The Eye of the beholder: Background notes on the US-Japan military relationship

Abstract

In the last half century, the pivotal steps in American-Japanese relations have been paced off at roughly ten-year intervals. At the Washington Conference of 1921-1922, American and other Western pressure brought about cancellation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and forced Japan to rely upon uncertain international guarantees for its security. The Manchurian Incident of 1931 dispelled the professed hopes of the twenties, and a full decade later Pearl Harbor marked the total bankruptcy of Japan's relationship with the West. At the San Francisco peace conference in 1951, America led forty-eight other nations in restoring Japan's sovereignty, and five hours after the signing of the peace treaty the U.S. summoned forth shades of the old Anglo-Japanese Alliance by signing its own bilateral military pact with Japan. Nine years later, nationalistic resentment against this security arrangement of 1951 erupted in Japan, forcing cancellation of President Eisenhower's proposed visit. Now another decade has passed, and 1970 is clearly destined to mark yet another watershed in the American-Japanese relationship.     

The Gouffre à Bataillons — A French artillery officer at Dienbienphu, 1954

Abstract

If I wake up in the morning with an ache in my left ball I send a couple of rounds through the post just to let them know I'm off for breakfast.     

Inner‐city concentrated poverty and neighborhood distress: 1970 to 1990

Abstract

Tract‐level data from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses of population are used to identify poverty neighborhoods, extreme poverty neighborhoods, distressed neighborhoods, and severely distressed neighborhoods within the nation's 100 largest central cities. Changes in demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of these neighborhoods are documented, including racial/ethnic composition; poverty population concentration; school dropout rates; and rates of joblessness, single‐parent households, and welfare receipt.

Results show that despite some encouraging individual city turnarounds in the Northeast (especially in New York, Newark, and Philadelphia), urban poverty concentration and neighborhood distress worsened nationwide between 1980 and 1990. The greatest deterioration occurred in midwestern cities, particularly in Detroit. Southern cities, whose neighborhoods and cities typically improved during the 1970s, slipped during the 1980s; conditions in western cities also deteriorated. Blacks fared worse than whites and Hispanics during the 1980s in terms of increased concentration of poor in poverty tracts and distressed urban neighborhoods.     

The Society's 2006 tour of Southern India

Global cities are almost by definition somewhat detached from their geographical hinterlands. Cosmopolitan and modern, they are open to external influences from other cultures and from overseas trade. But they are also vulnerable to the rise of nationalism in the country which surrounds them, as is shown by the fate of three famous cities of the Levant, Alexandria, Smyrna and Beirut. They were multicultural trading cities, linking the economies of Europe and Asia, “windows on the world”, in contrast to inland capitals like Cairo Ankara and Damascus. New global cities like London, Hong Kong and Dubai also have hybrid and polyglot inhabitants, like Levantine cities of bygone days. But they will need support if their cosmopolitanism is to prevail over nationalism.