Although international consensus has it that the Japanese people are unusually reluctant to face their own wartime past, this generalization has never been entirely true, as regular readers of The Asia Pacific Journal already know. Like human beings everywhere, since 1945 Japanese have debated the lessons of war and disagreed about its meaning among themselves. And, also like people everywhere, many Japanese regret both official policies and widespread individual behaviors of the past. They not only desire reconciliation with Koreans, Chinese, and other Asians, but also recognize that, as Japanese, they cannot dictate its terms. Some have already entered into cross-national dialogue about the war and the colonial violence that reached its crescendo during the war years. Moreover, precisely because reflection on such issues is uncomfortable, they struggle over how to do so, often turning to oblique or refracted approaches, what Dora Apel calls “the sideways glance,” such as through literary or artistic expression. Both this ambivalence and these strategies are human rather than Japanese traits.

The most surprising aspect of the recent unexpected terrorist violence in Norway is that, in retrospect, it is not surprising. Our revived hopes after the end of the Cold War, that we might finally be emerging into a world of diminishing bloodshed, have been abundantly disabused. Events of seemingly random irrational violence, such as that which so shocked us when President Kennedy was assassinated, have become a predictable part of the world in which we live.

A November 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on labor abuses in mining firms in Zambia parented by state-owned enterprise (SOE) China Non-ferrous Metal Mining Co. (CNMC) has been a media sensation.

CNMC subsidiaries operate two copper mines and two copper processing plants in Zambia Non-Ferrous Company Africa (NFCA), CNMC-Luanshya Copper Mines (CLM), Chambishi Copper Smelter (CCS), and Sino Metals Leach Zambia (Sino Metals).

As Japan's government gets set to expand a nuclear evacuation area, the mayor of a city inside the radioactive zone speaks about his fears.

David McNeill in Minami-Soma City

Like most Japanese men, Sakurai Katsunobu read apocalyptic comic book stories about the future when he was a boy. He never expected to live through one of those stories himself.

It seems that Korean society experienced more trials than usual in the year 2010. Perhaps it feels that way because the final weeks since the shelling of Yeongpyeong Island on the West Sea of the Korean peninsula on November 23 have been filled with events that evoke grief, anger, and anxiety.

“Rather than feeling liberated from (Dutch) colonial rule, Papuans have felt subjugated, marginalized from the processes of economic development, and threatened by the mass influx of Indonesian settlers. They have also developed a sense of common Papuan ethnicity in opposition to Indonesian dominance of the local economy and administration. These pan-Papuan views have become the cultural and ethnic currency of a common Papuan struggle.” Chauvel (2005)

“Papuans have less access to legitimate economic opportunities than any group in Indonesia and have experienced more violence and torture since the late 1960s in projects of the military to block their political aspirations than any other group in Indonesia today.” Braithwaite et al (2010)

Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Energy said in a Democracy Now! interview on June 10, “The nuclear industry, particularly in the United States, and elsewhere—Russia and Japan—has had a very long history of withholding information and misleading the public about the hazards of their activities.” Being no exception to Alvarez's generalization, the Japanese government, since the mutiple meltdowns and explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in mid-March, has withheld or controlled information about health risks of radiation, expected dispersion of radioactive materials, and their actual contamination measurements in areas surrounding Fukushima Daiichi. Instead of providing candid information to the public, the government started campaigns in the opposite direction—to lull the public into worrying less about radiation and its health risks.

More than a week after March 11, when northeastern Japan was hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 7-metre tsunami, the death toll remains unknown. It seems certain to exceed 20,000, as whole sections of some communities were washed out to sea. Search and rescue groups are grimly at work finding bodies alongshore and beneath the rubble and debris.

For most of my life I have felt split between two conflicting approaches to reality: 1) as a researcher trying rigorously and methodically to understand violence in the world, and 2) as a poet, responding to intuitive impulses to say what moved me, whether rational or not. But recently my editor Mark Selden suggested that I write about the role of Coming to Jakarta in my political thinking. In responding to his request I have come to realize that the two sides of my life have become synergistic, each side not just facilitating the other but indeed enabling it. Because each can be characterized as an attempt, using radically different methods but towards the same goal, of becoming more aware of forces in our life that are not easily understandable by normal rational investigation. So that each is an exploration, if you like, on the same frontier between the known and the unknowable.

