Month: June 2012

Published in the Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2012: Japan's renowned woodblock prints—the ones said to have inspired Western Impressionists such as Claude Monet—are known as ukiyo-e, literally "pictures of the floating world." Ukiyo-e originated in the 17th century in Edo, the ancient name of Tokyo. They depict the most colorful aspects of the city's pleasure quarters—fierce-looking Kabuki actors and half-dressed courtesans, serene teahouses and crowded brothels.

Published in the Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2012: There is no dispute about the existence of the North Korean gulag. Anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can go to Google Earth and zoom in on a string of vast prison camps located in the unforgiving, mountainous center of the country. The U.S. State Department and international human-rights organizations put the number of inmates at about 200,000. As many as one million North Koreans are believed to have perished there. Only three people are known to have escaped.

Published in the Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2012: An important piece of North Korea's system of control over its own people is finally being exposed: China's complicity. On Monday, Seoul raised the issue of Beijing's policy of repatriating North Korean refugees in the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. While it stopped short of mentioning China by name, referring only to "all countries directly concerned," this represents a major loss of face for Beijing.