Reading the 25 February inauguration speech of South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun, I felt my spirits lift. Heading the list of his political principles, President Roh spoke of steps towards the launch of “a Northeast Asian era”:

“The Korean peninsula is located at the centre of Northeast Asia. The Korean peninsula is a bridge linking China and Japan, continent and ocean. In the past, this geopolitical location was a cause for suffering, but today it constitutes opportunity. The 21st century demands a central role for Northeast Asia.

It has long been my dream for an order of peace and prosperity of the kind that now exists in the European Union to be built in Northeast Asia By such an accomplishment the era of Northeast Asia would be brought to fruition. I give my firm promise to devote all my effort for that day to be brought closer.”

This article, and Geoffrey White's “War Memory and American Patriotism: Pearl Harbor and 9-11” originally appeared in Laura Hein and Daizaburo Yui, Crossed Memories: Perspectives on 9/11 and American Power, Center for Pacific and American Studies, The University of Tokyo, 2003. http://www.cpas.c.u.-tokyo.ac.jp/ The texts have been revised and condensed for Japan Focus.

North Korea ranks high on the Bush administration's list of ‘terror states’. The January 2002 ‘Axis of Evil’ speech and the June 2002 commitment to preemptive war were stark signals from Washington to Pyongyang. The formal presidential statement of strategy presented to Congress in September 2002 referred only to two ‘rogue states’, meaning states that brutalize their own people, ignore international law, strive to acquire weapons of mass destruction, sponsor terrorism, ‘reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.’ These states, which constituted ‘a looming threat to all nations’, were Iraq and North Korea.

This article traces the fundamental shifts in Japanese contingency planning for war under pressure from the start of the Bush administration and particularly since 9/11. The author shows that the Koizumi administration's security policy, and particularly the War Contingency Laws that passed the Diet on May 15, 2003, are not only in violation of the no war clause in the Japanese Constitution but constitute a dramatic extension of the U.S.-Japan security relationship that is at odds with the interests of the people of Japan and Asia. Asai Motofumi, the former head of the Foreign Ministry's China Division, is a professor at Meiji Gakuin and the author of numerous articles and books on Japanese global policy. The article appeared in the February, 2003 issue of Gunshuku Mondai Kenkyujo.

America's 703 officially acknowledged foreign military enclaves (as of September 30, 2002), although structurally, legally, and conceptually different from colonies, are themselves something like microcolonies in that they are completely beyond the jurisdiction of the occupied nation.1 The United States virtually always negotiates a “status of forces agreement” (SOFA) with the ostensibly independent “host” nation, including countries whose legal systems are every bit (and perhaps more) sophisticated than our own.

For its sheer brutality, the scene that has emerged before us has hurled the world into what I might call a “new Dark Ages.” Wielding high-tech weapons, a barbarian “empire” is set to dominate the world with absolute violence. This empire's intentions are “medieval.”

The only thing that is new is the use of state-of-the-art weapons systems. People are being killed with certainty – and in utter absurdity.

According to a survey by the Ministry of Education and Science, this spring's graduation ceremonies’ enforcement rate of singing “Kimigayo” (the Japanese national anthem) crept ever closer to their target of 100%. Behind these figures, there remain a not insignificant number of students who question, object and oppose it. Students at Hokkaido's Sapporo Minami High School (the island's most academically prestigious high school), persistently challenged the national anthem enforcement, including requesting an Attorneys’ Association to appeal on behalf of their human rights. Why did they resist and how do they reflect on their actions now?

For half a century, Japan has permitted ethnic minorities, notably Koreans, to run their own schools while refusing to recognize these schools graduates by denying their students the right to sit for entrance examinations at national universities. The controversy has centered above all on the rights of graduates of pro-North Korean schools. The issues came to a boil recently when the Ministry of Education extended this right to three international schools while continuing to require that graduates of ethnic schools take a preliminary examination to determine eligibility to sit for the regular examination. The issue has long been central to the movement for the rights of ethnic minorities in Japan. Eriko Arita is a staff writer for The Japan Times. This article appeared in The Japan Times on April 12, 2003.

This article draws on the Tokyo Tribunal on the Military Comfort Women to reexamine issues of violence against women in both wartime and peacetime. In highlighting the centrality of the issue of violence against women, Ito offers a feminist alternative to dominant peace discourse. The Tokyo Tribunal of December 2000, organized by Asian feminists, presented the testimony of scores of surviving military comfort women from a dozen Asian nations, as well as specialists on Japanese atrocities in the Pacific War. The citizens’ tribunal convicted Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese state of crimes against humanity in their treatment of more than 100,000 Asian comfort women who served as the sexual slaves of the Japanese military. Ito draws on the experience of the comfort women and World War II to advance a gendered concept of positive peace. This article appeared in Heiwa Kenkyû (Peace Research) Vol. 26 November 2001. Ito Ruri is a Professor at the Institute of Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University.

History moved forward, but the movement was accompanied by painful sacrifice. Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to North Korea was intended to carve out a new page in the history of Japan and North Korea, countries whose relations have been suspended for almost half a century. Instead, when North Korea revealed the shocking truth that among the Japanese abducted to North Korea 8 were dead and 5 alive somewhere, the response from the Japanese public was of anger against North Korea combined with suspicion that the Koizumi administration was using the North Korean visit to try to boost its own popularity. The Japanese Foreign Ministry, moreover, compounded its incompetence by delaying distribution of a list recording the dates of the victims’ deaths. Fierce criticism of the government and its handling of foreign affairs mounts daily. In response to this public concern, the outlook for the normalization talks scheduled for October becomes uncertain, and it is possible that the government's schedule for accelerated negotiations towards normalization might collapse.