I don’t always agree with Tom Plate’s articles about East Asia, but his column that appears in the Japan Times today is an exception that contains a lot of common sense. Plate discusses efforts in Asia to deprive Japan of a seat in the UN Security Council, and says this would harm Asia more than it would harm Japan. He also notes:

A main argument against the integration of Japan — to focus on that one issue — into the council core seems more emotional than analytic, and in effect goes like this: Having committed atrocities of the unimaginable kind more than a half century ago, the newer generations of Japanese should be denied what makes eminent sense today because of what made no sense back then: Japanese savagery against its Asian neighbors.

There are the usual oddities one gets from Plate. For one, he seems to think Japanese have territorial ambitions instead of ongoing territorial disputes. He also thinks that backing Japan into a corner would make it come out fighting and create exactly what the Asians are complaining about–a risible idea for anyone who’s spent significant time in the country. Despite these quibbles, the piece is worth reading.