Enclosed is my term paper on postwar Japanese military policy. While considerably more academic and probably less general-interest than my Uyghur piece, it is still somewhat relevant today. This paper mainly sprang out of my frankly flabbergasted disbelief at the kinds of operational restrictions the Japanese government puts on their Self Defense Forces. After reading more on the subject in an effort to understand, I've constructed an argument for why that might be. I lost this paper once when my computer crashed and died, so this version didn't have as much cumulative effort devoted to it as the Uyghur one just on the basis of time constraints; to some extent I think this may have lead me to overstate my case (that of a realist leadership calculating costs and benefits of a particular national strategy), and I don't believe that it alone is the sole explanation by any means. Nonetheless, it's one explanation, and hopefully one that's sufficient for my professor, whose views on the matter I happen to arguing against.

In any case, it's done, and now I can move on to my even more obscure study of the Chinese danwei work units, which I expect to spend the entire weekend frantically trying to finish by Monday!   more »

I have three term papers coming due at the end of the next month and a half or so, all theoretically running at 10-15 pages each but which, depending on my ability to focus, may well end up sprawling past that nominal limit.

For my Islam in South Asia course, I have chosen to focus on Uighur separatism in China's western Xinjiang province. Muslim minority separatist groups in places like Chechnya have in the recent past successfully exploited their identity to appeal to a broader Pan-Islamic community, drawing in material, monetary, and ideological support as well as the occassional corps of foreign volunteers like the Arab Afghans of the 1980s; given the considerable efforts by Beijing to repress Uighur nationalism and the Han colonization campaign in the west, it's important to determine whether those small handfuls of Uighurs you always hear tacked onto the end of the list of Egyptians, Jordanians, and other Middle Eastern and South Asian militants captured or killed in the news reports are signs that Xinjiang might develop into the newest front of radical Islamic revivalism sometime in the near future.

For my China course, I'm planning on writing something on the danwei work unit system, with all the incorporated housing, educational, and social controls that come with employment in a state-owned factory unit; the basic focus of that will be the penetration of the CCP party-state apparatus into Chinese society and asking whether the CCP leadership can continue to effectively rule China without the use of such interventionist state organs to prop up their rule.

And for my Japanese Foreign Policy course, I'm trying to explain why the Self Defense Forces continue to operate under a system of such binding hadome ("brakes"), because frankly it just boggles my mind the kind of restrictions they place on their military forces. Did you know they can't even take part in land mine removal missions? I don't think they have to wait for a Diet resolution to return fire any more, but some of this stuff puts even the American aversion (that keeps repeating itself every other chapter in my American Military Experience course) to funding a standing war-fighting Army during times of peace to shame.

Right now for all this I have... an introduction for one of them and an outline for the other two, so if I'm not blogging much from now till early December, I trust you'll understand why. If I get any good excerpts while writing, I'll be sure to post them here, otherwise I'll put the whole things up when I can finally get them finished.