President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un met in Hanoi only to part ways abruptly without producing an agreement. Their failure stems, I argue, not from the difference between Trump's “big deal” and Kim's “small deal,” but from the incompatibility in their conceptions of the future of the Korean peninsula as well as a common lack of a vision for Northeast Asia. In its zeal to compel the North to disarm, the Trump team conditioned its lifting of UN sanctions on the North's disarmament of WMDs, not just nuclear weapons. But the Kim team was so singularly focused on enticing Trump to accept a deal that it put on the table what it thought was a big concession, only to be called upon for more. South Korea now has a critical role to play to bring the two parties together to a broader vision for a denuclearized peninsula that is anchored to a more peaceful Northeast Asia.

After 1973, employers in Japan who had been promising to adopt a weekend system began to withdraw those plans. Thus began a yet-unfinished debate in Japan about how to balance need for employee rest with the demands of employers to increase economic output. The Liberal Democratic Party's current approach to the overwork problem, including its recent labor reforms—which emphasize granting legal flexibility to employees without creating firm regulations to prevent employers from demanding excessive labor—reflects the continued refusal of employers and political leaders to accept the need for employee work-life balance.

In Japan, recent scandals have highlighted severe problems related to government opacity, including tampering of official records about the discounted sale of land to a nationalist school and Defense Ministry officials' lies related to the dispatch of Self Defense Forces to South Sudan. Transparency and accountability are at the heart of any healthy, well-functioning democracy and although the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) might not be perfect, when it is functioning well, it allows the public access to government documents. As such, it functions as one of the pillars of American democracy - however its usage is often overlooked by academics, researchers and journalists writing about Japan and, in particular, Okinawa.