More than a decade ago, Joao Masuko seized an opportunity. With the burgeoning Latin American migrant population in Hamamatsu hungering for a taste of home, he opened a small grocery.

Seeking a “21st-century way of working” that promotes increased labor productivity and “diverse work styles,” Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) has issued a report recommending major changes to work hour regulations. The centerpiece of the proposal is an exemption from overtime pay for white-collar workers.

Japanese history has become an explosive political issue in the media today, particularly in the journalistic coverage of politicians' statements and of recurring questions of textbook whitewashing. But as scholars of Japan and Asia are aware, these perspectives constitute only a portion a much wider public debate surrounding historical reconciliation in Japan. As an anthropologist who studies youth culture and media, I have been disturbed by the narrow range of examples that tend to be relied upon in coverage of nationalism in Japan. I offer as a contrast examples from my own research on Japanese rap music and anime.

As some members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan know only too well, Japan can be a very uncomfortable place when the right starts sharpening its rhetorical spears. The Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) discovered this to its cost last year when it wandered into the debate over prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine: a key issue for Japanese conservatives.

While “karma” is used so often in the West today that it has become almost a household word, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the socio-political role played by karma in Asian societies, past or present. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the very idea of karma having a socio-political role will come as a surprise to many. That is to say, how could an ethical concept like karma, commonly associated with the good or bad effects of an individual's acts, play a role in collective entities like society and politics?

The 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurs today, August 6, 2007, bringing with it thousands of commemoration ceremonies in cities and towns around the world. Such events have become part and parcel of the nuclear era, and include the lighting and floating of lanterns in memory of the dead, silent vigils, religious observances, the chalking of human “shadows” on the ground, readings of John Hersey's Hiroshima, and leafletting.

Japan's critical intellectuals, whose views on Asia Oguma Eiji analyzes in the context of Japan's postwar history, were quite influential at least through the 1970s. They regularly published not only in books but in monthly magazines read by hundreds of thousands and newspapers with circulations in the millions. As Oguma shows, their perspectives on Asia and modernity have fluctuated in response to a variety of factors, including most prominently Japan's relations with the U.S. but also in response to the changing course of Asian revolutions.

This set of papers is adapted from the panel, “Labor Migration to Japan: Demography and the Sense of Crisis,” held at the Association of Asian Studies meetings in March, 2007. As the chair and discussant of the panel, I would like to introduce these papers to the Japan Focus audience. If there ever was a notion that a straightforward relationship exists between population decline, on the one hand, and the welcoming of immigration in a transparent, systematic, and coordinated manner, on the other, these papers show it to be totally mistaken. Even in the face of anxieties concerning labor shortages, the politics of migration in receiving countries prove to be complex indeed, as the state seeks to perfectly regulate and control immigration, and to define those worthy of some kind of regular status, versus those unworthy, illegal, and thereby, criminal. While migrants' 1.6% share of the population may sound insignificant in comparison with levels in Europe, the government has mentioned raising the level to three percent, so there is now an official discourse toward increasing foreign residents' presence. At three percent, Japan would approach Spain's ratio (3.1%) in 2002

True to his word, Abe Shinzo is radically overhauling Japan's education system, the single most important item accompanying his attempt to revise the Constitution. In his basic policy speech to the Diet in 2006, the prime minister vowed to rewrite the Fundamental Law of Education, rebuild education and “nurture people who value their families, their communities, and their country.” That makes his reform agenda the most ambitious since 1947, when the education law, written under US occupation, swept away the fascist-tinged classroom policies of the Imperial era.

This is the third article by John McGlynn in a series that meticulously dissects US charges of North Korean criminality, notably the forgery of US currency and money laundering, the significance of the legal instruments it has imposed on North Korea through Banco Delta Asia, and the significance of US actions for the resolution of the interrelated issues of North Korean nuclear weapons and the normalization of US-North Korean relations.

Lhamo Thondup was born on July 6, 1935 in Taktster, a small village in the Amdo region of northeast Tibet. But neither his parents — farmers who grew barley, buckwheat and potatoes — nor his three elder brothers and one elder sister (a younger sister and brother came later) were to discover his true identity until a few years later.

Then, when the little boy was 4, a party of senior Buddhist monks and officials from the distant capital of Lhasa arrived in the village searching for the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama – the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, whose title means “ocean of wisdom.” The party was led by Kewtsang Rinpoche, a respected monk who had chosen to head northeast as that was the direction in which the face of the embalmed 13th Dalai Lama (known as “the Great 13th”), who died on Dec. 17, 1933 was said to have mysteriously pointed.

The southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago has been a source of contention between Japan and China since 2004, when Chinese officials started to refer to it as “rocks” not as an “island.” In international law, rocks cannot be a basis for claiming an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). After the Chinese challenge to its territorial right over Okinotorishima, Japanese officials reacted vigorously, notably Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, within whose jurisdiction Okinotorishima falls. Ishihara ordered installation of a 330 million yen radar system for surveillance and set up an address plate at the “island.” The two countries continue to dispute the issue.

The zanryu fujin (stranded war wives) [1] are former Japanese emigrants to Manchukuo who remained in China at the end of the Second World War. They were long among the forgotten legacies of Japan's imperialist past. [2] The reasons why these women did not undergo repatriation during the years up to 1958, when large numbers of former colonial emigrants returned to Japan, are varied but in many cases, the ‘Chinese’ families that adopted them, or into which they married, played a part. [3] The stories of survival during the period immediately after the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War on 9 August 1945, the civil war that followed, and throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, are testament to their strength. At the same time, the history of how the zanryu fujin came to be in China is useful for understanding the Japanese government's colonial policies, its wartime attitudes toward women, and its post war handling of inconvenient war legacies.

With high hopes for better economic mobility and social security, many Filipinos arrive in Japan through the arrangements of promoters and matchmakers. Despite potentially high rewards, some Filipinos nonetheless feel ambivalent about the choices they have made in coming to Japan. Others try to suppress their anxieties about the possibly severe physical, economic, mental, and sexual exploitation and violence from which they may suffer. They are usually aware that their services and performances are the objects of their customers' desires to enjoy exotic and erotic ambience at the clubs where they work. Other Filipino entertainers may conversely swiftly sink their ragged bodies onto the canvas, barely hearing the count going up to ten and the bell signaling the end of their stints.

Is anything new under the sun in military-ruled Burma? On August 15, 2007, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) military junta ordered a cut in subsidies for gasoline products, resulting in a 100 percent price increase for diesel oil and as much as 500 percent for compressed natural gas. The decree was unexpected, and imposed great hardship on people whose standard of living was already precarious. Public transport became unaffordable, forcing many people to walk to work. Food trucked in from rural areas became more expensive. Shop owners and business people could no longer afford diesel oil to fuel their generators, the only reliable source of electricity in Rangoon and most other places in Burma.

The first lines of Robert Browning's poem, ‘The Patriot’ – “It was roses, roses, all the way” – may well characterise the splendid success of prime minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Japan during December 13-15. It all started with the “breaking of protocol for a late evening arrival at Tokyo International Airport, Haneda, by the Japanese foreign minister Taro Aso”. The next day he had an afternoon audience at the Imperial Palace with the emperor of Japan, Akihito, and empress Michiko, followed by a historic honour – a first for an Indian prime minister – to address the joint session of the Diet, the Japanese parliament. The visit concluded on December 15 with a joint public statement, with the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, on “India-Japan Strategic and Global Partnership”.

Since the Six Party Beijing Agreement on North Korea of 13 February 2007, optimism has spread on all fronts save one – Japan. For the Abe government, nuclear weapons constitute only part of the North Korea problem. Indeed, as Wada Haruki notes below, for the Japanese government it is not nuclear weapons but the abduction problem that constitutes “the most important problem our country faces.”

Duane Schattle doesn't mince words. “The cities are the problem,” he says. A retired Marine infantry lieutenant colonel who worked on urban warfare issues at the Pentagon in the late 1990s, he now serves as director of the Joint Urban Operations Office at U.S. Joint Forces Command. He sees the war in the streets of Iraq's cities as the prototype for tomorrow's battlespace. “This is the next fight,” he warns. “The future of warfare is what we see now.”

He isn't alone. “We think urban is the future,” says James Lasswell, a retired colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. “Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment.” And Wayne Michael Hall, a retired Army brigadier general and the senior intelligence advisor in Schattle's operation, has a similar assessment. “We will be fighting in urban terrain for the next hundred years.”

The post-war Asia-Pacific witnessed many conflicts involving major regional players. These include the divided Korean Peninsula, the Cross-Taiwan Strait problem, and the sovereignty disputes over the Southern Kuriles/“Northern Territories”, and the Tokdo/Takeshima, Diaoyu/Senkaku, and Spratly/Nansha islands. These and others, such as the ongoing Okinawa problem, emblematic of the large US military presence in the region, and the US-imposed outcomes in Micronesia, all share an important common foundation in the post-war disposition of Japan, notably the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. Prepared and signed by multiple countries under US initiative, this treaty largely framed the postwar political and security order in the region, and with its associated security arrangements, laid the foundation for the regional Cold War structure, namely the “San Francisco System”.

Two prominent leaders of the Middle East headed abroad last weekend, canvassing support from the international community. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad went on a tour of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador, the “red rain land” of Latin America, while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert headed for China.