For many years Umebayashi Hiromichi from Peace Depot in Yokohama has been prominent in both the use of the US Freedom of Information Act as a research tool and the analysis of United States and Japanese missile defence policy and operations in East Asia. In 2006 Umebayashi published a major study of US naval operations testing capacity to detect and track North Korean missile launches in the Sea of Japan. That research was based on a careful scrutiny of US Navy ship decklogs and command histories, available at the US Naval History Center in Washington.

Despite an express policy against importing unskilled foreign labor, the Government of Japan (GOJ) since 1990 has been following an unacknowledged backdoor “guest worker” program to alleviate a labor shortage that threatens to become chronic. Through its “Student”, “Entertainer”, “Nikkei repatriation”, “Researcher”, “Trainee”, and “Intern” Visa programs, the GOJ has imported hundreds of thousands of cost-effective Non-Japanese (NJ) laborers to stem the “hollowing out” (i.e. outsourcing, relocation, or bankruptcy) of Japan's domestic industry at all levels.

War is tragedy. Bigtime.

Destruction of lives, livelihoods, families, homes, hopes, dreams.

All the things that peace nurtures.

War is so extreme — so irrevocable, so unthinkable — that the very seriousness of militarism invites its exaggeration into pure farce. Satirists and cartoonists are our public disbelievers, anarchic enough to wrestle war's horror into absurdity, allowing us to confront our worst fears with a dash of wry disbelief, an edgy insistence that another reality is possible, that we have a choice.

A farming method called ‘natural farming’ needs no tilling, no fertilizers, no pesticides, and no weeding. For about 60 years, Fukuoka Masanobu, Japan's renowned authority on natural farming, honed methods based on his unique theories, insights and philosophy. His seminal book, “One-Straw Revolution,” first published in 1975, has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and other languages, and has been read around the world. The book addresses not only the practical aspects of natural farming but also the root causes of environmental deterioration. Fukuoka's thought and philosophy have inspired many people worldwide by pointing out a way of life. Here we introduce his thought and practices.

Three months before he became Prime Minister, in July 2006 Abe Shinzo published his political manifesto, under the title Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a beautiful country). It is well known that Abe's sense of beauty involves a denial of the darkest aspects of wartime history and insistence on compulsory love of country, and that he is committed to revision of the country's basic institutions accordingly. But the fundamental changes in the country's military posture, and especially in its relationship with the United States, have received less attention. Here we consider evidence of a new domestic role for the Self Defense Forces (SDF) as enforcer of unpopular policies, and the implications of a new law to facilitate US military reorganization. Okinawa is at the center of both.

By Chinese standards, the city of Yanji is rather small, with a population of nearly 400,000. About a third of them are ethnic Koreans: Yanji is the capital of Yanbian autonomous prefecture in the northeastern province of Jilin, the ethnic home of the large Korean minority in the area. The prefecture is close to the borders of North Korea and Russia.

[Japan Focus introduction: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo recently added another entry to the long, sorry chapter of official Japanese war-crime denials when he said that there was no coercion of the so-called comfort-women by the imperial military “in the narrow sense of the word.” On March 1, an historic day in the history of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, he said: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”

On March 29, 2007, members of the Japan Acton Network for the ‘Comfort Woman’ Issue, accompanied by three Diet representatives, visited the Cabinet Office to submit letters of protest against Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's series of statements denying Japanese governmental involvement in coercing the comfort women into the military's wartime system of sexual slavery. They also raised concern over efforts to revise the 1993 “Kono Statement.”

Nuclear power stations now produce about 17% of the world's electricity. In France and Lithuania nearly 80%, in Britain about 25%. Popular attitudes to nuclear power in other countries vary from apathy and indifference to fear and loathing. For the most part it would be fair to say, that as long as they don't contaminate the environment, and there are no blackouts, nuclear reactors must be a good thing. What has been the record of the countries that have been using nuclear power for decades?

March 1 and May 4 are important dates in the calendars of South Korea and China as they respectively mark the anniversaries of popular uprisings in 1919 against Japanese imperialism.

In South Korea, the anniversary is observed with a commemorative ceremony in which the president delivers a speech.

This year, President Roh Moo-hyun remonstrated with Japan about its “mistaken glorification and justification of history” and demanded that it engage in sincere soul-searching on the issue. Last year, South Korea's Prime Minister Lee Hae Chan came under public criticism for skipping the ceremony to play golf and was forced to step down.

This article was originally written for a Japanese audience. My purpose was to inform them of the developments leading up to the passage of the “comfort women” resolution in the House of Representatives. I did not, therefore, devote much space to describe the tireless efforts made by Japanese scholars, lawyers, and activists who have long kept the “comfort women” issue alive. Their dedication to the historical truth and the victims resulted in such accomplishments as the creation of Women's Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo and the 56 consecutive issues of the “The Report on Japan's War Responsibility” published by the Center for Research and Documentation of Japan's War Responsibility.

The maturity and the humanity of states and societies, as in the case of individuals, may be measured by the way they face the darkest moments of their own history. The contrast between recent judgments in courts in South Korea and Japan points to a gulf in terms of civic maturity, with South Korea apparently showing the way to Japan.

In the late 1990s, press coverage of police scandals in Japan provoked policy reactions so that more ‘trivial’ offences were reported, and overall crime figures rocketed. The resulting ‘myth of the collapse of secure society’ appears, in turn, to have contributed to increasingly punitive public views about offenders and sentencing in Japan.

Funafuti Atoll~A straight well-paved road leads to the northern tip of Fongafale Islet. In some places it is so narrow it feels like a causeway. Reverend Fr. Camille Desrosiers slowly drives his van pointing at modest landmarks of his adoptive country. He is 78 years old, originally from Quebec, Canada. He arrived in the Pacific in 1956 and never left, helping the impoverished people, drifting from one small island nation to another: first Samoa, later Tokelau now Tuvalu.

The starting point of this paper is the assumption that North Korea is de facto a well-defined nation-state, home to a national economy and inhabited by individuals that bear the same basic economic and social characteristics as individuals elsewhere. Despite the obvious specifics of the economic system and institutional structure of the country, standard economic theory should be applicable to the question of North Korean economic development. The article seeks to prove this as broadly as possible, showing that economic theory as diverse as classical and neoclassical, Marxist, Keynesian, institutional, developmentalist, neo-liberal or structuralist, dependency analysis-based and many others, including regionally centered approaches, can be utilized to explain the North Korean case with useful results, although the latter will inevitably vary depending on the chosen framework. Without arguing against or in favor of any of the available theoretical methods, this article advocates further research on North Korea as another case of development in East Asia, rather than as a mystical exception to the rule. This is particularly important in light of the tendency to describe North Korea as unpredictable, bizarre, and incomprehensible. This is clearly not the case.

At a time when the Iraq war continues to be a defining issue on the American scene, it is ironic that the most powerful and uncompromising documentary on the subject remains almost entirely unknown and unseen in this country. It took Japanese filmmaker Watai Takeharu a year and a half to film more than 123 hours of footage in Iraq, which he managed to edit down to two unforgettable hours. The result is the stunning Little Birds, which plunges the viewer into the middle of the war, in all its sorrow and horror, and never lets up.