts about the Games.

The symbolic torch is due to arrive in Japan next month before it is taken on a 121-day journey past some of the country's most famous landmarks.

Chief executive Toshiro Muto says the relay will go ahead but admitted that 'we'd like to think about how to implement it while preventing the spread of infection, including scaling down'.

With half of China's population facing some level of travel restriction due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Politburo's attempt to get the country back to work has been slow going and fraught with setbacks.

Much of the coverage so far has lingered on Apple's supply woes and warnings by companies as diverse as automakers and textiles firms about supply chain disruptions tied to factory closures in China. But China isn't the only country facing serious economic blowback from the outbreak.

The Japanese professor Kentaro Iwata, an epidemiologist at the University Hospital of Kobe University, spent a day at the Diamond Princess as a volunteer. In multiple YouTube videos, he strongly criticized government policy.

“The cruise ship was completely inadequate in terms of controlling infections,” he said in one of them.

“There was not a single infection control professional on the ship, nor anyone professionally involved in infection prevention. The bureaucrats were in charge of everything.”

“There is no clear distinction between the green (healthy) zones and the red (potentially infected) zones. And the staff is running back and forth,” Iwata reported.

Japanese health authorities are beginning the process of offloading the remaining 2,000+ passengers and crew aboard the 'Diamond Princess', a ship that has been under quarantine for 14 days.

The offloading will take place in phases over three days, finally wrapping up on Friday. The first 500 people are set to leave at around 10:30 am Tokyo time on Wednesday. There will be no preference given to different nationalities, according to Japan's Ministry of Health.

Many who depart will be subject to another 14 days of quarantine, including any Americans who elected to stay on the ship instead of traveling back to the US on the evac flight. Roughly 40 Americans were also excluded from that flight because they were being treated for the virus in a Japanese hospital.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday briefed Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Tokyo’s plan to send naval forces to the Middle East to protect Japanese vessels, a Japanese official said, Reuters reports.

Rouhani said in response that he understood Japan’s intention to contribute to navigational safety, the official told a media briefing after the two leaders met in Tokyo.

“I’m highly concerned about tensions running high in the Middle East,” Abe told Rouhani at the start of the meeting.

Friction between Tehran and Washington has increased since last year when US President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with six nations and re-imposed sanctions on the country, crippling its economy.

The Israeli government has increased discretionary spending on settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory by 50 per cent over the last two years, reported the Jerusalem Post.

According to data published by settlement watchdog Peace Now, so-called “discretionary spending” “is expenditure by various ministries outside the general budget, including from the Interior, Housing, Education, and Energy and Water ministries, as well as the National Roads Authority”.

These funds are directed towards the construction of settlement housing units, as well as for roads inside the settlements, “buildings for educational, social and religious purposes, commercial centres and industrial parks”, the report added.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
The Israeli government is aiming to increase the volume of Israel’s defence exports, reported Globes, which has revealed the main points of the plan for the first time.

The project, being overseen by the Defence Ministry’s International Defence Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) led by Brigadier General (Res.) Yair Kulas, will begin to be rolled out in early 2020.

According to Globes, the plan is based on “focused seminars for senior commanders in foreign armies”, Israeli military “assistance for promoting sales of Israeli weapons”, and “subsidising small and medium-sized defence companies seeking to sell arms around the world”.

Speaking this week, Kulas said that SIBAT favours a major expansion of agreements between countries, resulting in significant deals for the large defence companies, especially Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.

Ever since the new round of 'tanker wars' began in Strait of Hormuz in mid-June with a mysterious mine attack on multiple tankers, one involving a Japanese-owned ship, Tokyo has reportedly mulled sending a Japanese defense force to the area to help protect vital shipping lanes.

In a rare move, the pacifist nation appears ready to pull the trigger, as FT reports, citing chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, who indicated that "the government was planning to deploy forces in a region where a Japanese tanker, the Kokuka Courageous, was recently attacked with a limpet mine."

This is believed to be the earliest photograph from the ground, 15 minutes after the plutonium bomb detonated over Nagasaki. The destruction was so incredible that there is no count on how many people died that day. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will forever live in the pages of history as two of the most significant turning points in modern history, initiating the world into the nuclear age.

