The picture on this page was taken by a People's Pictorial photographer in 1953. The sixty-year-old Mao Zedong had just finished writing a calligraphic inscription that read “Celebrate the successful completion of the Guanting Reservoir Project.” The man sitting next to him was my father-in-law, Wang Sen, the project manager for the dam.

The photograph was probably published in some newspaper or other around that time. Even if I'd seen it, I wouldn't have paid any attention to it. I certainly never imagined that fifteen years later I'd marry the project manager's son, Wang Dejia, thereby becoming the daughter-in-law of a man once shown relaxing on the bank of the dam, chatting and laughing with the “Great Leader.”

Just when it seemed Japanese politics was being pulled back into the hands of the collusive interests who brought us Fukushima, it's thrown up another surprise. The reformists, centred in innovative capital and local government, seem to have found a new, and very promising, avenue to fight against the revanchist old guard that still dominates the central government. On June 10, Iida Tetsunari, the director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies and of Softbank CEO Son Masayoshi's Japan Renewable Energy Federation, announced that he would be a candidate for governor in the July 27 Yamaguchi Prefectural election.

The Republican loss in the November midterm election, most observers have maintained, was a rejection of President Bush's failed Iraq policy. But the Bush administration's North Korean policy (not to mention its botched Iran policy) has also been unsuccessful, since the six-party talks that were created more than three years ago, far from defusing the nuclear crisis with respect to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), has only deepened it. While there was no hard evidence that Pyongyang actually had a nuclear weapon before the North Korean nuclear crisis emerged in October 2002, there is irrefutable evidence now that it has restarted its plutonium-reprocessing plant at Yongbyon and that it has the technological know-how to detonate a nuclear device.

We present two articles on the market response to North Korean famine.

Pak Hyun-yong was, by North Korean standards, an entrepreneur. Too much of an entrepreneur. During the famine that ravaged the country in the late 1990s, Mr Pak watched his family die of starvation – first his younger brother, then his older sister's children. Then, eventually, his sister too.

Somehow he pulled through this period, dubbed by the regime as “the arduous march”, and was spurred into taking some very noncommunist, almost subversive action. He began selling noodles.

Chemical physicist Chris Busby is at the forefront of scientists who are challenging the radiation risk model propounded by ICRP, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, whose standards for allowable radiation doses the Japanese government has adopted for its citizens affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident. Busby, Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), points out that the ICRP model “deals with radiation exposure from all sources in the same way, as if it were external to the body,” and then takes this dose and multiplies it by a risk factor based on the high acute external doses of the atomic-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ICRP method thus fails to take into account a number of ways in which certain internal radionuclides can deliver very high doses to critical targets in cells, particularly the cell DNA. One of these is from “inhaled or ingested hot particles, which are solid but microscopic and can lodge in tissue delivering high doses to local cells.” As a result, internal radiation exposure can be “up to 1,000 times more harmful than the ICRP model concludes.”

Even as the Japanese public turns against nuclear power at home, the Japanese government and corporations such as Toshiba are moving swiftly to expand the country's nuclear business by exporting reactor technology abroad.

In a December 10 editorial, the Mainichi Shimbun said that an agreement for nuclear power cooperation and export to Jordan, Vietnam, Russia, and South Korea was based on a decision that “… came too hasty and has not been thought through.”

The Mainichi editors are concerned that the agreements have no details about how nuclear power stations will be regulated and safety ensured. There are worries that an accident involving Japanese nuclear technology abroad could further undermine international confidence in Japanese technology and industry already shaken by the 3.11 earthquake tsunami and nuclear disaster.

This article examines the role of military, emperor and government in the enshrinement of Japan's war dead from 1868 to 2007. Below also find an Asahi Shimbun editorial reflecting on the constitutional and political issues of enshrinement.

It all began on July 18th, 2001, when I made a visit to reconstruct the clinic in Darya-ye Nur. It was the first time for me to enter Afghanistan since the Taliban had come into power. It had been a while since I last crossed the Khyber Pass. I went around each PMS clinic in Darya-ye Nur, Daraye Peech and Nuristan Wama, which are in the back region along the Kunar River, upstream from Jalalabad.

I respect the intention of Tawara Yoshifumi to alert the Japanese and international public to the designs of the nationalist right-wing on the Japanese school curriculum – with which designs I have no sympathy. However, the errors, exaggeration and misleading sensationalism in his article ‘The Hearts of Children’ (posted at Japan Focus on 25 August 2008) only serve ultimately to discredit liberal views on education, thus rebounding to the advantage of the right. This is unfortunate, especially given that the article also contains useful information. This brief reply aims to point out some of the ways in which Mr Tawara's article misleads.

