One year after media reports that Aso Mining used 300 Allied prisoners of war for forced labor in 1945, Foreign Minister Aso Taro is refusing to confirm that POWs dug coal for his family's company—and even challenging reporters to produce evidence.

That is not hard to do. Records produced by both Aso Mining and the Japanese government clearly show that POWs toiled at the Aso Yoshikuma mine in Fukuoka Prefecture.

In his personal narrative Atomic Quest, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, who directed atomic research at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory during the Second World War, tells of receiving an urgent visit from J. Robert Oppenheimer while vacationing in Michigan during the summer of 1942. Oppenheimer and the brain trust he assembled had just calculated the possibility that an atomic explosion could ignite all the hydrogen in the oceans or the nitrogen in the atmosphere. If such a possibility existed, Compton concluded, “these bombs must never be made.” As Compton said, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.” Certainly, any reasonable human being could be expected to respond similarly.

As the US-India-Japan-Australia-Singapore joint military exercise styled Operation Malabar was conducted in early September, reverberations were felt not only in China, but also in India. The US-India nuclear agreement, driving a nail deep into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has produced sharp debate within Indian politics, including in the ruling coalition, as described by Praful Bidwai. Japan Focus.

New Delhi - As India's coalition government tries to complete the controversial nuclear cooperation deal with the United States, it finds itself caught between domestic opposition to the agreement from its Left-wing allies and pressure from Washington to seal the deal.

The election of Kevin Rudd as Australian Prime Minister in a Labor Party sweep has led many to anticipate a major shift in Australia's international relations and environmental policies, and possible realignments in Asia. We offer four brief assessments of the significance of the election for the region at a time when long-entrenched governments in England, Poland, and many parts of Latin America point to possible sea changes in international affairs.

This article deals with the Japanese Imperial Government's and Military's involvement in the wartime military comfort woman system (1931-1945) and presents new archival evidence documenting the use of comfort stations by Japanese businessmen as well as soldiers.

The Chukiren Peace Memorial Museum nestles among swathes of identikit houses in a suburb of Saitama Prefecture, watched over by a pensioner – a foot soldier in what Milan Kundera called the struggle of memory against forgetting. Voluntarily funded and still smelling of new paint, the museum is a work in progress; an antidote, hopes Curator Niki Fumiko, to the narcissistic chauvinism of the Abe administration, which she and her supporters believe is poisoning the bloodstream of Japanese politics.

Despite centuries of subjugation by larger neighbours—Joseon Korea, Imperial Japan, and South Korea—Jeju island society has maintained a distinct identity and a measure of autonomy. Relations with both Korea and Japan have at times had devastating effects on the islanders, but also contributed to the dynamism of Jeju island society and opened up new routes for islanders to continue traveling as a vital part of their social life.

SAMOA — Espen Ronneberg is Climate Change Adviser for the Secretariat of the Pacific Program on the Environment (SPREP), a regional organization established by the governments of the Pacific region and including all 22 Pacific island countries and territories as well as Australia, France, New Zealand and the United States. Ronneberg was Vice-President of the Kyoto Conference of 1997 that adopted the Kyoto Protocol on the environment.

China's coastal regions have received impressive financial and organizational resources through overseas Chinese networks and international capital generally. China's land borders are also linked to transnational communities, thanks to the networks of ethnic minorities who live there. This article introduces the mobilization of the Korean minority's transnational ethnicities in the service of local economic development. China's well-established structure for the utilization of overseas Chinese resources serves as a frame of reference. The analysis focuses on foreign investment, donations, and remittances—resources that are widely regarded as the most important development input provided by the overseas Chinese. The regional focus is on Yanbian, a Korean autonomous prefecture in Jilin Province in Northeast China, which has enjoyed a measure of success in attracting Korean investment in step with burgeoning China-South Korea economic and political ties. But it has also faced significant challenges.

Opposition to free trade is commonly treated as a heresy. Yet farmers in Japan, and in other countries across the Asian region, have persistently opposed the WTO order, and now oppose its extension through bilateral or multilateral Free Trade Agreements, of which most notable are those currently being negotiated between the United States and South Korea and between Japan and Australia. Commonly, those negotiations are conducted at high bureaucratic level, with direct input from major business federations but little or no voice for farmer and consumer groups. With the Doha round of WTO negotiations stalled, the United States, Japan and others are shifting their attention to bilateral FTAs. Ono Kazuoki, veteran of Japanese and Asian farmer movements, here comments on the projected Australia-Japan FTA. (Japan Focus)

Japan Focus presents the introduction to the text and the link to the illustrated children's story that accompanies it. Illustrations by Shikoku Goro. The story is available in side-by-side Japanese and English texts.

