On what appeared to be a normal day off the Pacific coast of California, Scott Thomas was relaxing on his boat and enjoying a peaceful day of leisure. His wife had just gone below to grab two beers when he noticed a strange fog approaching. He stood up, and for a moment, the fog enveloped him. The cloud passed, and when his wife returned, she saw that Scott seemed to be covered with glitter. The couple thought nothing of this until the impossible began to happen: Thomas began to shrink; he had been transformed into The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Mount Paekdu (Korean), meaning “White-Topped Mountain”, or Changbai (Chinese), meaning “Forever White Mountain” straddles the border between North Korea and China. It has long flared as a hot spot in claiming national history, identity and territory involving China, Korea and earlier kingdoms in the region. It has also emerged as a source of contention between China and the two Koreas, North and South. China has recently moved aggressively to develop the Changbai area in Jilin Province on the Chinese side of the border. Plans include economic and infrastructural development including the Mt. Changbai Airport and the Mt. Changbai Eastern Railroad, both under construction. The railroad is a key to linking China's largest nature preserve to Changchun and to the promotion of domestic and international tourism. China has also filed a claim to make the mountain a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There is even momentum behind a Chinese proposal to hold the Winter Olympic Games there in 2018. In addition, Chinese actions like the torch-lighting ceremony for the 2007 Asian Winter Games atop Mt. Changbai, the naming of schools after the mountain, and military operations in the area have exacerbated tensions between China and the two Koreas. The Asia Winter Games' official song includes a paean to Changbai. The pressroom for the Games at Changchun in February 2007 provided pamphlets on Changbai Mount. All these activities lay foundations for claims that the landmark is Chinese.

May 15 marks 40 years since Okinawa “reverted” from US military administration to Japan, but the celebrations in 2012 will be muted. While few Okinawans regret the fact of reversion, there is widespread resentment over the fact that the national government continues to insist the prefecture serve US military ends first and foremost. Newspaper opinion surveys taken on the eve of the commemoration found that 69 percent of Okinawans believed they were the subject of inequitable and discriminatory treatment because of the heavy concentration of US military bases, and nearly 90 percent took the position that the Futenma Marine Base should either be unconditionally closed and the land simply revert to Ginowan township or else be moved away, whether elsewhere in Japan or beyond it. That figure exceeds even the opposition of the time of the Hatoyama government (84 percent) less than two years ago. A similar 90 percent oppose the deployment within Okinawa of the accident- plagued MV22-Osprey VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft that the Pentagon, backed by the government of Japan, promises to deploy in Okinawa from July.

Japan's 1930s Manchukuo project concentrated the idealism, imagination, and energy of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who wanted a better world. Today, the ideal in whose name Manchukuo was founded remains to be accomplished and again compels attention: how to construct a peaceful, just, cooperative order in East Asia, especially among the three regions of China, Korea and Japan.

From late November 1944, the U.S. Air Force began aerial bombing of Japan's main islands. By the time the war ended on 15 August 1945, the United States had dropped a total of 160,800 tons of conventional and incendiary bombs, as well as two atomic bombs. More than ninety percent of these bombs were dropped by B-29 bombers during the last five months of the Asia-Pacific War. In the end, almost 100 cities and more than 300 towns and villages throughout Japan were targeted, causing more than 1 million casualties including 560,000 deaths. It is said that seventy percent of those killed were women and children. The great destruction and carnage from this intense indiscriminate bombing campaign imposed severe physical as well as psychological damage on Japan's society and people.

11 September 2011 marks ten years since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC. However, I would also like to call attention to the date, 20 September, which marks ten years since the United States entered its present condition of perpetual war. It was on 20 September 2001 that then U.S. President George W. Bush declared the opening of the “war on terror.”

Radioactive particles released after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant continue to spread along the seashore and rivers of eastern Japan, creating underwater hotspots as far as Tokyo Bay, according to recent scientific studies. But the full magnitude and impact of the contamination, already considered the largest case of unintended marine pollution by radionuclides in history, has yet to be established.

Access to food is a basic human right. For several decades, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) prided itself on meeting the food needs of its population, although it has little arable land. Like many socialist countries, North Korea emphasized this success—along with high literacy rates, an equitable health care system, and guaranteed jobs for all—as proof that it upheld human rights, that its record in fact exceeded that of Western countries. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, a deteriorating economy and a steep rise in the cost of energy, followed in mid-decade by a series of natural disasters, undercut North Korea's capacity to feed its population. The public distribution system collapsed, and famine ensued. 1 Pyongyang appealed to its neighbors and then the world at large for help.

Japan is proceeding towards full security normalization, moving closer to throwing off all the externally and self-imposed restraints which for half a century produced a disjuncture between its economic status as the world's second largest national economy and its restricted status in the security realm. In the existing world system, normalization of this kind necessarily means militarization, and that is precisely what Japan has undertaken, a process that can be titled “Heisei militarization.” The Bush Doctrine has accelerated but did not cause this process.

On 16 March 2012, North Korea announced that it would launch an earth observation satellite named Kwangmyongsong (Lodestar) 3, aboard an Unha carrier rocket sometime between the hours of 7 am and noon on a day between 12 and 16 April, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of its state founder, Kim Il Sung, and the attainment of “strong and prosperous” status by the country. The launch from a base in the north of the country close to the border with China would be pointed south, dropping off its first phase rocket into the Yellow Sea about 160 kms to the southwest of South Korea's Byeonsan peninsula and the second into the ocean about 140 kilometres east of Luzon in the Philippines. Due notice of the impending launch was issued to the appropriate international maritime, aviation and telecommunication bodies (IMO, ICAO and ITU) and, to mark the occasion, North Korea announced that it would welcome scientific observers and journalists. The 15 April date, in the 100th year according to the calendar of North Korea, has long been declared a landmark in the history of the state, and the launch seems designed to be its climactic event.

