“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available - once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known - a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” –Fred Hoyle, 1950

The deaths stemming from the great famine of 1944-45, which reached its zenith in March-April 1945 in Japanese-occupied northern Vietnam, eclipsed in scale all human tragedies of the modern period in that country up until that time. The demographics vary from French estimates of 600,000-700,000 dead, to official Vietnamese numbers of 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 victims. Food security is an age-old problem, and dearth, famine, and disease have long been a scourge of mankind across the broad Eurasian landmass and beyond. While more recent understandings recognize that famines are mostly man-made, it is also true that in ecologically vulnerable zones, alongside natural disasters, war and conflict often tilts the balance between sustainability and human disaster. Allowing the contingency of natural cause as a predisposing factor for mass famine, this article revisits the Vietnam famine of 1944-45 in light of flaws in human agency (alongside willful or even deliberate neglect) as well as destabilization stemming from war and conflict. While I avoid the issue of impacts of the famine in favor of seeking cause - the human suffering of the famine has not been effaced by time. It was recorded in Hanoi newspapers at the time. It survives in local memory and in fiction by Vietnamese writers.

The poet WAGŌ Ryōichi 和合亮一 was living in Fukushima on March 11, 2011, when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, sending the entire northeastern Tōhoku region into chaos. After spending a few days in a camp for evacuees, he began documenting his experiences in a powerful and poetic Twitter feed, which seemed to touch a nerve as the nation listened in horror to the stories of the survivors. Wagō's Twitter feed quickly earned over 14,000 followers, and his poignant, pithy statements were frequently retweeted by many others. In this feed, he writes about the sights with the earthquake zone, his horror at the devastation in Minami Sōma (a town where he had worked as a high school teacher), and the need for a new kind of direct and powerful writing to capture the realities of the destruction.

The Fukushima nuclear reactor accident has had an immense economic and political impact worldwide, leading many countries to rethink their nuclear policies and programmes. Germany is a striking case in point, as the two statements introduced here show. Published in mid-March by IG Metall (the German metal workers' union), and updated for this translated release, the documents are in reaction to the disasters in Japan. The first policy paper is an explicit declaration of the need to get completely out of nuclear and more fully into renewables, while the second expresses grave concern about the worldwide economic repercussions of Japan's multiple disasters.

Our plane was one hour away from landing when the pilot announced, “There's been a major earthquake in Japan and Narita is shut down.” It was March 11th, 2011. I was en route to Japan to teach my film, ANPO: Art X War in art, film and history classes at the American School in Tokyo the following week. Or so I thought. I could never have imagined I would arrive to witness Japan's greatest postwar disaster. Or the resonances my film would assume in its wake.

Japan's tragic March 11 earthquake, tsunami and its continuing nuclear crisis struck in the midst of the world's unfolding financial, economic, environmental and energy crises. The Fukushima Shock is drastically reshaping Japan's energy policy and politics. This opportunity for change is being seized by a rapidly expanding coalition of large Japanese and foreign firms, small and medium businesses, subnational governments, farmers, NPOs, and others. Their interests are united and focused by the feed-in tariff policy championed by former PM Kan Naoto. They are further channeled and reinforced by the YEN 23 trillion commitment for the 10-year rebuild of Tohoku, a project committed to renewables and smart-city infrastructure. Meanwhile, Japan's central government is adrift, its fiscal and regulatory tools blunted by a continuing rearguard action to undermine renewables and keep nuclear as the main pillar of Japan's power economy. The clash between contending energy regimes is being played out at the international level as well, and remains very fluid and difficult to predict. What is certain is that it involves strikingly different political coalitions and implies equally contrasting infrastructure choices, institutions and ideas. In Japan, the challenge is whether to protect a monopolized, centralized, expensive, and probably cul de sac power economy or opt to innovate a potentially world-beating decentralized smart-power economy. The evidence suggests Japan risks forfeiting an historic opportunity if renewable power generation does not become the main pillar of an emerging, smart power economy.

On August 19th, 2011, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement in response to recent media coverage about the US military's use and storage of defoliants (including Agent Orange) on Okinawa during the Vietnam War. MOFA announced that, although it had requested the US Department of Defense to investigate these allegations, Washington had replied that it was unable to find any evidence from the period in question. As a result, Tokyo asked the US government to re-check its records in more detail. This was the first time that the Japanese government had asked the US about military defoliants since 2007 - and its refusal to accept the Pentagon's stock denial was rare. The current announcement arose after two weeks of unprecedented press reports which alleged that these chemicals had been widely used on Okinawa during the 1960s and ‘70s.

Koide Hiroaki began his career as a nuclear engineer forty years ago drawn to the promise of nuclear power. Quickly, however, he recognized the flaws in Japan's nuclear power program and emerged as among the best informed of Japan's nuclear power critic. His cogent public critique of the nuclear village earned him an honourable form of purgatory as a permanent assistant professor at Kyoto University. Koide would pay a price in career terms, continuing his painstaking research on radio nuclide measurement at Kyoto University's Research Reactor Institute (KURRI) in the shadows. Until 3.11.

