Sunday, July 15, 2012

All Hail Michael Cucek and Jun Okumura!

Evening all!

For those that follow this blog semi-regularly, thought I would chime in quickly to update you on my reading activity this week.

As some of you may know, I am an avid fan of Michael Cucek's famous blog on Japanese politics, "Shisaku" (no joke - I have spent Friday nights reading his stuff.  Maybe not the whole Friday night, but at least enough of the night for it to be downright strange.)  Until recently, I was not familiar with a similar blog written by one of Cucek's friends, Jun Okumura.  Okumura is a former MITI/METI bureaucrat and a Counselor at the Eurasia Group, and his commentary is equally informative, hilarious, snarky, and apt.

So, where do they come in?  For the past few days, I have been procrastinating on a review I need to do for a stupendously boring book about SNTV election systems in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.  (I'm not kidding.  You will deed me the naming rights to your first-born child in gratitude for having only to read my sort-of-boring review and not the god-this-is-really-boring-book).  To escape the clutches of the dreaded SNTV system, I have been going through and reading all of the old posts by these eminent individuals, because I realized that I could stand to learn so much from their older commentary since 2004 or so.  I only started reading Cucek in 2011, and fairly loosely at the beginning, so there's a lot of ground to be gained here.

So anyway, that's what I'm up to!  I will be sure to comment briefly on my conclusions from the old Cucek/Okumura posts.  And maybe I will gather myself to finish that review...soon...

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