The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement is a proposed trade pact that Japan is currently negotiating with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam (as of September 2013). The TPP aims to increase the liberalization of economies in the Pacific region through abolition of tariffs on trade as well as reregulation. In 2008, the United States joined the talks “and has espoused a hard core complete free trade policy,” which has vastly expanded the scope of the negotiations. With both the US and Japan as participants, the pact would cover nearly 40% of the world's economy. Japan officially joined one of final rounds of the negotiations in July 2013 in Malaysia, as the participating countries intend to finalize the TPP negotiations (at least partially) by the end of 2013.

Japan's swing to the right in the December 2012 Lower House election placed three-quarters of the seats in the hands of conservative parties. The result should come as no surprise. This political movement not only capitalized on a putative external threat generated by recent international territorial disputes (with China/Taiwan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and with South Korea over Takeshima/Dokdo islands). It also rode a xenophobic wave during the 2000s, strengthened by fringe opposition to reformers seeking to give non-Japanese more rights in Japanese politics and society.

This article traces the arc of that xenophobic trajectory by focusing on three significant events: The defeat in the mid-2000s of a national “Protection of Human Rights” bill (jinken yōgo hōan); Tottori Prefecture's Human Rights Ordinance of 2005 that was passed on a local level and then rescinded; and the resounding defeat of proponents of local suffrage for non-citizens (gaikokujin sanseiken) between 2009-11. The article concludes that these developments have perpetuated the unconstitutional status quo of a nation with no laws against racial discrimination in Japan.

In 2012, Kim Jong-il, the “beloved leader” of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, died. As power passed to his son Kim Jong-un (the third generation of the Kim family to exercise dominion over the now impoverished nation), intelligence analysts and media pundits began their inevitable cycle of conjecture, anticipating power struggles and the possibility for a fundamental political realignment in the region. In this essay, Brian Cumings suggests something of the short-sightedness of these speculations, and argues that any effort to understand the political transition in North Korea must take into account long-standing patterns in religion, culture and politics. These patterns represent, not some unchanging template — Kim Jong-un's notable departure from the Confucian mourning ritual observed by his father suggests as much — but a repertoire of authoritative symbols, the materials out of which the regime will construct a “usable past” by which to characterize and respond to the challenges of the present. Awareness of the traditional repertoire that makes up this “usable past” may not allow us to predict with certainty how individuals and societies will behave, but it will certainly help us to understand why they behaved as they did.

A June 2 article in Bloomberg by the deservedly respected University of California at San Diego Professor of Japanese Business, Ulrike Schaede, makes the argument that Abenomics requires nuclear restarts in order to work. Professor Schaede presents an overview of Japan's present circumstances on energy, and concludes that “Japan has only one viable course of action: It cannot afford not to turn its nuclear-power plants back on.” In the present article, I suggest that Japan cannot restart its nuclear capacity in the time-frame suggested by Professor Schaede. And drawing on recent research by Japanese and American experts, I shall argue that Japan's best bet is in accelerating its efficiency and conservation programmes.

I’m staring at a blank white screen that awaits my text, but to type feels like a violation. What can be added to the sheer luminous emptiness in light (in the impossible violence of light) of the cataclysm of Hiroshima 1945? By taking on the incomprehensible destruction wrought by the atomic bomb in her book After Hiroshima, artist elin o’Hara slavick faces a void of annihilation that transcends expression, and yet, with meticulous care and consciousness, she produces photographic exposures that illuminate the unspeakable. Through works of troubling beauty, slavick enacts a temporal rupture, unearthing a moment that has been relegated to the historical past by saying, with stark but quiet clarity, that Hiroshima 1945 is not over.

From the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45 to the Communist Revolution of 1949, the onrushing narrative of modern China can drown out the stories of the people who lived it. Yet a remarkable cache of letters from one of China's most prominent and influential families, the Lius of Shanghai, sheds new light on this tumultuous era. These letters take us inside the Lius’ world to explore how the family laid the foundation for a business dynasty before the war and then confronted the challenges of war, civil unrest, and social upheaval.

In a dismaying week for the PRC, India turned away from China…and gave further signals that it is ready to move beyond the narrative of Japanese World War II aggression that has informed China's Asian diplomacy and anchored the US presence in Asia for over half a century in favor of a view of Japan as a leading and laudable security actor in East Asia.

Is it time to bring Japan's postwar experiment in liberal democracy to an end? Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his followers seem to think so. In April 2012, the LDP published a clear blueprint for constitutional revision that would go a long way toward achieving this goal.