The recent spate of Japanese films dealing with World War II or with Japan fighting modern wars raises questions about what kind of histories are being narrated, both wartime and postwar, what they say about Japanese responsibility for war and atrocities in the Asia-Pacific War, and how they relate to current trends in nationalism. The fear is that such movies resonate with other phenomena, from the comments of Japanese officials, most recently exemplified by the speeches and writings of retired General Tamogami Toshio, Japan's former Air Self-Defense Force [ASDF] Chief of Staff, to popular manga like Kobayashi Yoshinori's work, that seem to legitimize Japan's pursuit of war in East Asia and deny Japanese responsibility for atrocities. I have already argued in Japan Focus, with regard to two cinematic imaginations of Japan at war, the alternative World War II history Lorelei (Rōrerai, Higuchi Shinji, 2005), and the Maritime Self-Defense Forces mutiny movie, Aegis (Bōkoku no ījisu, Sakamoto Junji, 2005), that such fears of a rising revisionist nationalism in cinema are not always justified. Both works present a “victorious” Japan, populated by young people willing to sacrifice themselves for their community, but through an entertainment cinema that appears so conscious of a consumer base with conflicting opinions about the war and nationalism, that it attempts to construct a hegemonic vision of the nation that appeals to all sides, only to end up portraying an empty Japan that can mean anything to anyone.

Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America's interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today. Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.

U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.

This is a revised, updated and abbreviated version of the introduction to the two volume collection by the authors of Pan-Asianism. A Documentary History Vol. 1 covers the years 1850-1920; Vol. 2 covers the years 1850-present, link.

The economic and political power of Asia, the world's largest continent, is increasing rapidly. According to the latest projections, the gross domestic products of China and India, the world's most populous nations, will each surpass that of the United States in the not-too-distant future. China's economy, like Japan's, is already larger than that of any single European country. With this new economic might comes growing diplomatic influence. The twenty-first century, many pundits agree, will be an Asian century. This undisputed Asian success story, together with its accompanying tensions and discontents, has attracted much media and scholarly attention. Yet for all this talk of Asia, there is no consensus on what Asia actually stands for as a whole. Is the vast Asian landmass a single entity? There has never been—and perhaps never will be—universal agreement on this question.

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.“

– Senator Frank Church (1975)

While tackling global warming issues has gained popular approval in the names of Eco and LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), in recent years the voices of citizens against nuclear power have been suppressed in Japan's environmental protection movement. It is worth reflecting on the possibility that Japan's eco became warped in light of the fact that TEPCO became its big sponsor.

The Fuji Sankei Group sponsors a prize, the Grand Prize for the Global Environment Award, given annually to a company or a group actively engaged in protecting against global warming and supporting environmental protection. The twentieth recipient to be of the prize announced on February 25 this year was, ironically, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), that is now the party concerned with the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

The following comment on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, abbreviated here, was first published in Korean in the widely read blog Hangyoreh Sarangbang, in early May, and then translated and published in Japanese shortly afterwards. Here the author provides an English version, and adds an introduction briefly surveying responses to the death in South Korea, particularly those of progressive sectors of South Korean opinion. APJ

At a time when territorial conflicts in East Asia repeatedly raise tensions between China and Japan (Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands), North and South Korea (the Northern Limit Line) and Japan-Russia (the Northern Islands/Kurils), it is worth recalling that disputes continue to simmer not only between long-time rivals, but also among allies.

This is Okinawa's Governor Nakaima Hirokazu's speech at George Washington University on September 19, 2011 on the relocation of the Futenma Base and its implications for US-Japan-Okinawa relations. The English version is followed by a Japanese summary, which appeared on the September 20 edition of the Ryukyu Shimpo. 仲井真弘多沖縄知事による９月１９日ワシントンＤＣのジョージ・ワシントン大学での講演の英語版全文を紹介します。２０日の琉球新報に掲載された講演要旨を英語版に続いて下方に貼り付けました。

Only by bringing the nuclear power station into government hands can scientists find out what really happened, say Taira Tomoyuki and Hatoyama Yukio.

Events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami are of crucial importance for the future of atomic energy – in Japan and globally. To respond adequately to the accident, we have to know precisely what happened then and what is continuing to happen now.

“It's not that I'm weak, it's that the suffering weighs down on me too heavily.”

This was said, in 1938, by a writer whose life and death are noted with public attention every year in June. The popularity of this author has not waned in Japan. Crowds gather on June 19 around the country in rituals of celebration and mourning. Given the personality of this man, it is not easy to separate the two.

3/23 Shuzenji, Shizuoka, .0045 MicroSieverts

I write this by candlelight. Interesting times. Reactor 3 of Fukushima 1 spewed black smoke of an unknown substance this afternoon. Tokyo reported elevated levels of cesium in tap water in excess of those recommended for infants and pregnant women. Same with spinach from Ibaraki, milk from Fukushima (no surprise there) and selected produce from Chiba.