Bulletin/message/564.July 16, 2005, will be the sixtieth anniversary of the plutonium-fueled atomic bomb, tested at White Sands, New Mexico. On July 15th and 16th the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear-weapons watchdog, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will hold poetry readings and a silent auction in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. John Bradley, a fellow poet, and editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (1995), and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader (2000), and this writer, are two of the writers invited to participate.

He is perhaps the best-known governor in Japan, largely because he has been breaking with tradition ever since he took office in Nagano Prefecture in October 2000.

After converting his private office into a glass-walled room to make his work as transparent as possible, Gov. Tanaka Yasuo defiantly declared “No More Dams” in a direct counter to the local economy's heavy reliance on public works projects at the expense of ecological concerns. He also abolished the traditional, self-serving press club system in his prefecture, and has been busily promoting environmental protection in his mountainous domain since day one.

[The plight of Japan's forests is just one of many ignored in the September election campaign. As mountains of debt soar over Japan's national and local governments, Koizumi managed to focus attention on a single area that was in the black - the Post Office - and persuade sufficient numbers of voters that it constituted a crisis and needed to be privatized to win the election. Neo-liberal leave-everything-to-the-market policies would be Japan's salvation, the Prime Minister declared, presenting himself as the apostle of reform after four and a half years in office without a single reform in place. Here, Shiga prefecture Governor Kunimatsu looks at the impact of market-opening policies on the environment and economy of a major Honshu prefecture -adjacent to Kyoto and Lake Biwa.

George and Junichiro, two great buddies (if the Japanese media is to be believed) meet again, on 15 and 16 November, in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto. Since Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro is one of the dwindling band of ever-faithful Bush supporters, and since officials on both sides have been working hard to clear away all possible obstacles from the negotiating table between them, the mood may be expected to be warm: Japanese troops will remain in Iraq till September 2006; the ban on US beef imports, till recently cause of great congressional anger, is about to be lifted; the Japanese Post Office, sitting on the world's largest pool of funds, is about to be privatized; and, perhaps most important, a deal has just been done on the re-organization of US forces in Japan. The ground should therefore be clear for an untroubled meeting, plenty of windy rhetoric about the world's “closest and most important” relationship, some photo-ops, and perhaps some quiet tippling under the red and yellow-hued autumn foliage of the old Kyoto palace.

One year ago this month, an advance team from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) arrived in Iraq on a mission – so the Japanese public was told – to help rebuild the wartorn country. The rest of the main contingent of 600 troops soon followed.

Then, on Dec. 9, 2004, amid simmering debate over whether the dispatch fell foul of Japan's war-renouncing Constitution – and after an Asahi Shimbun poll registered over 60 percent opposition to it – the Cabinet of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro extended the Self-Defense Forces' stay by another 12 months.

As the government emphasizes patriotism as part of the national school curriculum and discussion continues apace over revising Article 9, some Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers are calling for changes to the Constitution that may put equal rights and individual freedom at risk.

Kawakami Kenji's weird inventions have brought him notoriety in his native Japan and in Europe, where some call him a surrealist genius and even a neo-dadaist. But there is method in his madness.

Let's be frank. Kawakami Kenji looks a bit barmy: hooded eyes staring unnervingly beneath what appears to be shaved eyebrows, topped by an unruly mop of spindly hair. And this is before he happily poses for photographs with a toilet-roll dispenser on his head. “It's for sufferers of hay fever,” he explains. “They blow their noses a lot.”

More than 30 years later, a Japanese court is reconsidering an epoch-making media scandal that raised the question of whether unethical conduct by a reporter in obtaining the news should outweigh the significance of the facts he uncovered, no matter how earthshaking they might be.

BEIJING - With floods of cash and a new policy of patience and friendly support, China has quietly penetrated the thick wall surrounding North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's regime - gaining significant leverage for the first time in one of the world's most closed societies. Chinese leaders have gained Mr. Kim's ear, sources say, with a message that the North can revitalize its economy while still holding tight political control.

In the past year, with Washington preoccupied, Beijing has bypassed US hopes that it would squeeze Kim and force him to drop his nuclear ambitions. Indeed, the once-heady “six-party process,” started in 2003 to denuclearize Korea, appears defunct. Instead, Beijing pumped up investment to some $2 billion last year, and is helping to rebuild ports, create factories, and modernize energy sectors in what one US diplomat calls a “massive carrotgiving operation.” Yet Beijing is not using such aid as a means to end the North's nuclear program.

Much English writing about pacifism and peace movements has focused on the ideas and activities of Europeans and Americans. While attention has been paid to Mohandas Gandhi, peace movements in other parts of the world have been largely ignored. Like most Western peace activists, however, Gandhi was an exceptional figure in Indian society, far from the political mainstream.

In contrast to most other societies, there has been a widely shared public consensus in Japan throughout most of the post-war years that the Japanese government should abide by the pacifistic guidelines decreed by its Constitution, which forbids Japan from waging wars or maintaining armed forces. This charter won approval ratings of 70-90 per cent in public opinion polls taken from the 1960s through the 1980s. These figures demonstrate that a wide sector of the general public in Japan, although not engaging in any political activities, shared pacifist views that are minority opinions in the rest of the world.

