re: #237 Ben Hur

Japan?

Why on Earth would they do that?

This is a few years old, so I assume its changed already

Japanese diplomats calculate that Japan’s gross domestic product accounts for 14.4 percent of the global economy. Japan pays 19.5 percent of the United Nations budget, or almost $1 billion a year. By contrast, the United States accounts for 30 percent of world gross domestic product, and pays 22 percent.

”Japan cannot just give sweet faces to everybody,” Yukio Okamoto, chairman of the prime minister’s Task Force on Foreign Relations, said in an interview here on Monday. ”We have to question: Why are we the only country in the world with inflated cost on our shoulders?”