With a proud high-heel clatter not becoming a military runway, she rushes forward, followed by her children with slightly shy looks on their faces. A pilot in flight suit awaits them, arms spread. Embraces, kisses, tears. …

A recent event making headlines worldwide was the publication of GAIJIN HANZAI URA FAIRU (The Underground Files of Gaijin Crime). This magazine, which went on sale at major Japanese bookstores and convenience stores nationwide, depicts foreigners as “dangerous” and “evil”. Despite Japan's lack of a legal framework, or a civil society capable of curbing hate speech, activists managed to have the magazine removed from stores and put out of circulation. This report shows how non-Japanese residents in Japan (a disparate group with few things in common–not even a language) successfully pushed for their rights in a case ignored by the Japanese media. Utilizing the power of the Internet to organize a boycott of magazine outlets, “Newcomer” residents and immigrants demonstrated their strength as a consumer bloc for what is probably the first time in Japan's history. This is the report of a participant observer.

After the launch of a three-stage rocket in April and the second nuclear test in May 2009 it seems less realistic than ever to think about opening and reform in North Korea. Inter-Korean relations are deteriorating almost daily. Hard-line orthodoxy has been returning to North Korea since late 2005 at an alarming pace as the country enters an era of socialist neoconservativism that emphasizes self-reliance and mass campaigns, cracks down on previously promoted market activities and stresses anti-imperialist struggle more fiercely than throughout most of the last decade.

Can an effort to make peace between humans and nature help bring peace among humans? For nearly two decades, the Six-Party states—the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia, and Japan—either bilaterally or multilaterally have attempted to denuclearize North Korea and make peace on the Korean peninsula. Many options considered by the US and its allies, including a preemptive military strike and coercive economic sanctions against North Korea, have proven ineffectual or ethically unsupportable. Political and diplomatic negotiations have lacked both mutual regard among the parties and faith in the process and have thus far proven to be useless. Today it seems apparent that the United States and its allies cannot accomplish what they want under the current negotiating scheme. A new paradigm is needed for building trust and for moving forward. Collaborative efforts to turn Korea's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into a UNESCO World Heritage Site can provide a trust-building measure among the Six-Party nations. Environmental and cultural cooperation among the major adversaries, prompted by internationally neutral scientists and scholars, will provide a unique opportunity in the DMZ. The efforts to change human behavior toward the DMZ's natural and cultural importance can help make peace among humans and serve as a new paradigm for creating peace on the Korean peninsula.

Standing strong year after year, from sunrise to sunrise, silent sentinels unmoved by summer's raging typhoons and winter's crashing ice floes.

Not sure what to think of tetrapods? Not even sure what they are? Well, fear not, you're probably in the majority.

But what you don't know may surprise you.

Among those who do know and care, tetrapods inspire passionate and widely divergent opinions.

Alfred McCoy's important new article for TomDispatch (March 30, 2010) deserves to mobilize Congress for a serious revaluation of America's ill-considered military venture in Afghanistan. The answer to the question he poses in his title – “Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State? – is amply shown by his impressive essay to be a resounding “No! “… not until there is fundamental change in the goals and strategies both of Washington and of Kabul.

The Libyan Foreign Ministry's December 19, 2003 “Statement” outlining its plan to “get rid of [weapons of mass destruction] materials, equipment and programs, and to become totally free of internationally banned weapons” prompted some to ponder whether North Korea might be next.{1} Will the Northeast Asian “rogue state” join the Middle East “rogue state” in renouncing its nuclear weapons programs? The Japanese weekly magazine Aera questioned whether Kim Jong Il would follow the cooperative path of Muammar Kaddafi, or continue along the confrontational, and ultimately self-destructive, path that Saddam Hussein trod.{2} In an interview with the Nikkei Press, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage held out this offer: if they chose to voluntarily end their weapons programs like Libya, North Korea “would very rapidly find herself integrated into the vibrant community of East Asia.”{3} Neither of these two statements, however, address the central fact that the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, or the threat of their production, is the lone asset that the North Korean government under U.S. threat has as a bargaining chip in its effort to survive. Like other states, North Korea and Libya respond to international developments not as part of a “rogue alliance” but on the basis of analysis of their specific interests and needs.

Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, have enjoyed considerable success in Japan and the United States. Letters from Iwo Jima, which told the story of the battle from the Japanese perspective, made nearly 5 billion yen at the box office in Japan, and won an Academy Award and a number of other major awards in the United States. Critics in America praised a film that, in the era of the war on terrorism and the Iraq conflict, attempted to understand the humanity of the enemy, while those in Japan celebrated the film's anti-war message and its largely unbiased portrait of Japanese. Few, however, have tried to analyze the reasons behind this success and how audiences were approaching these films. One of these rare cases was a short piece in the Asahi Shinbun (13 December 2006) by Ikui Eikoh, which suggested conceptualizing the film against the background of the Iraq War and the fact that to America, having lost many of its staunch allies except Japan, “Japan is the sole country in the whole world that it feels it can understand, that it wants to understand.” Japan Focus, in extending a series of articles we have featured on the two films, asked Professor Ikui to expand on his thoughts. This article appears for the first time in Japan Focus and was translated and introduced by Aaron Gerow.

Ko Un was born in 1933, which means that today he is nearer 80 than 70. He is surely Korea's most prolific writer and he himself cannot say for sure how many books he has published in all. He guesses that it must be about 140, volumes of many different kinds of poetry, epic, narrative, and lyric, as well as novels, plays, essays, and translations from classical Chinese.