Hiratate Hideaki's essay on Japan's Working Poor highlights two issues that are likely to be with us for some time: how to provide social support for increased numbers of elderly, and how to cope with growing income inequality. A first step of course is to recognize that the problems exist and are connected, and this article is helpful in that regard. By “us” I refer both to people in Japan but also around the world where so many societies are aging at a fast pace, where disparities in income and wealth are growing, and where welfare and retirement systems are being cut back.

Over many years textbooks and conservative educational policies such as “moral education” have been central to the discussion of the propagation of Japanese nationalism. These are important facets of the persistent efforts to raise national sentiment. In recent years, however, new avenues for inculcating nationalism have emerged. This essay examines two such examples to gauge the role of popular culture in creating “love of nation” among children and youth.

The rape of a twelve year old Okinawan schoolgirl in 1995 by US servicemen touched off an upsurge in anti-US base sentiment and a fierce legal and political contest between then Okinawan Governor Ota Masahide and the Japanese government. Less than six months later, the two governments agreed to return the highly controversial Futenma Marine Corps Air Station in the crowded city of Ginowan. But with the proviso that an alternative base be built within Okinawa prefecture. The announcement of the base relocation plan led to a popular struggle in which local voters resoundingly rejected relocation. In July 2002, however, the US and Japan reached agreement on a final plan for a new base, involving mass land reclamation over a coral reef off the Henoko district of Nago, known to be a feeding ground for the endangered dugong. Okinawan Journalist Abe Takeshi reports on the quagmire of pork-barrel politics involved in securing the base over the opposition of many Okinawans, as industry players large and small race to profit from constructing the new base. Abe�s report, written before the November 17 election for Governor of Okinawa well forecast the re-election of Governor Inamine, who supported the base relocation, over the divided progressive opponents of relocation who could not agree on a single candidate. This article appeared in Shukan Kinyobi, October 25, 2002. Abe Takeshi is an Okinawa Taimusu reporter.

On 14 February, Kayama Emi and Watanabe Tsuguo filed an administrative appeal to have the rejection of their marriage application by Arakawa Ward, Tokyo rescinded. Ms. Kayama wanted to keep her surname after marriage, as did Mr. Watanabe. The court rejected the appeal after only ten days without hearing arguments. “I've never had a gate closed in my face so quickly,” said Ms. Kayama.

In December 2012, not a few people in Japan remembered the 75th anniversary of Nanjing Massacre. Those people hoped that the lessons from war crimes committed by the Japanese Army from 1931-1945 would be learned so that Japan would never wage war against another country again, and peace would be achieved in East Asia. These Japanese, however, now face a major challenge.

The U.S. government has filed a protest over Defense Minister Kyuma Fumio's remarks last week criticizing President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq, diplomatic sources said Saturday.

“History is bunk,” Henry Ford once proclaimed. His statement is often cited as evidence for Americans’ lack of interest in the past. But some versions of history are bunk. Two memoirs by National Security Council officials, Victor Cha in the Bush administration and Jeffrey Bader in the Obama administration, reflect Washington's deep denial of its own recent past with North Korea. Deep denial still misinforms - and shackles - U.S. policy.

Historical issues haunt Japan. The world is facing a crisis, which may become a once in a century depression in the wake of Wall Street's financial meltdown and the subsequent recession throughout the world. Japan is no exception. At this time of crisis each country must show its resilience to alleviate immediate pain while implementing a long-term policy to strengthen the fundamentals of its economy and society. Japan is asked to come up with a powerful economic policy to overcome its crisis and contribute to global solutions. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and expectations are rising not only in the States but throughout the world that the U.S. will confront this challenge effectively. This is a golden opportunity for Japan because the fundamentals of Japan-US relations are solid and much of Obama's agenda coincides precisely with what the Japanese government has asserted for decades: the necessity for a sustainable global economy, emphasis on the environment, need for a long-term energy policy, serious concern about nuclear disarmament, cooperation through the United Nations and so on. Why not come up with creative ideas to attract the attention of Obama's new team and consolidate the alliance?

Oguma Eiji, a sociologist from Keio University, has emerged as one of the most astute commentators on the shifts that have occurred since the 3.11 crises. As an engaged intellectual with a respected history of solid scholarship, he has repeatedly done two things few others have: link the events since 3.11 to larger patterns of political and economic transformation in post-war Japan, and situate this moment in Japan in relation to similar moments of political crisis beyond Japan.

On 2 March 2003 some 6,000 people from Hiroshima gathered on an empty space one kilometer from ground zero, where the first nuclear weapon killed hundreds of thousands and devastated the city, to form a message with their bodies, which read from the sky as NO WAR, NO DU!

Our warning was against war and the use of nuclear weapons by USA-UK forces. Our fear was based on the fact that the US has used illegal nuclear munitions and weapons containing Depleted Uranium (DU) and plutonium five times since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed on 6 and 9 August 1945.