I'm going to provide a few words of introduction for readers of The Asia-Pacific Journal on the subject of a piece I wrote for The New Republic's website, The Plank, as background to President Obama's visit to Japan.

The invitation came about through John Judis. I've known John now for close on twenty years; not only is he a good friend, but he has been my most trustworthy guide (personally and in his writings) through the labyrinth of American politics. John is one of those rare American writers who extends his gaze beyond that stretch of land that lies from sea to shining sea when he grapples with the deep currents in American politics. I first got to know him when I was doing the research for my first book, The Weight of the Yen. As a student of the rise of American conservatism and the corruption and decline of the old internationalist American foreign policy elite, John seemed taken with my thesis that it was financing from Japan that had made that re-alignment of American politics known as the Reagan Revolution possible.

At 12, Pov knows the sexual geography of the riverfront area in Phnom Penh like the seasoned prostitute he has become. The four middle-aged Frenchmen in front of us? “They like girls,” he explains, giggling. “Small girls.” The sun-blackened and tattered woman a few yards away? She will rent her daughter for the price of a hamburger. If I don't like boys he can fetch girls. Otherwise, in exchange for the meager contents of my wallet, Pov and his three barefoot, scruffy friends will guide me to a safe hotel and stay the night. “What would we do there?” I ask. “Up to you,” he says.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the fate of nuclear power appeared to hang in the balance as generating states scrambled to conduct safety checks on their existing nuclear reactors and newly-restarted nuclear programmes. A number of these states have since elected to phase out their nuclear power plants.

Takahashi Tetsuya's “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine, ” is among the most important statements to emerge from the debate over Yasukuni Shrine, historical memory and war nationalism.

Japan Focus is pleased to present chapter seven of Naoko Shimazu, ed., Nationalisms in Japan. Philip Seaton is the translator.

We thank Takahashi, Shimazu, Seaton and Routledge for their cooperation in publishing this article.

Find a podcast of Takahashi Tetsuya's lecture of March 6, 2007 on Postwar Japan on the Brink: Militarism, Colonialism, Yasukuni Shrine. This was the inaugural lecture of The Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture Series in Japanese Studies at the University of Chicago.

Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro and Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarō have repeatedly worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine since 13 August 2001 and 15 August 2000 respectively, and have expressed their intentions to continue worshipping in the future. In the face of this worship, there has been bitter criticism from inside and outside Japan. There are doubts over whether worship by public figures at Yasukuni Shrine, which is an autonomous religious institution (shūkyō hōjin), contravenes Articles 20 and 89 of the Constitution, the provisions concerning the separation of religion and the state. Furthermore, worship at the shrine where Class A war criminals, those found guilty as the leading war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, are enshrined, is seen as Japanese political leaders’ neglect of Japan's war responsibility and causes distrust among the people of Asia, including China and South Korea.

Worried for years about a water shortage, the vast Tokyo metropolitan area is now overflowing in the stuff.

Water-saving appliances, bottled drinking water and good old-fashioned conservation have helped the average Tokyo household in fiscal 2004 use 6 percent less tap water than six years earlier.

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

The United States has pushed the international non-proliferation regime to the breaking point.

Anxiety over US attempts to define and direct the international non-proliferation regime may be provoking some dangerous decisions in the Middle East.

In the early morning of February 11, around 4 a.m., a devastating fire swept through the locked cells of a migrant worker detention center in the South Korean city of Yeosu, killing 10 detainees and wounding many others. The center staff tried to put out the flames by spraying fire extinguishers through the bars of the cells, but in an act that can only be described as barbaric, did not unlock the cell doors to free those trapped inside, out of fear that they would escape. Migrant workers behind the locked doors and barred windows were forced to breath in the toxic fumes emitted from burning mattresses. These fumes were the cause of most of the deaths and injuries. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but the reality is that the roots of the tragedy lie with the Korean government's inhumane policy towards migrant workers.

What happens when a nuclear reactor overheats?

When nuclear cores overheat due to a lack of water coolant, they ultimately melt. Remaining water quickly turns to steam preventing replenishment of the water and endangering the integrity of the pressure vessel. Furthermore, the reactor pressure vessel may also melt leaking the melted fuel which may escape into the environment if the primary and secondary containment structures (concrete) have been damaged. Spent fuel is kept at around 25 degrees in cooling ponds for a few decades. The water must be continually replenished to maintain this temperature. If there is a loss of water or a failure of replenishment, the spent fuel will overheat and catch fire, releasing its radiotoxic contents. Note that the longer fuel is irradiated in the reactor core, the more radioactive it becomes due to the build-up of fission by-products which also contaminate the fuel limiting its usable life. Only about 1-2% of the uranium in fuel rods is actually used up in a reactor. It is these fission by-products that pose the greatest immediate danger if released into the environment.

The apparent success of Meiji Japan's rapid modernization project at the turn of the twentieth century did not go unnoticed by inhabitants of Ottoman lands concerned with their Empire's survival, including Ottoman statesmen and political activists determined to achieve the same results. Ottoman Arab journalists and intellectuals who were subtly objecting to their exclusion from political power within the Empire, however, produced a discourse on Japanese modernity that explored Japan's reform and modernizing projects as well as its distinct national identity. In doing so, these Arab writers formulated a critique of the Ottoman state by highlighting its failures in contrast to modern Japan, though their idealization of Japan resembled that of their Ottoman Turkish counterparts.