The Liberal Democratic Party has advocated fundamental revision of Japan's Constitution since its founding in 1955. Nearly seven decades after the end of World War II, LDP leaders remain humiliated by the thought that the country is governed under a constitution largely drafted by a team of foreign military officers. Abe is working hard to build a coalition with the power to rip the “imposed constitution” out by its philosophical roots. He and his followers, who dominate the LDP, envision an “autonomous constitution” (jishu kenpō) that would radically adjust the balance between government power and individual rights.

The Asia-Pacific Journal presents excerpts from Sarah Bird's newly published novel, Above the East China Sea together with her conversation with Steve Rabson, who served in the army on Okinawa in 1968 en route to becoming a leading translator of Okinawan literature. Bird's novel engages the theme of suicide and death from the Battle of Okinawa to the present, interweaving the fate of Okinawans and American occupying forces. As Robert Leleux observed in a review of the novel, “In the heightened metaphysical reality of Bird's novel, humans and ghosts walk among each other, and mortality proves no hindrance to resolving family dramas. In fact, Okinawans’ relationship to death, at least as presented by Bird, seems somewhat offhand, as though the great cosmic divide is actually a very thin veil between our world and the next … reminiscent of Faulkner's great line, ‘The past is never dead. It's not even past.’“ This issue of APJ couples the novel with the recollections of compulsory mass suicide in the Battle of Okinawa in which 16-year old Kinjo Shigeaki killed his mother and two younger siblings.

Having grown up in East Germany, from early on I have been familiar with all kinds of mass performances, including organized parades, meetings, or so-called mass games or mass gymnastics. All of them involved large numbers of people, often in the thousands or tens of thousands. The performances were characterized by a high level of synchronism and uniformity. They included music, artistic components, dancing and marching. They brimmed over with symbolism. The 대집단체조와 예술공연 아리랑 (Mass gymnastics and artistic performance Arirang), in the West usually known as Arirang Mass Games (henceforth Arirang) of the DPRK, or North Korea, thus do not strike me as particularly “breathtaking”, which seems to be the typical reaction of most visitors. This does not mean, however, that Arirang is less worth of our attention.

The renowned architect's life work and his new book, My Place, reflects an awareness of humanity's close affinity to the world around us

“I wanted to go to a place that wasn’t neat and tidy, somewhere dangerous. I was bored, and it had something to do with the era and something to do with myself too.”

In a recent letter to fellow architect Sejima Kazuyo, Kuma Kengo expressed in the above words the tenor of his mood and the disarray of his esprit during his student days.

Thailand has been in crisis since an armed forces coup overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006, ultimately forcing him into exile. Although his opponents used fair means and foul to keep various incarnations of Thaksin's party out of power, his sister Yingluck Shinawatra became Thailand's first female prime minister following a resounding electoral victory for Thaksin's Pheu Thai (For Thai) party in 2011.

More than six decades from the San Francisco Treaty that purportedly resolved the Asia-Pacific War and created a system of peace, East Asia in 2013 remains troubled by the question of sovereignty over a group of tiny, uninhabited islands. The governments of Japan, China, and Taiwan all covet and claim sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

These tiny islands, together with other scattered outcroppings across the Western Pacific, assume today some of the weight that attached almost a century ago to the vast domain of Northeast China (“Manchuria”), with comparable potential to plunge the region into conflict. If the countries of the region are to transcend the 19th and 20th century eras of Japanese imperialism and US Cold War hegemony and construct a 21st century of peace, cooperation, and prosperity, the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue must somehow first be addressed.

In the second half of the twentieth century, typhoon-triggered floods affected all sectors of society in the Philippines, but none more so than the urban poor, particularly the esteros-dwellers or shanty-town inhabitants, residing in the low-lying locales of Manila and a number of other cities on Luzon and the Visayas. The growing number of post-war urban poor in Manila, Cebu City and elsewhere, was largely due to the policy repercussions of rapid economic growth and impoverishment under the military-led Marcos regime. At this time in the early 1970s, rural poverty and environmental devastation increased rapidly, and on a hitherto unknown scale in the Philippines. Widespread corruption, crony capitalism and deforesting the archipelago caused large-scale forced migration, homelessness and a radically skewed distribution of income and assets that continued to favour elite interests.

Japan had the predominant role in creating the discourse of Pan-Asianism because it won the Russo-Japanese War. Gerhard Krebs's “World War Zero? New Literature on the Russo-Japanese War 1904/05” surveys some of the recent work on that war and the impact of Japan's victory around the world. It captured global attention as a racial war, since it was the first time an Asian nation had defeated a white nation. The greatest impact was in China and Korea, but Japan's success also influenced Pan-Islamic thought and the “Japanizers” of Ethiopia.