Town hall Japanese politics is rarely of much interest beyond the town, much less beyond the country. The election of a new mayor in Nago City in Okinawa on 24 January, however, is something very much out of the ordinary. It would be no exaggeration to say that no local election in postwar Japan has carried such weight.

“It is in maternity that woman fulfills her physiological destiny; it is her natural ‘calling,’ since her whole organic structure is adapted for the perpetuation of the species. But […] human society is never abandoned wholly to nature“

-Simone de Beauvoir

Precis: Using Kawaguchi Kaiji's graphic novel Jipangu (2001-2009) as an example, this essay explores a horizon of historical consciousness revealed by alternative histories of the Asia-Pacific War. Alternative histories of the war attempt to remove the stigma of defeat but also betray the extent to which contemporary Japan is unimaginable without the experience of defeat. Jipangu suggests a limit to the alternative pasts imaginable in early-twenty- first-century Japan.

Does it make sense to refer to a Chinese “tributary system?” A number of influential Western scholars, including John Wills Jr., James Hevia and Laura Hostetler, have argued that it does not—largely on the grounds that previous China scholars, John K. Fairbank “and his followers” in particular, have overgeneralized its historical significance. The result, however, has been that much of Fairbank's painstaking and valuable research on the structure and functions of the tributary system has been ignored. Although Fairbank may well have overestimated the degree to which Chinese assumptions about tribute shaped Qing policy toward foreigners, it seems unhelpful and misleading to suggest that they were of no consequence whatsoever.

There could hardly be a better time for publishing Kinglun Ngok's article on Chinese labor policy and legislation. Three major national labor-related laws were passed in 2007 and went into effect in 2008. These are: the Labor Contract Law, the Employment Promotion Law, and the Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law. What does this flurry of labor legislations mean? Why now? And perhaps most important: does it matter for China's workers?

“Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones:machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Japan's war for empire in Asia had many endings: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the imperial broadcast announcing acceptance of surrender terms, “suffering the insufferable”; signing of the surrender instrument on the deck of the USS Missouri; promulgation of a new constitution; the last execution of a convicted Japanese war criminal, Nishimura Takuma; American implementation of the Treaty of Peace with Japan; the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; establishment of the Asia Women's Fund to compensate the former comfort women (1995). But no one of those endings was more protracted and potentially more recuperative of Japan's view of itself than the reversion of the Ryūkyū Islands to Japanese rule on May 15, 1972 after 27 years of direct American military control. Reversion did not go uncontested among Ryūkyūans. Memories of the entrepôt Kingdom of the Ryūkyūs and its final annexation by Meiji Japan in 1879 persisted: independence was the impossible possibility. But the hand of the Pentagon had been so stern, so deforming on the Ryūkyūs, and the realistic alternatives so few, that reversion to Japanese sovereignty seemed better to many Ryūkyūans than continuing as America's China Sea military outpost complete with nuclear weapons. Yet, at the point of reversion and in the 38 years since reversion, Japanese sovereignty was a mask: the US occupation of the Ryūkyū Islands continued undiminished, but now Tokyo and not Washington paid most of the bill; Japanese sovereignty in post-reversion Okinawa continued “to be subject to the over-riding principle of priority to the military, that is, the US military.”

The sentencing of Matsumoto Chizuo (Asahara Shoko) to death on February 27, 2004 marked nearly nine years since members of Aum Shinrikyo carried out an attack with sarin gas on subway lines in Tokyo on March 20, 1995. Asked to write an opinion piece for the Japanese edition of Newsweek that appeared two days before the sentencing, I chose to focus on how the notions of victims and victimizers have structured efforts to understand and come to terms with the Aum Affair.

[Written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and later re-worked in Memories of the Battlefield published on the fiftieth anniversary of Japan's surrender, this essay presents wartime violence not as something distant and exceptional, but rather as a pervasive condition of our lives. Tomiyama attempts here ‘to bring out the battlefield in the everyday’, and then from the battlefield, ‘to reconstitute the everyday’. In a time when war and violence can be seen everywhere and yet felt at a remove, his ideas are as pertinent as ever. N.M.]

Southeast Asia, long known as an intermediate zone between the ancient civilisations of China and India, is also an area that scholars have long portrayed as historically subject to influences coming from its west, beginning with Indianisation, then islamisation and finally westernisation. However, this article argues that it would be far more insightful, and historically more accurate for the last several centuries at least, to treat Southeast Asia and southern China as part of one region, in the same way that Fernand Braudel approached the history of the Mediterranean.

This article by Softbank CEO Son Masayoshi outlines the thinking of one of Japan's most innovative capitalists and public-spirited citizens. Having helped create a competitive market in telecommunications, Son is now aimed at liberating and greening Japan's YEN 16 trillion electricity industry. In addition to the efforts he outlines in the article, Son inaugurated his Japan Renewable Energy Foundation on September 12. This Foundation is to be led by Tomas Kaberger, the former Director General of the Swedish Energy Agency. It includes a stellar cast of international experts on renewable energy, associated support policies (especially the feed in tariff), and other aspects of the ongoing energy revolution. Through these initiatives and the plan for a “solar belt,” described in this article, Son has been instrumental in defining a new direction for Japan in the wake of Fukushima. Without Son putting renewable energy so squarely and credibly on the public agenda, Japan might have succumbed to the enormous pressure from Keidanren, METI, TEPCO and other elements of the nuclear village to maintain the unsustainable status quo.