Seven months after the Democratic Party of Japan's triumph in the national elections of 30 August 2009, Hatoyama Yukio's government is meeting with so much trouble that rumours have begun to circulate that it is doomed.

Twenty nuclear accidents at the official International Nuclear Event Scale of 4 to 7 have occurred between 1952 and 2011 (Lelieveld et al. 2012). The risk of another major accident during the next 50 years is high and it has been estimated that some 30 million people could be directly affected by such an accident (Lelieveld et al. 2012). The highest risks occur around major metropolises such as New York, Washington, Atlanta, Toronto, Western Europe, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo and Osaka. The lessons that have emerged from Chernobyl and Fukushima reveal a range of serious questions that must be answered appropriately, above all for the sake of citizens, but also for the credibility of the nuclear industry, and for framing the ongoing debate over energy alternatives. Because recent models suggest that more than half of released radioactive material from a nuclear disaster would be transported more than 1000 km from the site of release (Lelieveld et al. 2012), these questions are important even for citizens in distant countries. It is in this spirit that we have produced a list of unpleasant questions that have been a cause of concern since we first started conducting research at Chernobyl in 1992, and have grown in urgency since conducting research at Fukushima beginning in 2011.

Japan Focus Introduction. History often taps us on the shoulder unexpectedly. War and occupation—and, more particularly, occupied Iraq vis-a-vis occupied Japan a half-century ago— is a good example of this

In this case, the tap on the shoulder really began in 2002 as a crude, hubristic shove. In the propaganda campaign that preceded the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, officials in the Bush administration frequently evoked the example of Japan after World War Two, where the U.S.-led occupation proceeded smoothly and ended happily in a democratic and prosperous nation staunchly loyal to the United States. President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, NSC director Condoleezza Rice, and many others repeatedly evoked this reassuring analogy before the invasion, and before chaos consumed Iraq. Astonishingly, the president has continued to do so up to the present day—using the fifth anniversary of V-J Day in 2006 to resurrect all the by-now tattered and torn analogies to World War Two and its aftermath, and using the Washington visit of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in April 2007 to murmur the same incantation.

This paper examines the history of women in the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. I focus on policy makers’ reasons for introducing women into the SDF, reasons that have nothing to do with gender equality. I apply a framework of “camouflaging” in my discussion of these reasons.

This article is a modified and developed version of a chapter from Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Socialization and Strategies, edited by Ishida Hiroshi and David H. Slater, Routledge 2009. For a brief outline of the book's arguments, please see Note 1A at the end of the article.

Review of Utsumi Aiko, Sugamo Prison: The Peace Movement of the War Criminals (Sugamo purizun—senpantachi no heiwa undo). Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2004.

“Sugamo Prison” became Sugamo Keimusho (jail) at the end of the occupation when it passed from American to Japanese-government control. Until that time, it was the place of confinement for convicted war criminals and suspects. Although located inside Japan, it was an abnormal space—one might call it a foreign country—where Japanese had their freedom restricted by the Occupation authorities. If we view it from a stance critical of “the Tokyo Trial view of history” (e.g., the new nationalist history), “Sugamo Prison,” was a space in which victims were confined by “victors' justice”. However, viewed through the eyes of those “who were visited with the horrors of war” (to quote the Preamble to the Constitution), this prison was a space for implementing “justice” in which aggressors were confined.

[Many older Japanese conservatives are deeply committed to pacifism as a result of their personal experiences in World War II, despite recent Japanese government efforts to assert the right to belligerence in the present and the legitimacy of Japan's wars in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonaka Hiromu, the former Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party, retired from politics last year. But he still openly criticizes Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, his foreign policy, and the LDP's planned revision of Japan's Constitution. He lost his cousin and uncle in the Asia-Pacific War. Gotoda Masaharu, who served as Chief Cabinet Secretary for the Nakasone Cabinet in the 1980s and was also highly critical of both Koizumi's foreign and domestic policies, died last year. He was also as a staunch supporter of Article 9, the “no-war clause,” of Japan's Constitution. Watanabe Tsuneo, the Editorial Chief of the Yomiuri Newspaper, belongs to this same circle of conservatives whose wartime experiences prompted strong anti-war sentiments, although he is less supportive of Article 9.

“Nothing attests more dramatically to the psychological sway of its lingering shadow than the very reluctance of today's Japanese to debate in public the pros and cons of retaining the imperial family,” says Ivan Hall, a former Gakushuin University professor and author of Cartels of the Mind.

Yet changes are under discussion concerning the imperial succession that raise important questions about the nature and future of the institution. What are the consequences of change? How have other monarchies adapted to a changing world? And what are the consequences of hewing firmly to the present system? Why is it so difficult to have public discussion of issues central to Japan's future, particularly the character of Japanese democracy?

When Hokamura Kenichiro's kidneys failed, he waited over four years for a transplant before going online to check out rumors of organs for sale.

As a native of Japan, where less than 10 kidney transplants are performed a year, the 62-year- old businessman was desperate. “There are 100 people waiting in this prefecture alone and there were just three operations performed here last year. I would have died before getting a donor.”

The Asia-Pacific Journal is honored to offer a preview of Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keiji, including Richard Minear's introduction and a chapter of the book, with Nakazawa's manga illustrations.

Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter—the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn—the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. Responding to the high-pressure production regime, the young generation of Chinese rural migrant workers engages in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power.