Fifty years ago, the mass repatriation of ethnic Koreans from Japan to North Korea was reaching its peak. In towns and cities all over Japan farewell gatherings were being held, as “returnees” to North Korea packed their bags and boarded trains that would take them to the port of Niigata where, after various formalities including a “confirmation of free will” by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), they would board Russian ships for the voyage to Cheongjin in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Over 49,000 people embarked on this journey in 1960 alone, and 93,340 over the full span of the “repatriation project”[帰国事業, 북성사업) from December 1959 to July 1984.

Strong in the Rain, a new book co-authored by Japan Focus coordinator David McNeill and Lucy Birmingham, Time magazine's Tokyo reporter, tells the story of Japan's 2001 triple disaster through the eyes of six ordinary Japanese people. The books follows the six – a housewife, a fisherman, the mayor of the coastal city of Minamisoma, a student, a foreign teacher and a maintenance worker at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they deal first with the shock of the initial earthquake and tsunami, then the horrific consequences of the nuclear disaster. In this except from Chapter Four, plant worker Watanabe Kai (a pseudonym) and Mayor Sakurai Katsunobu begin to realize the full scale of the triple meltdown at the Daiichi plant and what it will mean for their lives.

Listen to an interview with David McNeill on RTE Radio, Ireland.

The article explores the controversy surrounding the construction of the Kaminoseki nuclear power plant in Yamaguchi prefecture. While briefly introducing opposition activism against the plant, I introduce the voices of proponents of the plant. By doing so, I highlight the harsh economic realities facing this and other rural communities and divisions within the construction site community.

This essay addresses the role of individual actors in unofficial diplomacy, and the contributions of non-governmental projects in building international relations in post-WWII Asia. I treat the case of one Christian female as an illustration of the role of progressive intellectuals working outside official circles—a much neglected aspect of Japan's mid-twentieth century foreign relations.

The mood across East Asia as 2011 dawns is one of foreboding. Can the militarization and confrontation that gathered momentum through 2010 in the spiral of incidents (Cheonan in March, Senkaku in September, Yeonpyeong in November) and massive regional war rehearsals by the US and its allies be halted and reversed? The fear that events might slide during 2011 into catastrophe is hard to resist.

This article provides observations from the consumer perspective on food safety in the wake of the Great East Japan earthquake tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011.

The number of deaths by suicide in Japan on March 1, 2010 was 138. The current administration had monitored the total number of daily suicides in 2004 and 2008, but this was the highest daily total. This does not include the number of deaths by car accidents on that day. The average number of deaths due to car accidents in 2009 was 4,914, or about 13 people per a day. The suicide rate is almost ten times higher than the rate of deaths by car accidents. This article is a plea to recognize and confront this social problem.

Since early 2011, major peoples' revolutions have swept through North Africa and the Middle East. Most recently, the revolts engulfed Syria and Libya, leading to enormous violence in both countries and a NATO-led bombing campaign in the latter. By far the most important to the United States was the uprising in Egypt, where the military took advantage of a popular insurrection to stage a coup against Hosni Mubarak, a 30-year U.S. ally whose military forces and intelligence services had – and continue to have - extremely close ties to Washington. In August, Mubarak will face trial for corruption and murdering protesters during the uprising that engulfed Cairo's Tahrir Square for 18 days in January. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

Roger Pulvers' novel The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn brings to life the encounter of the Greek-Irish expatriate journalist-writer with Japan and the Japanese. Arriving in Japan in 1890 after twenty years in the United States, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) (小泉八雲)'s fourteen-year immersion in Japanese life provided the basis for a series of books that established him as the most influential interpreter of Japan in the West. But what Japan? The novel brings out the clash between Hearn's idealized vision of a society rooted in ancient lore of the grotesque, the macabre and the quaint, and the thrust of industrialization and war that was transforming a rising imperial power. Drawing on his experience of immersion in Japanese literary, theatrical and filmic life for much of the last forty years, Pulvers limns the extraordinary life and times of Lafcadio Hearn. The following introduces readers to Hearn's biography and an excerpt of the novel. Mark Selden

In its press release of April 20, TEPCO has retracted the Cl-38 radioactivity concentration measurement (1.6 MBq/mL) for the seawater used to cool reactor #1that it had issued on March 25, saying that it was “below minimum detectable density”. Based on this original measurement, we had determined that the value was too high to be explained without invoking the possibility of inadvertent, transient criticalities. We are pleased that TEPCO has retracted this result and has set out to improve its analysis protocol as described in the same press release. But we would appreciate further explanation of why previous results were simply retracted with inadequate categorization and explanation of the errors, as in the TEPCO press release. (The Cl-38 reading was changed on April 20th from 1.6MBq to a value “below detection limit” with the following explanation: “Identification and determination of radioactivity density were conducted based on main peaks.”) For example, the main gamma lines of Cl-38 are at 1.64 MeV and 2.16 MeV. What lines did these interfere with that required a downscaling of 6 orders of magnitude? If the count rate could not be attributed to Cl-38 what isotope had a count rate equivalent to 1.6 MBq/mL?

What more can be done to protect the workers—those on the front lines of protecting the nation—so they can continue their efforts to stabilize the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant? The Japanese state and TEPCO should recognize the health and safety of front-line workers as a national priority

Concepts and best international practices presented in this document draw on current Japanese and international research and literature to provide information that may be of value in protecting the health of Fukushima workers and others who experience extreme heat and radiation.

