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John Longenecker Safer Streets Osaka mayor quake proves need to decentralize Tokyo...
"The March 11 earthquake and nuclear accident that caused some companies to temporarily relocate workers outside Tokyo sparked discussion on the long-term need to move more government and business functions outside the capital. Osaka hotels and leased-office facilities were among the benefactors of the temporary shift to Japan's western and southern regions." according to Bloomberg News.
Independence does seem to be a wide concept, and Japan seems to be no different. You have to be independent of bureaucrats in order to function optimally.
"Osaka's approach was different from New York's in that it was done mainly with the help of citizens groups rather than the police department, which is under the direction of the prefectural government, the mayor said."
The Bloomberg report seems to affirm what our American Militias express, and that is that citizens - often as groups of volunteers who know their territory best - serve the community interest in ways the bureaucracy can never touch. Volunteers are to be praised and supported. Encouraged. Volunteers who feel duty and obligation, not to mention public interest, are at their core the Militia concept.
What is so delightful is the idea that the Japanese are arriving at this concept instinctively.
See other articles at Patriot Post and elsewhere under search term Safer Streets 2011.
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Picture this: A 53-year-old walks off a beach into the frigid surf of Northern California determined to kill himself. While he stands in water up to his neck, risking hypothermia, the local police and fire departments are called.
[ . . .] In October, Pelican Press will publish "Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century" in which a number of scholars edited by Donald Livingston, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, examine the implications of secession, possibly by regional groupings of States, from the present federal government.