On September 30, 2011, an outfit named GumshoePictures uploaded on YouTube a video entitled “The True Origins of Pizza,” which, in the format of a brief documentary (3:44), reminiscent of those seen on such stations as the Discovery Channel, investigates an apparent historical puzzle: a series of speakers, from academics to a blogger and a representative of the “Korean Culinary Center,” are interviewed and advance evidence that pizza originated in Korea and had been “stolen” by Marco Polo, much as he had reputedly brought back noodles from China to Italy as spaghetti. Before we engage in an analysis of this remarkable well-produced clip, let us first encourage readers of The Asia-Pacific Journal who have yet to see this video to watch it, unencumbered by any spoilers or the authors' own opinions. At this point, viewers conveniently have a choice of watching mirrored versions: one in English, without the distraction of text crossing the screen in front of them; a version with Korean subtitles, uploaded on October 4, also by GumshoePictures; and a version with Japanese subtitles, uploaded on October 12 by “CoreanCulture.” We embed all of them below, for reception of the clip has differed according to context, and readers may wish to examine the comments on each separately: as of October 28, the first had 451,000 views and a roughly 1,400 to 200 like to dislike ratio; the second had slightly fewer views (356,000), but a strikingly different 1050 to 1,150 like to dislike ratio; while the third had 63,000 views, and an 800 to 200 like to dislike ratio:

It is not well-known that the Tōhoku region only established its position as the nation's rice production center after World War II. Yields of rice, a commercial crop of tropical origin, were relatively low in the Northeast until the Taishō Era (1912-1926).

Rice production in the region, however, started growing partly due to advances in agricultural technology and partly due to a variety of economic and political factors. The factors included the expansion of Tokyo as the nation's principal consumer market, government efforts to increase food production during and after the war, and the postwar independence of colonial Korea and Taiwan, which supplied Japan's rice before the war. As a result, Tōhoku became a major supplier of rice, vegetables and seafood for Tokyo.

The positive and negative significance of the Tokyo Trial has been passionately debated among Japanese historians and intellectuals. However, the attitudes of the Japanese people in general towards the Trial have been rather apathetic. The Trial was almost absent in Japanese public discourse from the conclusion of the Trial until the 1980s, and according to opinion polls conducted recently, 60 per cent or even 70 per cent of Japanese people are unfamiliar with the specifics of the Trial. Some historians and intellectuals argue that the Tokyo Trial, unlike the Nuremberg Trial, had no direct impact on post-war Japanese society. Nonetheless, a close look at Japanese attitudes shows that the Tokyo Trial has had a subtle but substantial impact on the Japanese sense of history, war responsibility and war guilt, all of which are highly contemporary issues. This long-term societal impact of the Tokyo Trial became clearer in the 1990s and started to be recognised and pointed out publicly from 2005 onwards.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. We have just experienced an earthquake. Please move away from the buildings to an open area…We will provide more detailed information as soon as possible…”

The polite but authoritative “we” was the voice of the Tokyo DisneySea theme park in this instance, but similar, oddly reassuring warnings of peril were being echoed across Japan, mostly following the lead of television broadcaster NHK.

Declassified US Embassy Seoul cables related to nuclear proliferation during the Park Chung Hee era show that, far from making South Korea more secure, Park's toying with the nuclear option made him an unpredictable and even dangerous client who needed restraint in the eyes of US policymakers.

On August 26, 2011, Prime Minister Kan Naoto resigned from office after a tempestuous fifteen months in power. Since May 2011 a virtual lynch mob egged on by the media bayed for his resignation. Kan's ouster became an obsession of the nation's powerbrokers. This article examines why, in the midst of an unprecedented cascade of disasters, natural and nuclear, the Kan problem trumped all others.

In 2007, an extraordinary apology by Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō appeared in print. It begins with an acknowledgement that Japan's indiscriminate bombing of civilians living in the Nationalist Chinese wartime capital of Chongqing beginning in 1938 violated international law and gave the United States a justification for its own devastating incendiary raids on Japan's capital. The prime minister also admits that, by not capitulating to the United States once defeat became inevitable, the Japanese government essentially permitted the firebombing of Tokyo and thereafter the rest of urban Japan in 1945. To show the sincerity of its apologetic stance toward Tokyo air raid victims, the state agreed to provide financial compensation to survivors and bereaved family members, conduct a comprehensive survey of the dead, and build a memorial both to honor them and to serve as a reminder that the air raids had occurred. The letter exists only as a suggested template, however, written by plaintiffs who sued the Japanese government seeking such an apology and compensation of 1.23 billion yen (approximately $15 million). In March 2007, sixty-two years after the catastrophic Great Tokyo Air Raid forever changed their lives, 112 survivors and bereaved family members announced their intent to sue the government for redress. The following month, the plaintiffs, the oldest of whom was eighty-six and whose average age was seventy-four, filed the suit with the Tokyo District Court.

Writers Winifred A. Bird and Elizabeth Grossman followed the unfolding Tokohu disaster from their respective offices in Nagano, Japan, and Portland, Oregon. To form a picture of the damage, begin to understand how chemical contaminants and their potential health hazards are being handled after the tsunami, and assess their longterm effects, Bird visited the hard-hit prefectures of Ibaraki, Iwate, and Miyagi, while Grossman researched company and chemical information and how such issues are handled in the United States. While Japanese and international attention has focused on radiation danger associated with the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, chemical contamination also promises to significantly impact the region and its ability to recover.

Murakami Haruki's brilliant speech on June 9 in Barcelona, Spain, delivered in acceptance of the International Catalunya Prize, has contributed to the resetting of the anti-nuclear agenda in Japan.

In January 2009, in his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize in Israel, the author had used his podium time to deliver a keenly aimed attack on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In Barcelona, by turning his sights to “peaceful uses” of atoms, he again gave voice to the Japanese conscience of our era.

I last visited Barcelona two years ago in the spring. An amazing number of readers gathered when I held a book signing. Long lines formed and I still could not finish signing all the books even after one and a half hours. The reason it took so long is that so many of the female readers wanted to kiss me. That was time consuming.