MacArthur “…no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”

“Albert Einstein…President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war before Russia could participate.”

On this day in 1945, the US military under the direction of President Truman dropped a nuclear bomb on a civilian target killing over 80,000 people instantly.

Was the attack on Hiroshima a military necessity?

No and here’s why.

Earlier, Tokyo lodged a protest over Russian military drills in the southern Kuril Islands, saying the exercises ran "counter to our position on these islands."

The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned Japanese Ambassador Toyohisa Kozuki on Tuesday, drawing attention to Japan's 'unacceptable' interference in Russia's internal affairs through its earlier protest to Russia over its activities in the southern Kuril Islands.

"The Russian side emphasised that Tokyo's comments regarding the visits of Russian officials to this part of the Sakhalin region, as well as various activitis carried out there, including of a socio-economic and military nature, border on an attempt to interfere in Russia's internal affairs," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The epicentre of the earthquake was located off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture at a depth of 50 kilometres.

A 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit north-eastern Japan at around 19:23 local time on Sunday, 4 August, according to the national meteorological service.

Japan’s cabinet voted to remove South Korea from its 'whitelist' of preferred trading partners, accusing Seoul of failing to adequately protect dual use materials, while alluding to other influences.

Seoul claims that Tokyo’s move responds to recent court decisions awarding damages to South Korean forced laborers of colonial Japanese corporations. Civil leaders calling for a boycott of Japanese goods and visits rallied outside the Japanese embassy Friday. South Korean President Moon Jae-in addressed the nation in a live televised broadcast.

The South Korean president called for Japan to reverse policy and for talks, also threatening to place restrictions on trade with Japan, and withdraw from an intelligence sharing agreement.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is reportedly seeking up to a fivefold increase in Japan’s spending on American military forces deployed to the Asian country.

In talks with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono and Shotaro Yachi, the head of the National Security Council secretariat, last week US National Security Adviser John Bolton raised the possibility of the fivefold increase in Japan’s spending on US military, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported on Wednesday, quoting a US government source.

Trump has long complained that Japan was not contributing enough to its defense and that the American military was shouldering an unfair burden. He has repeatedly criticized a decades-old military treaty with Japan as “unfair.”

Japan says it is not weighing sending military forces for a US-proposed maritime coalition in a purported mission of protecting maritime shipping lanes in the Middle East.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Tuesday that there was no change in the country’s stance previously stated by Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya.

It was “as Minister Iwaya said,” noted the Japanese top government spokesman.

A man screaming “You die!” burst into an animation studio in Kyoto, doused it with a flammable liquid and set it on fire Thursday, killing 33 people in an attack that shocked the country and brought an outpouring of grief from anime fans.

Thirty-six others were injured, some of them critically, in a blaze that sent people scrambling up the stairs toward the roof in a desperate — and futile — attempt to escape what proved to be Japan’s deadliest fire in nearly two decades. Others emerged bleeding, blackened and barefoot.

The suspect, identified only a 41-year-old man who did not work for the studio, was injured and taken to a hospital. Police gave no details on the motive, but a witness told Japanese TV that the attacker angrily complained that something of his had been stolen, possibly by the company.

Was President Harry Truman “a murderer,” as the renowned British analytic philosopher Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe once charged? Were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki indeed a war crime and a crime against humanity, as she and other academic luminaries have publicly claimed? A Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Oxford and Cambridge, who was one of the 20th century’s most gifted philosophers and recognizably the greatest woman philosopher in history, Dr. Anscombe openly called President Truman a “war criminal” for his decision to have the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leveled by atomic bombs in August 1945 (Rachels & Rachels 127). According to another academic critic, the late American historian Howard Zinn, at least 140,000 Japanese civilians were “turned into powder and ash” in Hiroshima.

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 made a carefully choreographed second touchdown on an asteroid called Ryugu last night (July 10) — and the photos are incredible.

