Former German politician Wolfgang Nowak had trudged the waters of both West and East Germany before their unification in 1990. He saw how East Germany, also known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), stalled behind West Germany, but how both states never gave up on unification by signing the Basic Treaty in 1972, which allowed mutual cooperation on business, science, telecommunications and culture during the years that followed.
At nine o’clock on a recent Monday morning, Lu Chen, the slender and polite lead singer of Top Floor Circus, the first rock band to sing in Shanghainese and a man whose transformative stage persona sees him swearing, stripping nearly naked, and engaging in exaggerated comedic role-playing met me in a bookstore at 50 Moganshan Road, in what’s become, in the nearly twenty years
Kishida may follow a common Japanese approach to the Koreas: seek apology and clarity from Pyongyang on the abduction issue while refusing to offer additional apologies to Seoul.