Martin Wolff's List: Asia

When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14... Female circumcision in Indonesia is reported to be less extreme than the kind practiced in other parts of the globe — Africa, particularly... According to Lukman Hakim, the Assalaam Foundation's chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.    “One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”

Is America the new Japan? Or more precisely, Japan circa 1990, just as it was staggering into its Lost Decade. As recently as the spring of 2008, the notion that the United States would face a decade or more of Japanese-style economic malaise seemed preposterous. But after the recent financial turmoil and political ineptitude, you could almost argue that America would be fortunate to end up with a downturn akin to Japan’s. That’s because in several key ways, Japan was much better equipped to withstand its financial lashing in the 1990s than Americans are today... America lacks several advantages Japan had as it grappled with the aftermath of its burst bubbles. The most obvious one is that Japan began its Lost Decade as the world’s largest creditor nation, and it still is. By contrast, America is now, as it was then, the world’s biggest debtor nation. Just to make the United States government run we need to borrow $2 billion a day from increasingly nervous lenders overseas, including the Japanese.    For the moment, it is in the best interest of America’s creditors to keep the spigot open, but when and if that changes, watch out.

In 1010 King Ly Thai To picked Thang Long (“Ascending Dragon”), situated within present-day Hanoi, as the capital for a country that had defeated the Tang Dynasty less than a century before, ending a millennium of Chinese rule.

When Mr. Boi began working here in 1975, he found an ecosystem decimated by war. Aerial spraying of defoliants like Agent Orange had destroyed large swaths of forest. Without live roots to anchor the soil, monsoon rains washed away the topsoil and its nutrients, allowing invasive grasses to take over and prevent forest regeneration.