Sushi, not long ago a quintessentially Japanese product, has gone global. Japanese food, and sushi in particular, has experienced a surge in international popularity in recent decades. Japanese government estimates that outside of Japan there are over 20,000 Japanese restaurants, most of which either specialize in sushi or serve sushi (MAFF 2006; Council of Advisors 2007). Some estimate the number of overseas sushi bars and restaurants to be between 14,000 and 18,000 (in comparison, the number of sushi restaurants in Japan is estimated to be around 45,000) (Matsumoto 2002: 2). Sushi stores today can be found across Asia, the Americas, Europe, Russia, Africa, Oceania and the Pacific. The phenomenon has accelerated rapidly since the turn of the millennium.

The following paper, which draws on and updates a 2007 Japan Focus article, was written for Le Monde Diplomatique, where it was posted online in French early in April 2011.

This article offers a general overview of the nuclear era that began in Japan less than a decade after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and may well have been brought to its close by the events at Fukushima six and a half decades later. The Hirohito imperial broadcast of 15 August 1945 announcing the Japanese surrender and calling on the Japanese people to unite to “endure the unendurable” is now matched by the Akihito imperial television address of 16 March, calling on people to unite in the face of catastrophe and help each other through the crisis. Two days after the Akihito address, the government announced that the “Great East Japan Earthquake” disaster was to be elevated from level 4 to level 5, on a par with Three Mile Island, and three weeks later, on 12 April, it raised it again, to level 7, the maximum on the international scale for nuclear incidents, alongside Chernobyl.

This summer, I participated for the seventeenth time in the “Pilgrimage for Peace,” traveling to Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a group that included seventeen American students led by Professor Peter Kuznick of American University, seven international students from across Asia, and sixteen students from Japan. During our eleven days together, we had many discussions on the topic of “How to Understand the Relation between the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Hiroshima/Nagasaki.” Our Canadian coordinator and interpreter Norimatsu Satoko and two students from Fukushima introduced by Gotō Nobuyo made a special contribution to these discussions.

Making their way through Vietnam's dense jungles, U.S soldiers heard a cacophony of squawking birds, chattering monkeys, and insects buzzing like high voltage wires. But after C-123 cargo planes swooped low over the trees, saturating them with Agent Orange, the ground was littered with decaying jungle birds, paralyzed and dying monkeys. Clusters of dead fish shimmered like buttons on the surface of slow-moving streams. Years later, veterans will recall being soaked, like the trees, when aircraft jettisoned their herbicides. They will remember feeling dizzy, bleeding from the nose and mouth, suffering from debilitating skin rashes and violent headaches after being exposed to Agent Orange, an herbicide contaminated with TCDD-dioxin, a carcinogenic, fetus deforming, and quite possibly mutagenic chemical.

A Chinese woman said that when her children first started school, she initially had difficulty getting information about their schoolwork as she was not listed on the registration document. ‘They wouldn't accept me as the ‘real' mother because I wasn't listed [on the family registry].'

An American man, who remarried following his wife's death, said his family had the unique situation of having three different ‘registrations’. Separate family registries for his daughter and second wife, and separate registration as an [sic] foreign resident for himself. ‘It was really strange that my daughter was listed as the head of household when she wasn't even in school’.

China and Korea have been engaged in a culture war in recent years, contesting issues of national identity, historical territorial claims, and cultural heritage. The single most inflammatory topic in this culture war is conflicting interpretations of the history of Goguryeo (Koguryo 高句麗) (37 BCE-668 CE), which ruled large areas in present-day Northeast China and Northern Korea, and constituted one of the Three Kingdoms in Korean history, along with Baekje (Paekche 百濟) (18 BCE - 660 CE) and Silla (新羅) (57 BCE -935 CE) (Figs. 1 and 2). North and South Koreans consider Goguryeo to be a key foundation state of their history. They are therefore angered by Chinese claims that the “various tribes that inhabited Koguryo [were] … among the many minorities that were eventually absorbed into “Greater China,” and therefore “its history is considered a part of Chinese national history.“

Peter Lynch, an expert on the renewable energy sector, offers a concise introduction to the central role of feed-in tariffs (FITs) in fostering the ongoing transition from conventional, carbon-laden sources of generating electricity to renewables such as solar, wind and geothermal. As the author points out, FITs guarantee markets and prices for renewable power, and drive down their cost through deployment and the encouragement of yet more technical advance. FITs thus offer much hope to a world that seems unable to reach any sort of global agreement on cutting emissions which have continued to spiral since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Twice in the same week two gruesome attacks shook Indonesia and the world. On February 6, 2011, in Cikeusik Village, West Java – more than 1.000 furious Muslims lynched three members of a minority (or, as seen by some Muslims, ‘deviant‘) Islamic sect Ahmadiyah. Two days later, on February 8 in Temanggung, Central Java, a crowd stormed a local courthouse and vandalized three churches after a man – a former priest who allegedly insulted both Islam and Christianity in his pamphlet – was sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum sentence. Protesters demanded the death penalty. A third attack soon followed.

This essay examines the ideology and politics of Japanese technocrats during the Pacific War. Focusing on Kishi Nobusuke and his faction of reform bureaucrats, it analyzes how these technocrats viewed the war as an unprecedented planning opportunity to realize their vision of Japan's New Order and Asian empire.