[Introduction: In late October, the Japanese government presented its nuclear plans for the next decade. As was widely expected, the strongly pro-nuclear Atomic Energy Commission declared that Japan should plow ahead with a nuclear fuel recycling program at Rokkasho in Aomori Prefecture.

The decision comes at a time when international concern over Rokkasho is intensifying. It ignores International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei's call for a five-year moratorium on new nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities worldwide. Shunsuke Kondo, the head of the AEC, has said that it is “general knowledge” that the Rokkasho plant, which has not yet come into operation, is an existing facility, and therefore not included in the calls for a moratorium.

One of the central lessons of the literature on the invention of tradition is that historical symbols are always available for reinterpretation in a variety of ways. Yet, there are some facts that are still rooted in the incontrovertible logic of the human life span. The sixtieth anniversary of anything means that those who were active participants are no longer making decisions in public capacities although some of them are still here. For example, this spring Lisa Fittko, who had helped such figures as Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall escape Europe, died at age 95. Like the people she guided across the Pyrenees, she eventually settled in the United States and helped institutionalize the European war in American memory.

The following are edited excerpts of a panel discussion, coordinated by Wakamiya Yoshibumi, chairman of The Asahi Shimbun's editorial board with Amano Yukiya (former Director-General of Arms Control and Scientific Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Asai Motofumi (former diplomat and President, Hiroshima Peace Institute); Choi Sang Yong (South Korean Ambassador to Japan); Kato Koichi, former Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General); Okada Katsuya (leader of the Democratic Party of Japan).

[Hara Manabu nicely sums up some of the misconceptions on postal privatization that lay behind LDP victory in the just-completed election. As Hara writes, many voters believe that the Koizumi plan will go a long way towards lifting the economy out of years of sluggish growth and mounting monumental debt. Yet most experts who actually know what's in the privatization plan, as well as how the current system is structured, do not foresee significant economic benefits in the privatization scheme. Indeed, some fear there will be more ill than good if the privatized postal savings actually went out into the already overcrowded market to make loans. Not only would this “weaken private sector financial institutions even further,” according to Richard C. Koo, chief economist of Nomura Research Institute, but it would reduce the pool of funds that currently buys up much of the government's very large floatation of debt. While a hard-core fiscal disciplinarian might regard this as just the sort of shock a profligate state needs, the consequences would almost certainly include escalating interest rates as well as cuts elsewhere in the budget to finance the increasing burden of debt repayment.

“Israel and Japan are situated at opposite ends of Asia, but this is a fact which binds them together rather than separates them. The vast continent of Asia is their connecting link, and the consciousness of their Asian destiny is their common thought.”

David Ben-Gurion, 1 July 1952

[In recent weeks, a number of protests directed against Japan have erupted throughout China. The most widely reported have been sparked by anger at new Japanese school textbooks that elide discussion of World War II atrocities, by territorial conflicts over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands, and by the Japanese bid for a permanent Security Council seat. Participants in those protests appear to have been overwhelmingly from the ranks of students and intellectuals. The strike at the Japanese-owned Uniden factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong carries the protest movement to a new level. It is significant as one of the first actions by workers in opposition to Japanese labor practices, as well as being an action that could simultaneously impact on the American giant firm Wal-Mart that has thus far resisted Chinese government pressures to permit a union. This is an unusual example of a strike whose principal demand is the right guaranteed by Chinese law to form a union. The 12,000 workers at the plant in the heart of China's export zone, mainly women migrants from poor interior provinces, make telephones most of which end up on Wal-Mart shelves. According to a New York Times report, Uniden workers typically work eleven hour days (three hours of compulsory overtime) to earn salaries of 484 yuan (US$58) a week. The present strike, following on the heels of walkouts on November 29 and December 10, 2004, contains echoes of the strikes directed at Japanese enterprises that exploded in the 1920s fueling nationalist and revolutionary movements. It also evokes the Chinese government's worst fears during the 1989 movement upsurge: that workers might join the protests on the side of students and intellectuals. Japan Focus.]

British geologist Jeremy Leggett's first book “The Carbon War” was described by the influential Sunday Times as “the best book yet on the politics of global warming.” Time magazine calls Leggett “one of the key players in putting the climate issue on the world agenda.” His recent book-called “Empty Tank” by its US publisher and “Half Gone” in the UK-builds on his former work as the Chief Scientist at Greenpeace UK and a decade as an international climate campaigner in order to now assert the importance of what he describes as “the oil topping point.”

During the recent Congressional testimonies by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others, the air ran thick with military jargon such as “command influence” and “chain of command”, but nowhere was the word “command responsibility” uttered. In 1945, following Japan's surrender to the Allied Powers, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japanese military forces in the Philippines, was tried for war crimes by a U.S. military tribunal, found guilty, and hanged. His crime: failure to uphold “command responsibility” over all the Japanese troops operating in the Philippines.