This unit presents the illustrated testimony of Takahashi Akihiro, an A-bomb survivor in Hiroshima, who was born in that city in 1931 and miraculously survived the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945 when he was 14 years old.

One of the few Americans to see action during the Bug Wars of the nineteen-nineties was Robert J. Lang, a lanky Californian who was on the front lines throughout, from the battle of the Kabutomushi Beetle to the battle of the Menacing Mantis and the battle of the Long-Legged Wasp. Most combatants in the Bug Wars—which were, in fact, origami contests—were members of the Origami Detectives, a group of artists in Japan who liked to try outdoing one another with extreme designs of assigned subjects. They engaged in the Bug Wars after one of the Detectives displayed what the group's Web site calls “an incredible secret weapon”—a horned beetle with outspread wings, which he had folded from a single sheet of paper. “Then the origami insect war got full-scale,” the English translation of the Web site continues. “They compared their confident models with others at their monthly meetings, and losers left with chagrin.” During the Bug Wars, Lang was not yet a professional origami artist; he was a research scientist at Spectra Diode Labs, in San Jose, who did some paper folding on the side. He was busy at work—in 1993, the year of the Menacing Mantis, for instance, he patented a self-collimated resonator laser and worked on fibre-optic networks for space satellites—so he usually wasn't able to travel to Japan to hand-deliver his bug of the month. Instead, he would e-mail his design to an ally in Tokyo, who would fold it and present it to the Detectives on Lang's behalf.

In 2006, close to 400,000 people in Japan participated in voluntary activities and more than 30,000 volunteer associations received a nationally certified status as non-profit organizations (NPOs). In 1985, only about 100,000 people counted as volunteers. These figures indicate not only a quantitative but also a qualitative change. Japan today is moving toward a borantia shakai or volunteer-oriented civil society, with particularly high rates of NPO activitity in urban regions. Why has this change occurred?

Korean ethnic education in Japanese public schools, which started in the 1960s, is a form of multicultural education that provides useful ideas for multiculturalist teachers dealing with children of newcomer foreigners. In Osaka, Japanese and Korean activists with different political agendas developed two distinctive approaches. Those interested in the homeland politics of the two Koreas tried to develop an ethno-national identity among Korean children, while those involved in civil rights politics in Japan encouraged the development of political subjectivity.

In February 2007, agreement was reached at the Six Party talks in Beijing on the parameters for resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue. The frame was one of comprehensive settlement of one of the long unresolved legacies of the 20th century and the prospect it opened was for a new, diplomatic, military, political, and economic order.

This paper asks why the settlement has taken so long to reach, considers the major obstacles to its implementation, and assesses its prospects. It argues that to understand the “North Korea Problem” close attention has to be paid to the “America Problem” and the “Japan Problem.” It suggests that, while North Korean strategic objectives have been consistent through the decade and a half of crisis, the US and Japan have vacillated, torn between conservative, neo-conservative, and reactionary forces on the one hand and “realists” on the other. The US strategic shift of February heralds the dawn of a 21st century Northeast Asian order; whether that dawn is to prove a true or false one should be clear by year's end.

It is not sufficient to fight against myths by destroying one myth and replacing it with another, as in, for example, criticising the myth of the homogenous nation by replacing it with the myth of the mixed nation (Oguma 2002: 349)

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo announced in April 2007 that the government was planning to establish a “panel of experts” to examine the question of whether to “revise the current interpretation of the Constitution” in order to permit Japan to engage in certain specified collective self-defense operations. The Americans have long pressed for greater Japanese involvement in collective security, and the announcement came shortly before Mr. Abe's first trip to meet with President George W. Bush. Yet Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, among other things, renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes”. This has been understood by the courts and all past governments of Japan to prohibit Japan's participation in collective self-defense operations, or engagement in any use of force, for any reason other than the direct defense of Japan.

The hearings of the US congressional committees on intelligence in Washington in the past two successive weeks make it clear that the administration of President George W Bush has no intention of pressuring Pakistan over the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Standing strong year after year, from sunrise to sunrise, silent sentinels unmoved by summer's raging typhoons and winter's crashing ice floes.

Not sure what to think of tetrapods? Not even sure what they are? Well, fear not, you're probably in the majority.

But what you don't know may surprise you.

Among those who do know and care, tetrapods inspire passionate and widely divergent opinions.