Foreign ministers are busy people - especially energetic, creative diplomats like Russia's Sergei Lavrov and Iran's Manouchehr Mottaki, representing capitals that by tradition place great store on international diplomacy.

Therefore, the very fact that Lavrov and Mottaki have met no less than four times in as many months suggests a great deal about the high importance attached by the two capitals to their mutual understanding at the bilateral and regional level.

The January 1922 issue of Shonen kurabu (Boy's Club) carried the first episode of an exciting new “hot-blooded novel” (nekketsu shosetsu) drawn from the fertile imagination of noted children's writer Miyazaki Ichiu. For fourteen consecutive issues Miyazaki enthralled Japanese children with depictions of Japanese valour and the Yamato spirit (Yamato damashii) locked in a titanic struggle against a duplicitous and rapacious foreign enemy. The fate of the navy and of the nation itself hung in the balance. The Imperial navy fought valiantly against a technologically superior foe but was ultimately destroyed. Then, in Japan's darkest hour, the nation was saved by a group of true patriots, led by a child warrior commanding a powerful new technology. All Japan wept. This was the Future War Between Japan and America, “the greatest naval battle in history.”

Japan Focus is pleased to present an introduction to, and excerpts from, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller and Anthony Weller, with a foreword by Walter Cronkite. The story presented here explores MacArthur's censorship of Weller's reportage as the first journalist to enter Nagasaki, where he interviewed military and medical personnel, and the first to write at length on Japan's POW camps, where he interviewed hundreds of allied prisoners. Weller brings direct experience to bear on questions of US censorship of the atomic bomb, and particularly issues of radiation. Extraordinarily, not only were his Nagasaki dispatches censored, but his detailed interviews with POWs were also censored. Weller's reports, censored for sixty years, have only now become available.

Like most people, museum professionals generally dislike being at the center of a firestorm of criticism. Yet in recent years, many Japanese and American museum curators have suffered this fate for their exhibits on World War II. As many scholars have noted, war remembrance is fraught with difficult issues, prominently including how to portray the motives, policies, and conduct of one's own government during the war. In both countries, curators, particularly those at public institutions, faced a sudden increase in vitriolic political criticism in the mid-1990s over how to remember the wartime past.

While the Western press branded the Caspian summit a failure for its inability to agree on how to divide the Caspian or to endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal that no pipelines be built in the region in the absence of approval by all nations bordering the sea, Iranian analyst Kaveh L Afrasiabi points to the summit's achievement for Iran and Russia and the setback for the United States bent on isolating Iran. Japan Focus

Hiratate Hideaki's essay on Japan's Working Poor highlights two issues that are likely to be with us for some time: how to provide social support for increased numbers of elderly, and how to cope with growing income inequality. A first step of course is to recognize that the problems exist and are connected, and this article is helpful in that regard. By “us” I refer both to people in Japan but also around the world where so many societies are aging at a fast pace, where disparities in income and wealth are growing, and where welfare and retirement systems are being cut back.

Here in Tokyo, I saw two movies last week. One was a feature, and the other was a documentary. Both were about Japan's Kamikaze pilots in World War II.

“I wanted to convey the corps' beauty to young people today.” So writes Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro at the start of “For Those We Love,” (Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku the feature film. Ishihara is the film's executive producer and scriptwriter.

[Japan's payments towards the UN budget, at more than 19 per cent, are second only to the US. Although all its efforts thus far to secure a permanent seat on the Security Council have been in vain, many Japanese citizens serve, some at high levels, on UN bodies. None has been more prominent than Sadako Ogata, Head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees through the decade of the 1990s.

Tanaka Shozo (1841–1913) is widely acknowledged as Japan's “first conservationist.” A former village headman, in the 1890s he led the fight against the Ashio Copper Mine's pollution of the Watarase and Tone rivers northwest of Tokyo. Tanaka's endeavors are frequently cast as a peasant warning to an industrializing Japan, but they can more accurately be seen as the work of a modern environmental thinker who developed a sophisticated ecological theory of society based on the twin processes of nature: “poison” (doku) and “flow” (nagare). From this position he went on to combat the Meiji state's flood control plans for the Kanto plain: a massive reengineering of the entire watershed and the beginning of the Japanese state's systematic intervention in nature. In response to the state's flood control plan, Tanaka's Fundamental River Law (konponteki kasenho) and philosophies of “poison” and “flow” describe the harm that comes from ignoring the dictates of an active nature in the name of absolute human agency. His law revered flow, “not as a made thing” but as fundamental to nature, indeed, to all life.

On the 23rd and 24th of April the first round of negotiations for the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) was held in Canberra, the Australian capital. This is the first negotiation since the telephone conversation four months ago between Prime Ministers Abe Shinzo and John Howard, in which a decision was made to begin negotiations. To avoid negative political repercussions the negotiations were scheduled to follow the Japanese General Election and were held in Australia.

BEIJING–With more than two decades of market reforms under its belt, China has transformed into a trading powerhouse and the world's “factory.” It is also making its presence felt in the worlds of science and technology.

China's expenditure, in terms of purchasing power parity, along with its army of researchers, has already surpassed Japan's.

A recent event making headlines worldwide was the publication of GAIJIN HANZAI URA FAIRU (The Underground Files of Gaijin Crime). This magazine, which went on sale at major Japanese bookstores and convenience stores nationwide, depicts foreigners as “dangerous” and “evil”. Despite Japan's lack of a legal framework, or a civil society capable of curbing hate speech, activists managed to have the magazine removed from stores and put out of circulation. This report shows how non-Japanese residents in Japan (a disparate group with few things in common–not even a language) successfully pushed for their rights in a case ignored by the Japanese media. Utilizing the power of the Internet to organize a boycott of magazine outlets, “Newcomer” residents and immigrants demonstrated their strength as a consumer bloc for what is probably the first time in Japan's history. This is the report of a participant observer.

This article examines the place of Sino-Japanese relations in Japan's domestic struggles over war memory in the early 1950s, when the door to an official reconciliation with China had just closed following the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. It focuses on the Japan-China Friendship Association as a lens through which to understand the role of civic organization in carving out a public space for memories of Japanese wartime aggression as part of special interest politics.

An American researcher examines how the requirements of political assimilation have threatened the unique culture of China's Tai minority, and the Tai response.

In 1997 I arrived on China's southwest borders planning to spend a year researching ethnic minority folklore. The only problem, as I discovered when I arrived, was that there didn't appear to be any.

This article is slightly adapted from a chapter by the late Fujiwara Akira, an emeritus professor at Hitotsubashi University until his death in 2003, which first appeared in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38: Complicating the Picture (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2007). Fujiwara wrote one of two introductory chapters to this volume about the Nanking Massacre, the seventieth anniversary of which will be observed in December.

If optimism is a force multiplier, as former US secretary of state Colin Powell once said, it has worked well so far for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). There were times in the past seven years when it seemed doubtful that the SCO would pull through, beating back the all-out US assault on its credibility.

Three concerns – oil, China and the war on terror – are pushing the United States toward greater involvement in Africa.

The new United States defence budget involves a substantial increase in spending and a redirection of many military programmes towards counterinsurgency and responding to asymmetric warfare (see “The costs of America's long war”, 8 March 2007). It also entails a relatively little-noticed change in the orientation of the US military towards Africa, announced on 9 February 2007: the planned establishment of Africa Command (Africom).