On 14 February, Kayama Emi and Watanabe Tsuguo filed an administrative appeal to have the rejection of their marriage application by Arakawa Ward, Tokyo rescinded. Ms. Kayama wanted to keep her surname after marriage, as did Mr. Watanabe. The court rejected the appeal after only ten days without hearing arguments. “I've never had a gate closed in my face so quickly,” said Ms. Kayama.

Tension heightened in Gangjeong village on August 14 when the protestors learned that 500-600 policemen, 16 police buses, 10 vehicles with suppression gear including 3 water cannons were dispatched from the mainland. The protesters responded by confirming their determination to protect their village (Headline Jeju, August 14, 2011)

This article shows how urban life in Seoul under the Lee Myung-bak government combines neoliberal political economy priorities with an immense accumulation of spectacles. It examines the Cheonggye stream restoration, which has been promoted as upgrading Seoul to become a cleaner, greener and competitive global city. The Cheonggye stream project points to a new form of governance which looks beyond the display of national progress through conventional museums or monumental structures, as favored by previous regimes. Instead, the progress of the city and the nation is increasingly being portrayed through the popular use of urban space.

Introduction: The current disaster in Japan, the worst since World War II, may bring major change in Japanese thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. But the preconditions for that re-thinking existed long before the disaster.

The article takes a close look at the claim that the Japanese Foreign Ministry's policy of “inseparability of politics and economics” (seikei fukabun) hampered Soviet-Japanese economic relations in the 1980s. Taking three case-studies (South Yakut coal, Sakhalin oil and gas, and the Siberian pipeline), the author shows that the loss of interest on the part of Japanese business circles in investing in the Soviet economy had little to do with the political priorities of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and much to do with the changing energy needs and structure of the Japanese economy and its shift towards greater resource-efficiency. The article concludes, therefore, that the solution of the “territorial problem” would have hardly contributed to increasing Japanese investment in the Soviet Union; hence seikei fukabun was based on a false premise. The findings may be relevant to the ongoing territorial dispute between Japan and Russia and, in a broader sense, between Japan and its other neighbors, notably China.

At 14:46 on 11 March 2011, a tremendous earthquake occurred in Japan's northeast (Tohoku), depriving approximately 28,000 people of their lives. More than 300,000 people took refuge from the quake, the following tsunami, and radiation originating from damaged nuclear power stations in the area. The magnitude of the quake was estimated to be 9.0, the biggest in Japan's modern history “The Great East Japan Earthquake” was more than 11,000 times greater than the New Zealand Earthquake in Christchurch on 22 February 2011, and 45 times greater than the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake in the Tokyo area which killed approximately 140,000 people.

On August 15, 1945, World War II came to an end with Japan's unconditional surrender. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), flew from the Philippines to Japan with a mission to occupy and demilitarize the defeated nation. The place and manner of MacArthur's arrival seemed to signal the victor's absolute confidence and unquestioned authority over its vanquished enemy. MacArthur – the embodiment of U.S. military power and a consummate actor well known for his grand performance – landed at the Atsugi Airfield, previously a training field for Japanese kamikaze fighters, with a handful of Allied troops. MacArthur himself was armed only with a corncob pipe. Despite his staff's concern about possible attacks by enemy soldiers not yet disarmed, MacArthur's triumphant landing was followed by a smooth procession to the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama and later an entry into Tokyo where he established the General Headquarters (GHQ) of SCAP in the Dai-ichi Seimei Insurance Building.

At the centenary of Japan's Annexation of the Korean Empire in August 2010, speculation centered on whether Japan could achieve a radical departure from its traditional foreign policy of ‘Datsu-A Nyu-Ou’, namely leaving Asia to become a Western style country. This policy, resulted in Japan's colonization of Korea in August 1910 and led further to the invasion of China and other Asian nations, ending in Japan's utter defeat in August 1945.

Komiyama Yoko is the first woman to ever be appointed Japan's Minister of Health, Welfare and Labor. As a mother she may have more insight and empathy than many of her male colleagues into the issues her ministry addresses. What is certain is that, as soon as she took the job in August, she stirred up controversy, mainly with her comment that the cigarette tax should be raised in order to help fund reconstruction in the areas devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. But tax matters are the responsibility of the Finance Ministry.

On 22 March 2011, an exhausting court battle finally ended for over 2000 victims of mercury poisoning in Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectures. In sum, the agreement, decades in the making, was as follows as outlines in the Japan Times (31 March): “Chisso will provide some 90 percent of the plaintiffs with a ¥2.1 million lump sum each as well as a ¥2.29 billion fund, and the central and prefectural governments will shoulder part of their medical costs.” Chisso Corporation's dumping of methyl-mercury in nearby waters caused Minamata disease, as the painful ailment came to be known after it was first recognized in 1956. Half a century later, time is running out for these victims to receive the official recognition they deserve, as their bodies are growing increasingly frail. The mercury that poisoned their bodies was carried through the fish they ate and accumulated as it moved up the trophic tiers in a process called biomagnifications. In this process persistent poisons, such as mercury, concentrate in the upper echelons of the food chain. In biomagnification, organisms at the top of the chain carry higher levels of toxicity in their fatty tissues.