The images beamed back to Earth show the perspective of two different cameras on board the spacecraft: the main navigation camera and a publicly funded camera pointed past the sampling mechanism.

Photos from the first camera show views of Ryugu's surface at touchdown; the second shows the nearby rock before and after the sampling itself.

Amid rising tensions with Iran, Trump has warned that if any country attacked Japan, he would fight “World War 3”. Speaking to Fox News’ Business Network, Trump spoke of the bilateral trade deals of the G20 summit. During his phone interview, Trump said: “If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War 3 with our lives and with our treasure.

A 6.5-magnitude earthquake has occurred in the Sea of Japan. The powerful jolt triggered a tsunami warning. The wave is expected to reach a height of around 0.2 to 1 meter, Japan’s meteorological agency says.

The quake occurred off the west coast of the largest Japanese island, Honshu. According to preliminary reports, the epicenter was just 5km below the ground while its strength measured 6.5 magnitude.

Japan’s meteorological society reevaluated the quake, stating it was actually 6.8 magnitude-strong, while its epicenter was located at a depth of some 10km.

The Japanese government has been requesting the United States for concrete evidence to back its assertion that Iran is to blame for the attacks on two tankers near the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, government sources said Sunday.

The request came after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a statement hours after the attacks blaming Iran but without offering proof. The Department of Defense later released a video allegedly showing an Iranian patrol boat removing an unexploded mine attached to the side of the Japanese-operated tanker Kokuka Courageous.

But Japanese government officials remain unconvinced, the sources said. "The U.S. explanation has not helped us go beyond speculation," said one senior government official.

The Japanese government has been requesting the United States for concrete evidence to back its assertion that Iran is to blame for the attacks on two tankers near the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, government sources said Sunday.

The request came after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a statement hours after the attacks blaming Iran but without offering proof. The Department of Defense later released a video allegedly showing an Iranian patrol boat removing an unexploded mine attached to the side of the Japanese-operated tanker Kokuka Courageous.

But Japanese government officials remain unconvinced, the sources said. "The U.S. explanation has not helped us go beyond speculation," said one senior government official.

Japan has been seeking more concrete evidence through various channels, including Foreign Minister Taro Kono who is likely to have made the request during a call with his counterpart on Friday, the sources said.

SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

Just after his trip to Tehran where he met with Iran's president Rouhani as well as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during which a Japanese owned tanker was attacked in the nearby Gulf of Oman on Thursday along with another international vessel, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the suspected attack in official statements.

Speaking to reporters Friday he said: “Japan adamantly condemns the act that threatened a Japanese ship, no matter who attacked,” and further urged “all related countries” to avoid any "accidental confrontation" or an escalation of tensions.

The Trump ally also spoke to the US president by phone on Friday, reportedly briefing him on his visit to Iran, Abe confirmed in his remarks, though without detailing what he conveyed to the White House. Trump had previously said during a Fox & Friends telephone interview that "it’s probably got essentially Iran written all over it."

For a moment on Thursday, it appeared that the US Navy had produced the 'smoking gun' to which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had alluded during his statement from earlier in the day: CENTCOM footage which the Navy said purported to show Iran's IRGC 'caught in the act' of trying to remove an unexploded mine from the Kokuka Courageous, one of the two tankers damaged in Thursday's attacks.

CENTCOM said the video it released showed the IRGC removing an unexploded limpet mine from the side of one of the tankers, suggesting Tehran had sought to remove evidence from the scene.

After the video's release, Iran continued to deny any involvement in the attacks. And perhaps now we know why.

Because in comments that cast the entire narrative promulgated by the US in doubt, Yutaka Katada, the president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the Kokuka Courageous, said Friday that he doesn't completely believe Washington's version of events.

With the words "Gulf of Tonkin" trending on Twitter this morning at a moment that a senior American defense official told CBS News that "it's highly likely Iran caused these attacks," it appears the general public is not even close to buying the claim that Iran attacked two tankers near the strategic Strait of Hormuz this morning.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javid Zarif pointed out a crucial obvious factor not likely to make it across the US mainstream airwaves or headlines:

"Suspicious doesn't begin to describe what likely transpired this morning," he said.

