Ken Watanabe is back from a year of self-imposed retirement after his acclaimed roles in Last Samurai and Letters from Iwo Jima. He talks about his new movie project, his life out of the limelight and the dangers of Asian stereotypes.

Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced an increase in the number of single parent families due to a significant rise in the divorce rate. In response to this trend, the Japanese government introduced welfare reforms in 2002, which aimed to limit welfare expenditures for single mothers and strengthen mothers' self-sufficiency through work. Becoming self-sufficient through work, however, is not just a matter of will and effort. As I will show in this paper, a single mother's ability to find employment is strongly influenced by her educational and class background, an issue which until recently has received comparatively little attention. In what follows, I examine single motherhood in Japan from the perspective of social class. Poverty and social class are rarely discussed in studies of Japanese society, in part because Japan is widely considered to be a quite affluent and egalitarian society. However, social class, which is chiefly explored through educational background in this paper, is an important factor that affects the living conditions of single mothers in contemporary Japan.

Declarations made before and immediately following the cessation of the Pacific War pledged the United States mission of the occupation of Japan, after disarming the erstwhile enemy of its military capacity and purging those responsible for the war, to be the introduction of democracy. The same Potsdam Declaration that demanded Japan's “unconditional surrender” appended the notion that through occupation the democratic ideals of “[f]reedom of speech, of religion and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.” This article considers the application of these principles to Japan's minorities. These peoples not only were denied political consideration as “Japanese” but also faced severe discrimination and at times non-recognition during the postwar period. In particular, given its size, its organization, and historical complications, this article examines the plight of Japan's Korean population.

“I'm over by the gym,” my friend Kinjo Minoru told me on his cell phone. I'd been standing at the entrance to Ginowan Seashore Park, site of the “Okinawa Citizens' Protest Demanding Cancellation of Textbook Revisions.” The crowd was so big I got tired of looking for him. I'd arrived late, so Asai Mayumi, an editor at Labor Report magazine who had come earlier with Mr. Kinjo, made her way through the crowd to find me.

The spectacular advancement in the peace process during 2007 (the six-party talks and the U.S.-DPRK talks as well as increasing North-South cooperation), progress in solving the nuclear issue (at least partly) and in normalization of the DPRK's relations with the West bring to the fore the question of the DPRK's future course. Provided hostility diminishes and its external security is guaranteed, will the country seize the chance to modernize and prosper, integrating into today's world?

The conflict-resolution literature offers new insights to reconciling parties in conflict. This article applies that literature, along with political-science approaches, to the seemingly intractable China-Japan rivalry. Proceeding from the standpoint that China and Japan need one another, and should manage their conflict for mutual benefit, the article suggests several steps they may take—bilaterally, in multilateral settings, and in civil society—to reduce tensions and promote better understanding.

Being an architect requires patience and endurance. For argument's sake, let's just say it's 2002 and, as the highlight of your career to date, you win the competition to design a new art museum in one of the most prized locations in the world: Manhattan.

For more than three decades, historical memory controversies have been fought over Japanese school textbook content in both the domestic and international arenas. In these controversies, Japanese textbook contents, which are subject to Ministry of Education examination and revision of content and language prior to approval for use in the public schools, repeatedly sparked denunciations by Chinese and Korean authorities and citizens with respect to such issues as the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, and coerced labor. In 2007, the most intense controversy has pitted the Ministry of Education against the residents and government of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. The issue exploded in March 2007 with the announcement that all references to military coercion in the compulsory mass suicides (shudan jiketsu) of Okinawan residents during the Battle of Okinawa were to be eliminated. The announcement triggered a wave of anger across Okinawan society leading to the mass demonstration in Ginowan City of 110,000 Okinawans addressed by the top leadership of the Prefecture. It was the largest demonstration since the 1972 reversion of Okinawa, exceeding even the response to the 1995 rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl by three US GIs.

Giovanni Arrighi, an authority on the political economy and geopolitics of world social change, here reflects comparatively on states and markets East and West at the dawn of capitalism. Ranging widely across Smith, Marx, Weber and Braudel, he assesses the logic and interplay of China's tribute trade system and Europe's emerging capitalism. This article draws on and extends a chapter from his new book, Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, which looks across the last five hundred years to consider the emerging position of East Asia in an epoch that marks the end of US hegemony. MS

The ancient kingdom, Koguryo/Gaogouli (37BC – 668AD) encompassed an area from central Manchuria to Primorsky Krai (the extreme Southeastern region of Russia) to the central part of the Korean peninsular at the height of its power, around the fifth century AD. Koguryo remains, including of walled towns, fortresses, palaces and tombs, as well as wall paintings and artifacts, have been found on both sides of the Chinese-North Korean border as well as in South Korea (the ROK). The remains and relics in the People's Republic of China (PRC) reflect the history and culture of the early and mid-period Koguryo kingdom; they also showcase Koguryo's architectural style and pioneering new patterns of city construction, in which both mountain cities and plain cities were successfully constructed.

