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Hard Numbers: Foreign travel to Japan surges, Ethiopian diplomat expelled, Safari turns deadly, ABBA’s winning ‘Waterloo’
Lots of foreign traveler are seen at Fushimi Inari-taisha Shrine in Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture on April 20, 2023. The number of tourists coming to Japan is increasing as the pandemic of new coronavirus COVID-19 has calmed down.
89: Japan’s weak yen is leading to a tourism surge, with foreign visitors jumping a whopping 89% in February — to 2.78 million people — compared to a year ago. Hotels, in turn, are fuller, and the day rates for stays are up roughly 25% since last year.
72: Ethiopia's ambassador has 72 hours to leave Somalia amid a spat over Ethiopian plans to build a naval base in the de facto autonomous region of Somaliland. Mogadishu is also closing two Ethiopian consulates and pulling its ambassador from Addis Ababa. Tensions between the two countries boiled over when Ethiopia offered possible recognition of Somaliland as part of the port deal, which Somalia sees as a move to annex part of Somalia to Ethiopia.
1: An 80-year-old American woman died while on a safari in Zambia this past weekend after a bull elephant charged at the vehicle she was in, flipping it. The tour company says the truck was blocked by the terrain and couldn’t get away from the agitated pachyderm. Last month, a similar attack took place in South Africa when a bull elephant lifted a 22-seat safari truck several times before letting it drop. There were no deaths reported in that incident.
50: It’s been 50 years to the day since ABBA won their first Eurovision song contest with “Waterloo.” Semifinal rounds for this year’s contest kick off next month, and, despite the competition's goal of staying apolitical, controversy over Israel's participation is already front and center.Hydraulic excavators scoop the broken rock into 100- or 150-tonne haul trucks at Agnico-Eagle's Meadowbank mine in Nunavut June 28, 2011.
The traditional 25th-anniversary gift is silver, but how about mines full of precious minerals? The vast northern Canadian territory of Nunavut turns 25 on Monday, and for its birthday it’ll also start having more control over decisions about its lands, waters, and reserves of gold, diamonds, iron, cobalt, and rare earth metals.
Background: Nunavut, which makes up about a fifth of Canada’s land mass, was created in 1999 from the eastern part of the Northwest Territories. The split was driven by the Inuit nation’s desire for a culturally grounded government closer to the people and lands it administers.
A January 2024 land transfer agreement gives Nunavut a say over many functions previously managed in Ottawa, putting it on the path to equal footing with the rest of Canada. As the territory’s Premier P.J. Akeeagok says, now “we'll decide our own future.”
The transfer of power from the federal to territorial governments will happen over the next three years.
If geopolitics are on your radar, Nunavut should be too. Nunavut yields minerals that are essential for battery production, which will be a source of increasing global leverage during the energy transition.
The draw of Nunavut’s (literal) goldmine of resources has already caused geopolitical tension. In 2020, Canada blocked a CA$230 million Chinese takeover of a Nunavut gold mine on national security grounds. That dealt an economic blow to the North, but sizzling US-China-Canada tensions surrounding the arrest on a US warrant of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou and the subsequent imprisonment of two Canadians in China likely helped kill the deal. Plus, China’s assertion that it’s already an “important stakeholder in Arctic affairs” with a right to a greater role in the region — even though it is nearly 2,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle — is ringing national security alarm bells.
While the territorial government’s new autonomy over its resources won’t override the federal government’s national security concerns, we’ll be watching as Nunavut balances local economic interests with geopolitical dynamics.
For a more lighthearted geopolitical ‘dispute’ involving Nunavut, check out the 50-year Canada-Denmark “Whiskey War.”Scientists ride their snowmobiles near Kronebreen glacier through the arctic landscape in Norway.
On Thursday, Norway became the chair of the Arctic Council, the leading forum for intergovernmental cooperation in the region. The transition has been muted, but the stakes are high: It’s taking over from none other than Russia.
As the Arctic heats up as a geopolitical theater (China has called it one of the world’s “new strategic frontiers”), managing it well is top of mind for Arctic states like Canada and the US.
What is the Arctic Council? It was created in the 1990s to facilitate cooperation on issues like sustainable development, environmental preservation, and search and rescue, though notably not on security. The council is made up of the eight Arctic nations (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the US), plus reps from the region’s Indigenous Peoples and observer states like China. Leadership rotates every two years, and Russia was halfway through its term when it invaded Ukraine last year.
Until the invasion, the Council was a solid example of post-Cold War cooperation.
Even after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, it remained a unique space for friends and adversaries alike to find common ground.
Not so these days. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the other Arctic nations froze their Council work with Moscow, leaving a third of the body’s 130 projects on hold.
Icing Russia out could compromise the Council’s viability. Over half of the Arctic’s coastline and almost half its population are Russian. Real progress in fighting climate change and managing a growing international interest in the region with only half the picture? Good luck.
Norway gets that. “Probably, the most important outcome of our time as chair will be that we make sure that the Arctic Council survives," Norway’s Senior Arctic Official Morten Høglund said.
Failure to advance a meaningful agenda for circumpolar affairs and sustain the council’s viability “would be a major blow to multilateral efforts to grapple with issues like climate change, which has an outsized impact on Indigenous peoples in the fast-warming Arctic region,” says Eurasia Group senior analyst Graeme Thompson.
Could Norway invite Russia back into the fold? Høglund has pledged to restart communication, and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre recently said that “there may come a time to move forward again. And I would warn against … cutting Russia out of the map as if it is no longer there. It is.”
And don’t forget about China. Beijing says it hopes Norway can restore the council’s cooperative work and is vowing to “play a constructive role.”
As it took the helm on Thursday, Norway offered to host a council meeting in 2025. All members would be invited, which means Russia might soon come in from the cold.