In the summer of 1999, during my first-ever visit to the North Coast of far-northern California in the United States, her name was still fresh on people’s lips and her memory alive and well.

Judi Bari had passed away two years before, but the local people still seemed to be speaking and writing about her with a sense of reverence, respect, humanness and humor — in the way that you would go on talking about a dear friend or family member who had died in the present tense, as if they were still alive. I didn’t know a thing about the well-known environmental activist Judi Bari, but I was soon to find out that summer in California.

Back in 1989, a provocative book titled ‘No’ to Ieru Nihon was co-published by Shintaro Ishihara, then the minister of transport in Japan and a rabid right-wing nationalist. The book’s English-language translation, The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals caused a big stir for its bluntness at the height of U.S.-Japan trade and economic friction.

Ishihara asserted in the book that it was time for Japan to stop being America’s “yes-man” (or “mistress,” as he sometimes put it) in economic, political and military matters, and for Japan to chart its own course in the coming 21st century. Despite his rhetoric, which often bordered on the extreme, Ishihara had some valid points. He was both adored and despised at home by the Japanese public.