No Japan was not acting as a lap dog for the US nor were they sent to negotiate with Iran. It was Japan who invited Iran to meet with them BEFORE Trump came to Japan. Trump’s visit had also been established well in advance to coincide with the crowning of the new Japanese Emperor.

If you said the nation in question is China, and the year is 2019, you are wrong (well, partially), because the events described above represent Ronald Reagan's bilateral trade dispute with Japan in the early 1980s.

The fact that the biggest geopolitical conflict of modern times is running off a 35-year-old script This has profound implications for not only how Trump's own trade war with the world's second most powerful nation will conclude, but also for the dollar, because it was against the above-described backdrop that authorities signed the historic "Plaza Accord" in 1985, and according to Goldman, a similar outcome may be coming, one which would result in "choppy dollar downside in the months ahead."

White House adviser Kushner, the chief architect of the ‘deal of the century,’ embarks on a tour in the region in order to rally support for a US-engineered conference in Bahrain next month, where the initial stage of the peace proposal is said to be unveiled

Japan plans to buy 105 US-made stealth warplanes, Donald Trump said on Monday, which the US President said would give Tokyo the largest F35 fleet of any US ally.

Trump, in Tokyo for a state visit, said Japan "has just announced its intent to purchase 105 brand new F35 stealth aircraft. Stealth, because, the fact is you can't see them."

"This purchase would give Japan the largest F35 fleet of any US ally," added the president.

Trump appeared to be referencing a deal first announced by the F35's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, in December.

Japan's government announced in its latest defence budget in December plans to buy 105 units of the F35A, which performs conventional take-off and landings.

President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday he doesn't view North Korea's short range missile tests as disturbing, a view deeply at odds with his Japanese hosts and in conflict with statements made a day earlier by his national security adviser.

"North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me," Trump wrote on Twitter.
This is a major blow ahead of his meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which are set to begin in a few hours.

Donald Trump kicked off his state visit to Japan on Saturday by urging Japanese business leaders to increase investment in the US – but he also complained about his own central bank and knocked his hosts for having a “substantial edge” on trade, which he said negotiators were trying to even out.

Four people are missing after two freight ships collided in the Pacific Ocean off the east coast of Japan on Sunday morning, local media reported.

According to Japanese Kyodo news outlet, the incident occurred at 2:00 a.m. local time (17:00 GMT), about 7 miles from Japan's easternmost city of Inubosaki.

As a result of the collision, one of the ships sunk. At the time of the incident, there were five crew members on the ship that sunk, four of which have gone missing.

The likelihood of a U.S. war with Iran is increasing, despite alternately isolationist and provocative messages coming from Trump administration officials.

The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln is now sitting off the coast of Iran, and the U.S. has asked its non-emergency personnel to leave nearby Iraq. Meanwhile, there is a debate about images of what the New York Times described as “missiles on small boats in the Persian Gulf that were put on board by Iranian paramilitary forces.” Whether those missiles photographed were offensive or defensive is important in determining whether the U.S. is misrepresenting Iran’s actions as threatening.

The US’ continuous military buildup in Japan, namely deployment of missile defense systems, is a direct threat to Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after meeting his Japanese counterpart Taro Kono.

“We've yet again drew attention to certain actions of Washington, including the deployment of the global missile defense systems’ elements to Japan, bolstering of its military presence in the region and activities in the arms control sphere, where the US is demolishing all the existing agreements. We perceive such actions as a threat for our country,” Lavrov said on Friday.

The US Navy has ended operations assisting Japan's search for a stealth fighter jet that crashed in the Pacific, after some of its debris was recovered.

"A US Navy salvage team aboard a contracted vessel completed its mission supporting search and recovery operations with the Japan Self-Defense Forces," the US 7th Fleet said in a statement on Wednesday.

Japan will continue searching for the remains of the plane, a defence spokesman said.

In the United States, many legislators and public health officials are busy trying to make vaccines de facto compulsory—either by removing parental/personal choice given by existing vaccine exemptions or by imposing undue quarantines and fines on those who do not comply with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) vaccine edicts. Officials in California are seeking to override medical opinion about fitness for vaccination, while those in New York are mandating the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for 6-12-month-old infants for whom its safety and effectiveness “have not been established.”

