Prime Minister Abe Shinzo announced in April 2007 that the government was planning to establish a “panel of experts” to examine the question of whether to “revise the current interpretation of the Constitution” in order to permit Japan to engage in certain specified collective self-defense operations. The Americans have long pressed for greater Japanese involvement in collective security, and the announcement came shortly before Mr. Abe's first trip to meet with President George W. Bush. Yet Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, among other things, renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes”. This has been understood by the courts and all past governments of Japan to prohibit Japan's participation in collective self-defense operations, or engagement in any use of force, for any reason other than the direct defense of Japan.

In the first week of May 2007, the Kingdom of Tonga was getting ready for a lavish wedding. Seventh in line for the royal throne, Fanetupouvava'u Tuita, 29, was to marry Kiu Kaho, an army lieutenant whose father is a noble, Tu'ivakano, and is a cousin of the royal family. Tuita is the second daughter of the controversial millionaire princess Pilolevu Tuita who runs Tongasat, a satellite communications company out of Hong Kong.

The Muslim community in Japan has a history of about 100 years. For example, an Islamic mosque in Kobe dates from 1935.

But the number of Muslims was relatively small before the 1980's. The number of Muslims in Japan grew rapidly in the mid-1980 during the bubble economy. At that time young men from Muslim countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iran came to Japan and worked in small businesses or factories which experienced labor shortages. But when the controversy over illegal foreign workers began, the Japanese government halted entry on short term visits without a visa for citizens of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran. Following the collapse of the bubble economy in 1990, a number of Muslims acquired resident status and some obtained legal residence in Japan by marrying Japanese women. There is no accurate record of the religious affiliation of foreign residents in Japan, but we can estimate the approximate number of Muslims from the native countries of foreigners. Keiko Sakurai calculated the number of Muslims in Japan in 2000 to be 63,552 (Nihon no Muslim Shakai (Muslim society in Japan) Chikuma shinsho, 2003). Now many of them have families. They live and work with Japanese and send their children to Japanese schools. With the passage of time, they began to construct their lives as Muslims. Japanese can see the ‘real Muslims lives’ before their eyes in Japan today. Against the world-wide negative media campaign against Muslims and Islam, it is useful for Japanese to take the opportunity to understand the Muslims in their midst. Morita Toyoko, Kobe University.

Three months before he became Prime Minister, in July 2006 Abe Shinzo published his political manifesto, under the title Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a beautiful country). It is well known that Abe's sense of beauty involves a denial of the darkest aspects of wartime history and insistence on compulsory love of country, and that he is committed to revision of the country's basic institutions accordingly. But the fundamental changes in the country's military posture, and especially in its relationship with the United States, have received less attention. Here we consider evidence of a new domestic role for the Self Defense Forces (SDF) as enforcer of unpopular policies, and the implications of a new law to facilitate US military reorganization. Okinawa is at the center of both.

[Japan Focus introduction: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo recently added another entry to the long, sorry chapter of official Japanese war-crime denials when he said that there was no coercion of the so-called comfort-women by the imperial military “in the narrow sense of the word.” On March 1, an historic day in the history of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, he said: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”