In Mongolia today, hunger for coal, copper, gold and uranium wealth is at odds with democracy as the demands of international resource giants collide with a stubborn political culture of resource nationalism.

In time for the June 2012 parliamentary elections, Mongolia's grand khural passed a law subjecting the purchase by “state-owned entities” of controlling interest in strategic Mongolian mining enterprises to government approval (as well as a host of other key industries).

The Asahi Shinbun and the International Herald Tribune recently published a five-part series on Korean residents in Japan. Many of these zainichi – the word literally means “residing in Japan” – have lived in the country for two, three and even four generations. Having been deprived of the Japanese citizenship that they obtained under colonial rule in the years 1910-1945, the 600,000 zainichi are those Korean residents who have not become naturalized Japanese citizens. The series shows that they now find themselves in a crossfire between the North Korean and Japanese governments. The zainichi are the largest ethnic minority in a country that often prides itself, mistakenly, on being homogenous.

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant have been trying to reestablish electricity connections to pumps so as to restart the cooling system for the reactors at the plant. According to news reports, two of the major obstacles have been

• • a high radiation environment (on the order of 1,000 millisieverts per hour) due to contaminated water on the floor of the turbine buildings, and

• • a lack of light in the turbine buildings, which has forced the electricians to work in the dark. The combination of these two factors has made it exceedingly difficult to accomplish the objective and has so far frustrated it. Pumping water out of the reactor buildings has not been possible since there are no empty tanks on site of sufficient capacity to hold the water, which is too contaminated to be pumped into the ocean. Recent reports indicate that the water is also leaking out of the building on to the site, further contaminating the working environment and complicating efforts to bring the problem of cooling the reactors and spent fuel pools under control.

More than sixty-five years after the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945, and the subsequent firebombing and destruction of Japan's cities by the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, a cursory examination of the relevant English-language literature, both popular and academic, reveals a striking lacuna. Researchers have covered substantial ground in analyzing various historical aspects of the U.S. bombing campaign against Japan. Specifically, much has been done to situate the events within the emergence of strategic air war in the twentieth century and within the concurrent evolution of American military air power doctrine. Scholars have discussed the air raids within the context of the evolution (and subsequent violations) of principles of noncombatant immunity during war, and have also provided important analyses regarding when and why the United States chose to target Japan's cities for destruction.

Sixty-six years after Japan's annexation of the former Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879, in the waning months of the Asia-Pacific War, the American military partitioned the Ryukyu Islands from Japan. The replacement of Okinawa Prefecture by US military rule in the Ryukyus from 1945 had profound implications, for residents of the occupied islands. A major repercussion of the military government's separation of the Ryukyus was the enforced isolation of the four main island groups from occupied Japan. The Ryukyuan-Japanese border severed longstanding administrative and economic links, while restrictive border controls prohibited free travel and interaction between the two sides. Another consequence of this imposed barrier was the socio-economic problem of how to provide for the livelihood and welfare of the island residents, who thereby became entirely dependent on the military government. These problems were compounded by the massive destruction, loss of life, and overall displacement of residents in the wake of war, especially in Okinawa.

Few would contest the general proposition that the population factor bears directly on the course of the friendly — and sometimes unfriendly — competition between states in the world arena today. Problems arise, however, when we try to move from the general to the specific. How, exactly, do human numbers (population size, composition, and trends of change) affect the ability of governments to influence events beyond their borders — or affect the disposition of a country's interactions with outside actors? And this is no less important for the would-be strategist: How can we use population indicators to anticipate, with some reasonable hope of accuracy, the impact of yet-unfolding demographic forces on the balance of international power? This essay explores these questions for the world's largest strategic arena: the great Asian/Eurasian expanse.

[The Nuclear Proliferation Treaty seeks to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons by preventing non-nuclear powers from developing nuclear weapons and requiring that nuclear powers dismantle their stockpiles. Mohammed ElBaradei, Director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has described as “unworkable” the way of thinking that it is “morally reprehensible for some counties to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.” In the latest U.S. flouting of NPT obligations, the National Nuclear Security Administration has now announced plans for a new generation of nuclear warheads. Japan Focus]

The ancient kingdom, Koguryo/Gaogouli (37BC – 668AD) encompassed an area from central Manchuria to Primorsky Krai (the extreme Southeastern region of Russia) to the central part of the Korean peninsular at the height of its power, around the fifth century AD. Koguryo remains, including of walled towns, fortresses, palaces and tombs, as well as wall paintings and artifacts, have been found on both sides of the Chinese-North Korean border as well as in South Korea (the ROK). The remains and relics in the People's Republic of China (PRC) reflect the history and culture of the early and mid-period Koguryo kingdom; they also showcase Koguryo's architectural style and pioneering new patterns of city construction, in which both mountain cities and plain cities were successfully constructed.