As a study of the influence and nature of popular nationalism in Japan, this article examines the relationship between nationalism and history in Kobayashi Yoshinori's bestselling manga comic, Sensoron (On War, 1998). Sensoron heralded the recent trend of nationalistic manga targeted at younger generations and has been instrumental in popularizing the ideas of new-generation rightists and historical revisionists over the last decade. Kobayashi explains his strategy as “using the language of daily life in order to discuss politics and ideas”, adding that he created Sensoron as “something that intellectuals cannot write — something that young people find pleasure to read and get completely absorbed in, and yet is not light but deep”. He also emphasizes that what he writes is based on the “common sense of common folks (shomin no joshiki)”. Such an anti-elitist strategy, along with constant caricaturizing of academics, journalists, political activists and politicians as “uncool old men (dasai oyaji)” as well as his well-constructed and marketed charismatic personality, has proved very successful. Indeed, via the popular medium of manga, Kobayashi has ostensibly “created a discourse that is more influential than that of any other “theorist” in the 1990s”.

Jakarta~ At 4 PM on January 13, 2008, the main entrance to Pertamina Hospital in South Jakarta is besieged by scores of journalists. Almost all are local, as Indonesia rarely attract international media conglomerates, unless there is a deadly landslide, tsunami or airplane crash. Some reporters place the lenses of video and photo cameras against the glass of the hospital entrance, hoping to spot at least some action.

In 1995 Lester Brown published a book, Who Will Feed China? Wake-up Call to a Small Planet. Among the most influential accounts warning of the dire consequences of China's growing appetite for food and resources, the book ignited an international debate centered on the domestic and international consequences of China's mega-growth. Although China continued to lose land to urbanization, and faces acute water shortages and pollution issues, it retained high levels of food self-sufficiency in most areas and the predicted famine did not occur as rising world food prices prompted increased food production. Indeed, China has not only maintained high levels of grain self-sufficiency, but maintains a balance of export and import of grain that is price sensitive and transport sensitive.

In 1944 President Franklin Roosevelt dispatched vice president Henry A. Wallace to meet with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and offer him the “return” of Indochina to China. Chiang wisely declined the offer.

The scientific term Minakatella longifolia G. Lister may be known only to biologists, but behind the story of this slime mold—and of how specimens came to be kept at the Natural History Museum in London—is the life of one of the most fascinating men of Japan's modern era: Minakata Kumagusu.

In August 2007 I asked Nakazawa Keiji, manga artist and author of Barefoot Gen, for an interview. Nakazawa was a first grader when on August 6, 1945 he experienced the atomic bombing. In 1968 he published his first work on the atomic bombing—Struck by Black Rain [Kuroi ame ni utarete]—and since then, he has appealed to the public with many works on the atomic bombing. His masterpiece is Barefoot Gen, in which Gen is a stand-in for Nakazawa himself. His works from Barefoot Gen on convey much bitter anger and sharp criticism toward a postwar Japanese politics that has never sought to affix responsibility on those who carried out the dropping of the atomic bomb and the aggressive war (the U.S. that dropped the atomic bomb, and the emperor and Japan's wartime leaders who prosecuted the reckless war that incurred the dropping of the atomic bomb).

A Canadian diplomatic mission led by Rodolphe Lemieux in November 1907 shares an anniversary with the much-maligned Japanese immigration controls, introduced on 20 November 2007. The themes underlying the Lemieux mission - racial profiling, xenophobia, discrimination in immigration, and claims of unassimilability in the host country - resonate deeply with the current political climate in Japan. The anniversary of Lemieux's arrival in Japan 100 years ago serves to remind us how little attitudes have changed in regards to immigration and racialization.

After serving as a Japanese diplomat in Asia and Europe during the first half of the 20th century—helping negotiate with the Soviet Union to purchase the North Manchurian Railroad, saving thousands of Jews from the hands of the Nazis in Lithuania, and being interned in the Soviet Union for a year at the end of World War II—Sugihara Chiune was told by his superiors to resign from the Japanese Foreign Service in 1947.

More than six decades after the end of World War II, responsibility for wartime suffering remains a highly sensitive political issue in Asia, nowhere more so than in the Japan-Korea relationship. When the two countries normalized relations in 1965, one treaty provision was intended to settle claims by the Korean government and its people for compensation for injuries suffered during the era of Japanese rule (1910-45). More than forty years later, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs still keeps documents created during treaty negotiations hidden from public view.

On November 1, Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., the man who piloted the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died at his Columbus, Ohio home at age 92. Throughout his adult life, he was a warrior. He bravely fought the Nazis in 1942 and 1943. He fought the Japanese in 1944 and 1945. And he spent the next 62 years fighting to defend the atomic bombings.