Earthquakes, and the preparations for them, are metaphors for Japan’s malaise

A CAPRICIOUS, mythical catfish lies beneath the Japanese archipelago. Usually the Shinto god of the earth keeps the brute’s head pinned down with a granite keystone. But when Kashima drops his guard, the thrashings of the grotesque fish convulse the earth.

Japan is extraordinarily prone to earthquakes, accounting for nearly a fifth of the world’s supply of them. No city, not even Los Angeles, surpasses Tokyo for seismic action. With tsunamis and typhoons too, an acceptance of natural disasters is said to be hard-wired into the Japanese psyche. ...

The world’s biggest Muslim-majority democracy prepares to go to the polls again

THERE are myriad reasons why Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (often called SBY), ought to be worried as the days count down to the country’s presidential election on July 8th. Only a quarter of the measures he promised in 2004 to improve the investment climate have been implemented. Desperately needed infrastructure development has been sluggish. Legal and judicial reforms have been patchy. Little progress has been made on improving labour-market regulation. The armed forces are so under-financed that aircraft crashes have become a monthly occurrence.

Meanwhile official poverty and unemployment rates, at 14.2% and 8.2% respectively, are much higher than he promised when he was first elected. Health-service delivery is widely considered woeful. Religious minorities believe they are more fiercely persecuted than five years ago. Then there is the minor matter of the world’s worst recession in decades, which has taken its toll throughout South-East Asia’s export-oriented economies. ...

India hires a famous entrepreneur to shine a light on its invisible masses

FOR Chanda, a middle-aged mother of two, moving to Delhi last year involved a trade-off. It brought her employment on the capital’s roads, for which she earns 2,000 rupees ($41) a month; in her village in Madhya Pradesh (MP) she could find no work at all. But Chanda and her family lost the state benefits—cut-price wheat, rice and cooking-oil—they had been receiving because, though they are still eligible to receive alms, the BPL (“below-poverty line”) card with which she claimed for them in MP is not recognised in Delhi. Nor is her voter-registration card, which allows her to vote only in her native village. Though all-too apparent, squatting under plastic sheeting on a Delhi pavement, she and her children are officially invisible.

Among India’s roughly 100m internal migrants, there are many like them: without documentation to enforce their claims on the state or, alas, to protect themselves from its abuses. India recognises at least 20 proofs of identity, including birth certificates, caste certificates, tax codes, driving-licences and so on, but none universally. Hence a bold scheme to issue a new biometric identity card to the whole 1.2 billion population. It was announced in January, with much focus then on its potential for guarding against illegal immigrants and foreign terrorists, including the Pakistani sort that launched a commando attack on Mumbai in November. But it made bigger headlines on June 25th when Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s biggest computer-services companies, was appointed—and given ministerial status—to run the scheme. ...

The battle over the royal family between government and opposition goes online

ON YOUTUBE, he was “thaiman 8”, a prolific poster of crude videos that mocked Thailand’s royal family. These days Suwicha Thakhor goes by another identity: inmate in Bangkok’s Khlong Prem prison. In April he was sentenced to ten years in jail after pleading guilty to lese majeste, the crime of defaming or threatening the Thai crown. Since 2005 this century-old law has enjoyed a renaissance, netting politicians, scholars, activists and an Australian author. Recently, it seems to have got more coercive.

Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul was arrested in 2008 after a blistering anti-royal public tirade. She went on trial last week and the judge ordered the case to be heard behind closed doors on national-security grounds—a ruling that would conveniently bar the foreign press. Ms Daranee and her lawyer cried foul. An appeal is pending. ...

The prime minister reforms his father’s economic policy

In 1971 Malaysia’s second prime minister, Abdul Razak, began a policy of racial preferences for majority Malays and other “sons of the soil”. The stated goals of the New Economic Policy (NEP) were to cut poverty and redistribute wealth, then largely in the hands of ethnic Chinese and non-Malaysians. On June 30th his son and the current prime minister, Najib Razak, took an axe to some of the privileges laid down by the father. He told foreign investors that Malaysia needed to overhaul its manufacturing-based economy to avoid falling into a “middle-income country trap”. He proposed to reform the requirement that all listed companies must have 30% of their equity in Malay ownership. Limits on foreign stakes in fund management and stockbroking will be relaxed. Red tape will be cut.