Emperor Akihito abdicated the Japanese throne Tuesday, becoming the country's first ruler in 200 years to step down from the role.

Akihito, 85, spent Tuesday morning holding traditional private ceremonies at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in which he symbolically announced his intention to abdicate to Amaterasu, the sun goddess.

That was followed by a more formal state occasion attended where he gave a televised speech, thanking people for their support during his 30-year reign, before ending with a solemn bow.

Akihito's rule officially ends at midnight when his eldest son, Crown Prince Naruhito, will ascend to the Chrysanthemum Throne. The process will be officially recognised with a ceremony on Wednesday morning.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its East Asian partners consider adding Chinese and Japanese currencies to their $240 billion currency swap safety net, business journal Nikkei Asian Review reported.

It said the 10 members of the association along with China, Japan and South Korea will discuss the proposed change to the so-called Chiang Mai Initiative at a May 2 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Fiji.

As politicians in the United States do their best to remove Americans’ freedom of choice when it comes to vaccines, Japan has medical freedom. There are no vaccine mandates in Japan and their children are growing up healthier than ours.

(Article by Mac Slavo republished from SHTFPlan.com)

Officials in California are desperately trying to take away the rights of their residents by seeking to override medical opinion about whether or not a person is fit for vaccination, while politicians in New York are mandating the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for 6-12-month-old infants even though that vaccine’s safety and effectiveness “has not been established.” (Link to Merck’s website – the creator of the MMR vaccine,) By Merck’s own admission, this vaccine is probably not safe, especially for infants.

Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya grounded the Air Self-Defense Force’s entire fleet of F-35As as a precaution after the aircraft went missing at about 7:30pm local time, half an hour after taking off. At the same time the fighter disappeared from the radar screens, ground control also lost all radio contact with it.

It was reportedly the first F-35A to be built at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries facility in Nagoya. In December, Japan announced plans to place an order for 105 more F-35s from the US on top of the 42 it had already bought – a deal which would make Japan the largest international buyer of the troubled plane.

Last August, the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO) said that senior officials developing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for the US armed forces — the most expensive military program of all time — are covering up dangerous flaws in the plane instead of fixing them. In particular, the Center for Defense Information at POGO obtained a document showing how F-35 officials were re-categorizing rather than fixing major design flaws to be able to claim they had completed the program’s development phase without having to pay overruns for badly needed fixes.

Moreover, a report on the F-35 last year from the US Government Accountability Office showed that the aircraft still had 111 Category One deficiencies that may cause death, severe injury, loss or major damage and that critically restricted the combat readiness capabilities of armed forces using the aircraft, POGO noted.

The UK Ministry of Defence is collaborating with US authorities as they look to review the status of 17 F-35B fighter jets - the probe was initiated after a Japanese F-35 jet crashed on Tuesday in the Pacific Ocean, according to a ministry spokesperson.

"Safety is of the utmost importance and very closely managed on the F-35 programme. We will continue to review the situation as further information becomes available," the UK Ministry of Defence spokesperson noted.

The British Ministry of Defence has shown its concern as it has plans to purchase a total of 138 F-35 fighter jets developed by Lockheed Martin, according to Reuters. In November last year, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson announced that the UK was doubling its fleet of F-35 fighters by ordering 17 more jets.

A scandal over improper maintenance work at jet-engine maker IHI Corp. deepened as the company said it has found over 7,000 cases of flawed engine inspections in the process of making engine parts during the two years through January.

The latest findings, which also affect parts supplied to Self-Defense Forces aircraft, raised the tally of improper inspections by the Tokyo-based company to over 13,000. IHI said Monday it has found no safety problems due to the improper checks.

IHI, a supplier of engines to Boeing Co. and Airbus S.A.S., is among a slew of Japanese manufacturers recently embroiled in scandals over improper quality controls on their products, including Nissan Motor Co. and Kobe Steel Ltd.