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.

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.

In 1940 the Japanese celebrated the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the imperial dynasty. This history was largely contrived.

For example, the supposed first emperor, Jimmu, never existed, and the first 1000 or so years of the 2600-year imperial history is also mythical. But the 2600th anniversary celebrations in 1940 were nonetheless massive and empire-wide.

With no end in sight to the world's worst atomic power crisis in a quarter of a century, collusion between Japan's nuclear industry and its supposedly neutral government watchdogs is, perhaps for the first time, under serious scrutiny. In May, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency singled out the lack of independence between regulators and the industry during a trip to Japan, noting that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) simultaneously promotes nuclear power and oversees it. Prime Minister Kan Naoto has since ordered a government committee to probe that relationship, though puzzlingly, committee head Hatamura Yotaro has said that it “will not aim to clarify” who is responsible for the accident.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the death of the postwar poet Ibaragi Noriko (1926-2006). She was prepared: three months earlier, at age 79, she had written out a farewell letter and had it printed, ready to send to some two hundred of her friends and correspondents. Leaving blanks for the date (February 17, 2006, though it was two days later when she was found in her bed) and cause of her death (a brain hemorrhage), she expressed her wishes that there be no funeral or memorial and that no flowers be sent to her now vacant suburban home. Instead she made one request: “If you will pause for a moment, just a moment, and say to yourself ‘So now she is gone…, ‘that will be enough.”

On July 9, 2011 another irrational colonial border that demarcated Sudan was consigned to history when South Sudan achieved independence. In the process an often seemingly irrevocable principle of decolonisation, that boundaries inherited from colonial entities should remain sacrosanct, has been challenged once again. Indeed, a cautious trend in international relations has been to support greater self-determination for ‘nations’ without awarding full statehood. Yet Kosovo is another state whose recent independence has been recognised by most major players in the international community. In West Papua's case, the territory's small but growing elite had been preparing for independence from the Netherlands in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Dutch plans envisaged full independence by 1970. However, in 1962 Cold War realpolitik intervened and the United States engineered a transfer of sovereignty to Indonesia under the auspices of the United Nations. To Indonesian nationalists their revolution became complete since West New Guinea had previously been part of the larger colonial unit of the Netherlands East Indies, which had realised its independence as Indonesia in 1949. In West New Guinea, most Papuans felt betrayed by the international community and have been campaigning for a proper referendum on independence ever since.

This four part article introduces geophysicist Lori Dengler's assessment of Japan's March 11 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, and its lessons for Japan and the world. It includes: an introduction by Gregory Smits, an interview with Yale Environment 360, a note by Dengler summarizing her ten day site visit to Japan beginning April 30, and an interview with The Asia-Pacific Journal.

In September 2011 the Asahi Shimbun added an English language webpage to the Japanese language site, launched in November 2010, introducing Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors' memoirs, “Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Messages from Hibakusha” (広島・長崎の記憶−−被爆者からのメッセージ, link).

In the last few weeks, Kim Jong Il has inspected a pig farm, a mine, a solar thermal energy research unit, a restaurant, an orchestra, and even gave field guidance to the Tudan Duck Farm on how to raise these pesky birds, where he reportedly enjoyed an art performance given by the members of the art group of the Pyongyang Poultry Guidance Bureau at the newly built house of culture of the farm, and congratulated them on their successful performance. He also travelled to the industrial east coast city of Hamhung, a crosscountry trip that one of the authors, having done it, can attest requires a bit of effort. Accompanied by his son, Kim Jong Il even managed to visit a terrapin farm. Given all these visits, how one might ask, does the peripatetic Kim Jong Il find time for his commander-in-chief military and foreign policy duties?

From the early 1880s down to the end of World War II, British and French colonial rulers, among others, held the Arab peoples of the Middle East in subjugation. Weakened by the war against Hitlerism, the European imperialists retreated under pressure from the United States, which stepped in to take their place. The creation of Israel as the last “colonial-settler state” (1948) and Israel's expulsion of the indigenous population of Palestine from their land and homes framed one side of the European retreat; the failed Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, known as the Suez Canal crisis (1956), framed the other.

This article provides a genealogy of the argument for kengai isetsu, or the relocation of US military bases outside of Okinawa to another part of Japan. It shows how kengai isetsu has been reduced to a politics of NIMBY, or “Not In My Back Yard” when understood through a politically conservative vs. progressive grid of intelligibility. Instead, a colonial vs. anticolonial reading informed by postcolonial studies is offered to show how kengai isetsu reveals Okinawa as the lynchpin holding together the US-Japanese security relationship. In particular, this paper problematizes the reluctance on the part of international and Japanese progressive activists and intellectuals to criticize Japan's role in maintaining US military bases in Okinawa because of the deeply entrenched desire to posit Japan as a passive victim of American power, thereby maintaining the Eurocentric position of the US as the more aggressive agent.