For foreign investors, this is all welcome news. It should also help Malaysia’s relations with trading partners such as America and the European Union, which have objected to the race-based rules. But the main audience is Malaysia’s restless voters, who are leaning towards the opposition led by a former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim. Mr Anwar has vowed to dismantle the NEP, which is deeply unpopular among minority Indians and Chinese. Since the main beneficiaries of stock allocations are often cronies of the government, plenty of ordinary Malays are now also smelling a rat. ...

The ruling LDP plays a sloppy endgame

PANIC is palpable among legislators of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Japan is on the verge of an historic change of government. A general election for the Diet (parliament) must be called by mid-September, after which power is expected to pass to the decade-old opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), after more than 50 years of almost uninterrupted LDP rule.

But the ruling party is not going gracefully. A gaggle of younger LDP parliamentarians is agitating to bring forward the selection of party president set for September in a clumsy attempt to replace the prime minister, Taro Aso, before the election. In recent days a few party elders have also called for him to step aside. Talk of ousting Mr Aso makes the LDP look desperate: he would be the fourth prime minister to quit in as many years. ...

Balancing reconciliation with justice may be impossible. A tiny bit of either would be nice

FOR several weeks a neat former schoolteacher has sat in a Phnom Penh dock, detailing before the tribunal how meticulously he used to carry out the orders of his bosses. As a child, he said by way of clarification, he had always been “a well-disciplined boy, who respected the teachers and did good deeds”. This is Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, former commandant of Tuol Sleng, a Khmer Rouge torture-centre and prison, which 14,000 men, women and children entered but only a dozen survived. Duch has admitted blame for the horrors at Tuol Sleng. According to the New York Times, he couldn’t bear to hear the late Pol Pot claim that Tuol Sleng was a fabrication of his enemies. He thus seems certain to be the first person convicted for playing a part in Khmer Rouge atrocities from 1975-79 that killed up to 2m Cambodians.

This is not unqualified good news. Justice comes years too late. The United Nations and Cambodia haggled for a decade just over the details of the court, eventually set up in 2007. The costs have been gargantuan, though, according to its outgoing chief foreign prosecutor this week, it is still “underfunded and under-resourced”. Political meddling is high, and corruption apparently abounds. Some of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders who gave Duch his orders await trial, but they are frail and may not live long. Besides, Cambodia’s strongman leader, Hun Sen, is a former Khmer Rouge himself and may be unwilling to see too much dug up. Duch may be the first to be tried, but also the last. ...

A revolting crime has renewed protests against Indian rule

OUTSIDE Shakeel Ahmed Ahangar’s house in Shopian, an apple-growing hub in the Kashmir valley, mourners gather. Spying a foreign journalist, they yell “Azadi!” (“Freedom!”). The battle-cry of Kashmiri separatists makes an incongruous lament for Mr Ahmed’s pregnant wife and teenage sister, who were raped and murdered on May 29th. Yet it is the inevitable one. Six decades after India secured the richest portion of Kashmir, its Muslim inhabitants miss no chance to tell it to leave.

Month-long protests over the crimes in Shopian stress the truth of this. The local police have been widely blamed for the crimes—and certainly they tried to cover them up. The women went missing while walking home from the family orchard. Their battered corpses turned up the next day, semi-clothed, on a riverbank that Mr Ahmed and his relatives had combed shortly before. Nonetheless, the police said the women had drowned in the knee-deep river. They fired tear-gas at a crowd that disputed this. After Omar Abdullah, chief minister of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, initially endorsed this lie, mass outrage was assured. The protesters are as liable to cry “Azadi!” as “Hang the culprits!”—though the police accused of these crimes, unlike the 600,000-odd Indian army and paramilitary troops in Kashmir, are almost all Kashmiris. ...