During the six months of World Expo 2010, Shanghai looked exceptionally clean, even spectacular, thanks to the city's face-lifting projects and a moratorium on construction and factory emissions for the Expo period. After two decades of relentless rebuilding, Shanghai's cityscape is dominated by clusters of sleek but soulless high-rises, while the city's major streets accommodate a mix of native and expatriate residents. In contrast to this uninspiring International-style architecture and the city's heterogeneous street crowds, the Expo site displayed an array of stunning architectural spectacles for the relatively homogenous crowds of predominantly domestic visitors.

The following text makes extensive use of the treasure trove of documents on the US-Japan-Okinawa relationship released by Wikileaks and published in The Asahi Shimbun and Ryukyu Shimpo in May 2001, setting them in the frame of four decades of chicanery. It also discusses the so-called “mitsuyaku” or secret diplomacy between the two countries that has gradualy come to light in the past two years without any help from Wiki, the “confession” of former Prime Minister Hatoyama, the strange case of the “Maher affair, and the shock waves of recent shifts in thinking about the Okinawa problem in Washington. APJ

The seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko (presently Emeritus Professor at Kobe University) predicted that a nuclear power plant accident like the present one was possible, and issued warnings from the late ‘90s. People had been warning of the danger of earthquake-caused nuclear accidents since the 1970s, but Ishibashi, from the specialized standpoint of seismology, proposed a new concept, which he called genpatsu shinsai [Translator's note: this expression literally means Nuclear-Power-Plant-Earthquake Disaster. As there is no English expression for this (the phenomenon itself is new) in this work we will render it as genpatsu shinsai syndrome.]. By this he meant a situation in which, as the damage from the earthquake widens, the situation is made doubly worse by nuclear radiation damage. It was in the hope of preventing this that he was issuing warnings. Ishibashi wrote many books on this, including Daichidouran no Jidai (The Age of Shifting Earth) (Iwanami Shinsho) and he is a very well-known scholar, so it is impossible that his warnings were unknown to the officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Governments come and go in Japan, Noda Yoshihiko's the most recent, being the third since the general elections of 30 August 2009 brought the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to power, following those of Hatoyama Yukio and Kan Naoto. In the weeks following his assumption of office, Noda has stated his core vision for the office on many occasions, including his inaugural Diet speech as Prime Minister on 13 September. He promises to confirm, deepen, and strengthen the alliance with the US, “the axis of Japan foreign policy and security.” That means, above all else, he will construct the base for the Marine Corps in northern Okinawa designed to substitute for the Futenma base that squats dangerously in the middle of the township of Ginowan.

Indignez-vous! Get angry, resist and fight against the blatant social injustices in our world! Thus Stéphane Hessel, the 93-year old French former Resistance fighter, called on the youth in France, and everywhere else, in his inspirational pamphlet published in France in 2010. It has since been translated into dozens of languages, though not yet into Japanese. Indignation, for Hessel, provided the fundamental motivation for the Resistance movement in Nazi-occupied France, and he finds plenty of reasons for outrage today.

23rd November 2011 was the first anniversary of the artillery exchange between the two Koreas around the island of Yeonpyeong off the west coast of Korea. The artillery battle in 2010 was the first such since the Korean War armistice and brought the peninsula to a state of heightened tension. With the Lee Myungbak administration mulling an invasion of the North in the event of a collapse of the DPRK, a local conflict could easily explode into war. The last year has seen a lopsided arms race with South Korea dramatically increasing its military capabilities on a scale the North cannot match. The South Korean military are under American ‘wartime’ control, and since for technical reasons as well they cannot engage in war without US support, the Americans would be automatically involved in any war. A US-ROK invasion of the DPRK would almost certainly force China to intervene, as it did in 1950. A second Sino-US war would have calamitous, consequences.

It is very difficult to say anything useful about Kobayashi Yoshinori today. Not least, because it was very hard to say anything about him in the first place. The lashings of masochistic self-irony in his work have been more than well commented upon. The more the manga artist and one contemporary face of cultural fascism in Japanese popular culture is criticized, the more it seems he feeds upon that controversy; the more he is pronounced “dead” as a significant cultural force, the more he seems to bounce back into necroperformative life.

Japanese prosecutors find themselves in the dock for abuses of power involving a number of high profile cases that have drawn considerable media attention in recent years. More than ever, the Japanese public is aware of the extent of prosecutors' power and how this jeopardizes justice. Until recently, prosecutors' post-WWII public reputation was relatively positive, and they were widely viewed as paragons of trust and propriety who had largely overcome the negative images stemming from their wartime role as tools of state oppression against critics and dissidents. This does not mean that Japan's procuracy has lacked critics both at home and abroad, but only recently has the positive public image come under sustained fire. The media is drawing unprecedented public attention to the ways and means of prosecutors and detailing their resort to unscrupulous methods in order to maintain their chilling 99% conviction rate.

The peculiar and unique U.S.-Japan relationship has entered a new phase, in which its future is shrouded in mist. While few Americans can be bothered ever to think about it, in the back of many Japanese minds it is something as generally accepted as a fact of nature, but at the same time a permanent complication that is recently showing sharp and irritating edges. Quite a few have begun to think that they should shake themselves out of the habit of taking it so much for granted.