Happy New Year.
This year corresponds to Bingwu (Hinoe-Uma) in the Chinese sexagenary cycle—the 60 combinations of the Ten Heavenly Stems and the Twelve Earthly Branches.
The sexagenary cycle originated in China and was later adopted and used in Japan as part of its calendrical and folk traditions.
In Japan, an unfounded superstition sixty years ago in 1966 even led to a sharp drop in births; however, the underlying traditional reading is that both bing and wu belong to the “fire” element in the Five Phases, implying that the intensity of fire grows—“a fire strong enough to burn everything down.”
On January 3, the United States invaded Venezuela and detained President Nicolás Maduro.
In Japan, much of the commentary has focused on surface-level narratives such as “a violation of international law” or “a grab for oil.”
Yet, as I argued in my final column last year, a more important point is that the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), released in December, asserted the Western Hemisphere as a U.S.