In his remarks to the Australian parliament on November 17, President Obama declared that the U. S. was making the Asia-Pacific region a top priority. While promising a continued U.S. military presence in the region, Obama also expressed his intention to strengthen U.S.-China cooperation. This declaration, however, was made at the same time as Obama announced a series of anti-China measures: to station U.S. forces permanently in Australia for the first time, to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a multilateral trade agreement that excludes China – and to discuss the South China Sea Islands at the ASEAN summit, to Beijing's displeasure. Therefore, the Japanese media view Obama's emphasis on Asia as strengthening an anti-China containment ring.

In this two part article Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick explore the relationship between the atomic bombing of Japan and that nation's embrace of nuclear power, a relationship that may be entering a new phase with the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima.

Miyamoto Teru (b. 1947), whose large and devoted readership is characterized by its social and geographical diversity, is admired for his uncommon ability to weave absorbing narratives out of the warp and woof of ordinary life, his working-class characters from the Kansai region evincing a universal appeal. Miyamoto's world is one neither of the traditional aesthetics that once mesmerized large audiences nor of the otaku culture that now holds such fascination for the young (and not-so-young)—nor does one encounter in his works the surprising flights of fancy typical of Murakami Haruki—but for those very reasons his fiction reflects with fidelity the reality experienced by the great majority of Japanese. “A Tale of Tomatoes” (Tomato no hanashi) first appeared in the literary journal Bungakukai in 1981, and the present translation is taken from the recently published collection Phantom Lights. It shares with Miyamoto's other short stories an evocative recounting of an incident from the narrating character's past—in this case an incident that closely parallels one of the author's own experiences. A part of every reader's psyche remains buried under the asphalt along with that urgent letter. RKT

The following is a chapter from my new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. Beyond Our Means tells the global story of how many states and societies have actively encouraged household saving from roughly 1800 to the present. To do so, they established an array of institutions aimed at attracting “small savers.” These included savings banks, postal savings systems, school savings programs, and wartime and postwar savings campaigns. Although four of the chapters present the history of Japanese savings-promotion, the book also describes the development of similar efforts to encourage saving in Europe, the United States, and other Asian nations. This is not simply a comparative history, but emphatically a transnational history. Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Germans love to talk about thrift as a part of their distinctive “culture,” yet nations do not save simply because of indigenous traditions. The similarities in savings institutions and campaigns across the globe are far from coincidental. They resulted in large part from transnational or international exchanges of knowledge. The postal savings bank, for example, was not a peculiarly Japanese institution, but originated in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. In turn, the emerging Japanese model of savings-led development profoundly influenced rising economies in East and Southeast Asia, including China. Rather than offering disparate case studies, the book interweaves the history of savings promotion on three continents.

More than sixty-five years after the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945, and the subsequent firebombing and destruction of Japan's cities by the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, a cursory examination of the relevant English-language literature, both popular and academic, reveals a striking lacuna. Researchers have covered substantial ground in analyzing various historical aspects of the U.S. bombing campaign against Japan. Specifically, much has been done to situate the events within the emergence of strategic air war in the twentieth century and within the concurrent evolution of American military air power doctrine. Scholars have discussed the air raids within the context of the evolution (and subsequent violations) of principles of noncombatant immunity during war, and have also provided important analyses regarding when and why the United States chose to target Japan's cities for destruction.

The exquisite shape of Fuji, its symmetrical triangle dominating a broad plain, has delighted the Japanese for two millennia, and pleased Western eyes for several centuries. Unlike the manmade symbols of other countries—-the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the pyramids of Egypt—-this universally recognized sign for Japan is a natural landmark.

Like a giant dose of salts to a bloated and constipated patient, Cable-gate has scoured its way through the post-9/11 United States empire, exposing its internal workings to merciless scrutiny: In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi subordinates kill civilians and journalists while their commanders turn a blind eye to sickening acts of torture and murder; in Pakistan, US special forces patrol ‘secretly’ inside tribal areas as military leaders from both sides discuss the possibility of a coup (link); in Yemen and Pakistan US drones covertly bomb ‘terrorist’ targets; in the United Nations, American diplomats are ordered to spy on officials from China, Russia, France and the UK (link).

What follows are excerpts from Nambara Shigeru's speeches and poems illuminating the conscience of an intellectual in war-time and its aftermath, introduced by Richard Minear, who translated and introduced the book War and Conscience in Japan:Nambara Shigeru and the Asia-Pacific War.

Chemical physicist Chris Busby is at the forefront of scientists who are challenging the radiation risk model propounded by ICRP, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, whose standards for allowable radiation doses the Japanese government has adopted for its citizens affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident. Busby, Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), points out that the ICRP model “deals with radiation exposure from all sources in the same way, as if it were external to the body,” and then takes this dose and multiplies it by a risk factor based on the high acute external doses of the atomic-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ICRP method thus fails to take into account a number of ways in which certain internal radionuclides can deliver very high doses to critical targets in cells, particularly the cell DNA. One of these is from “inhaled or ingested hot particles, which are solid but microscopic and can lodge in tissue delivering high doses to local cells.” As a result, internal radiation exposure can be “up to 1,000 times more harmful than the ICRP model concludes.”