Dude, I'm amazed at how you can keep up with so many things. The Japanese gov. article caught my eye and it will be interesting to see where this leads to. Japan hasn't had a major reform for awhile. As you probably know, they even haven't changed the American written constitution that was made for Japan. Resistent to change...probably. But it looks like people want change now because of how bad things were getting and how they've improved a little bit.

Could anybody imagine selling our postal system to UPS or Fed EX? Also, one thing about Japan's postal system is that they have savings accounts there too. Mainly because Japanese banks are known to be not reliable. Without gov. assistance for banks losing everything, people are afraid to put their money in banks. So they use the gov. owned postal system to save their money. Not sure how it works though.

Dude, thanks for the links. Really interesting post.
 

jon f.- yeah, i think may almost be reading too many newspapers... old journalism major habits die hard.