Although the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5 had radically changed the relationship between Japan and China, it was the Russo-Japanese war that lifted Japan out of the mass of Asian nations and into the status of a world power. Victory in this war first gave Japan a chance to speak as the voice of Asia to the Western powers. This achievement encouraged many in China and elsewhere in Asia to model their national reconstruction efforts on Japan. In Southeast Asia colonial subjects of the European empires hoped that Japan would help them gain independence. Although these hopes would not be dashed immediately, some people became aware of the contradictions between Pan-Asianism and the growing Japanese empire very early. Chinese intellectual Zhang Taiyan (who had famously said that the relationship between Japan and China should be as close as “lips and teeth”) became convinced that Japanese Pan-Asianism was not leading to what he desired, an “Asian Humanitarian Brotherhood,” but to Japanese imperial domination. By 1907 he was denouncing Japan as the “public enemy” of Asia.

Carlos Bulosan, in a 1949 letter to Philippine labor leader Amado Hernandez, warned his friend and political ally that they must be guarded in their future correspondence. Referencing FBI surveillance of left-wing labor activists in the United States, Bulosan tells Hernandez, “I'm being watched too.” To cover their tracks they employed aliases in their communiqués, Carlos adopted the nom de guerre, “Julie” and addressed his letters to Hernandez using his middle name “Victor.” “Julie” was but one of many anonyms that Bulosan used in his political communications during the Cold War to circumvent the watchful eye of the FBI. The letters to Hernandez along with similar dispatches to Luis Taruc, leader of the Hukbalahap (Huk) peasant movement were eventually discovered by Philippine police after the arrest of Jesus Lava, a key figure in the Philippine Communist Party (PKP). This information alarmed American intelligence operatives who worked closely with the Philippine government to suppress left-wing political opposition in the newly independent nation. Consequently, federal authorities redoubled efforts to disrupt transnational ties linking Filipino partisans in the United States and the Philippines.

Since our article appeared, there have been several developments that demand the reader's attention. The scale of electoral interference was found to have been more extensive than we originally reported. Last December, prosecutors investigating the case disclosed that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) had produced over a period of two years leading up to the election some 1900 online posts and approximately 22 million Tweets with political or election-related content—roughly 30% of all election-related content that was generated on Twitter. This was circulated by agents of the NIS's psychological warfare team and hired contractors.

Two years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began two media experts dissect how it has been covered by the media in Japan. Uesugi Takashi is a freelance journalist and author of several books on the Fukushima crisis, including Terebi Wa Naze Heiki De Uso Wo Tsukunoka? (Why does television tell so many lies?). He is also one of the founders of The Free Press Association of Japan (www.fpaj.jp), which attempts to offer an alternative to Japan's press club system. Ito Mamoru, is professor of media and cultural studies at Waseda University and author of Terebi Wa Genpatsu Jiko Dou Tsutaetenoka? (How did television cover the nuclear accident?).

The relationship between China and North Korea is a subject that attracts much discussion and speculation in today's policy circles and media. The history of Sino-North Korean friendship is typically traced to the time of the Korean War (1950-1953), although in North Korea it tends to go further back, to the colonial period. The texture of this international friendship has been changing recently. Some Chinese leaders state that China's friendship with North Korea is no longer a special one and that the two countries have, or should have, a “normal” interstate relationship—respecting mutual interests as well as certain international norms—rather than one that is historically determined and unchanging. In North Korea, by contrast, there has been renewed interest in reinventing its relationship with China as a historically constituted and durable friendship. This essay explores North Korea's recent efforts to present its relationship with China as a special, extraordinary, revolutionary friendship. It will focus on how the making of this special friendship draws upon a set of powerful ideas and metaphors of kinship and consanguinity. First, however, a few words on kinship and friendship concepts.

In this article Walker argues that Japanese imperial processes began much earlier than other scholars often assume; the Tokugawa government was well aware of various geo-political threats that certain countries posed to Japan's national defense in the early 19th century. Specifically, both the Qing Empire and Russia were poised to claim sovereignty over Sakhalin, an island in the North Pacific, through their competing attempts to map the territory. Walker examines the journeys of several Japanese cartographers, especially Mamiya Rinzō, who were commissioned by the Tokugawa government to map Sakhalin first and determine the borders between Japan and Russia. Walker argues that, while European countries were often “centers of calculation” that sought to amass scientific knowledge for the benefit of imperial projects, the Japanese cartographic efforts were an attempt by a “periphery of calculation” to rival these claims. The Tokugawa government's mapmaking activities were not only a way to fend off European colonialism, but used the same technology as the Russians, which allowed Japan to claim that it was a scientifically advanced society and therefore had a right to control Sakhalin. According to Walker, mapping distant lands was “an inherent exercise in state logistical power” because it showed that the state was strong enough to amass the manpower and ships to embark on such endeavors. The imperial processes that would enable Japan to successfully incorporate the southern part of Sakhalin (called Karafuto) into the Japanese empire in 1905 were thus set into motion almost a hundred years prior to Karafuto's colonization.