Nosappu, Japan – Wearing a white windbreaker to protect him from the Siberian wind, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi stood on the bridge of a Japanese coast guard patrol boat on Thursday, scanning the treeless shores of islands occupied by Russia since September 1945. Following close behind was an uninvited escort: a Russian coast guard patrol boat.

We describe Swauka ypresiana n. gen. n. sp., the second fossil gossamerwing damselfly (Odonata, Zygoptera, Epallagidae, Epallaginae) and its oldest occurrence. It is the first fossil insect reported from the Swauk Formation of central Washington State, U.S.A. It was recovered from the “Sandstone facies of Swauk Pass,” a fluvial unit, immediately below the Silver Pass Volcanic Member of the Swauk Formation, which has a U–Pb zircon CA-ID-TIMS age of 51.364 ± 0.029 Ma. The host deposits probably represent mud-dominated floodplain lake or oxbow lake environments.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/20167852-bcbc-4f8b-b372-dffa591abd6a

The following paintings depicting the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945 were featured in a special exhibit hosted by the Sumida Local Culture Resource Center (墨田郷土文化資料館) in 2004. The Center staff originally settled on the idea of collecting amateur and professional artwork as a unique way of contributing to the preservation of the public memory regarding the March 10 incendiary air raid. Each painting is accompanied by a short explanatory text written by the artist. As well as giving insight into the particular scene depicted in the painting, these explanations generally touch on the artist's overall air raid experience. We appreciate the permission provided by the Sumida Local Culture Resource Center to feature the paintings here. The paintings were published as part of a greater collection in 2005 as That Unforgettable Day—The Great Tokyo Air Raid Through Drawings (Japanese title: あの日を忘れない・描かれた東京大空襲). Head Editor: Kimura Toshiko. Editors: Tanaka Yoshiaki, Sueki Yoriko, Aoki Toshiro, Ogawa Shigenori, Yoshikawa Katsuyo, Takahashi Toshie, Tsuchiya Naotsugu

A descendant of the Hokkaido Ainu people, Chiri Yukie (1903-1922) became versed in the oral tradition of kamuy yukar (songs of the gods) from a young age. At the encouragement of the linguist Kindaichi Kyŏsuke, she transliterated and translated these songs into Japanese. Her Ainu shin'yŏshŭ (Ainu Songs of the Gods) was published posthumously in 1923. The following translation presents the author's preface, as well as a song attributed to the owl, patron deity of the village (kotan kor kamuy). In the former, Chiri shares both her nostalgia for a lost Ainu past, and her hope that her heritage will be preserved by sharing it with a Japanese-speaking audience. In the latter, we find a depiction of Ainu ritual, one that revolves around the notion of animals as both deities and the prey of hunters - after choosing to fall to an arrow, the owl is invited to stay with the impoverished family of the boy who shot it, receiving inau (offerings) and making the household prosper once more. It is a song that speaks, not only to the profound religious significance of animal spirits in hunter-gatherer traditions like that of the Ainu, but offers a commentary on the shifting nature of social fortunes - something of which Chiri seems to have been poignantly aware. It is hard not to view, in her recounting of an ancient hunting ritual, a thinly veiled commentary on the fate of her people - though reviled by their neighbors, both once had wealth and distinction, a state to which they may yet return through the proper veneration of the deity (kamuy).

At first glance, the handful of Tokyo rightists who created a furor about a graphic scene of the Nanjing Massacre in two September issues of the popular manga magazine Young Jump Weekly are a surprisingly tolerant lot. They restricted their complaint to technical issues in “My Country is Burning” (Kuni ga moeru!) by Motomiya Hiroshi, the only remotely educational series in a popular weekly comic book, and ignored 400 pages of gratuitous sex, violence, scatology and gore that dominates this illustrated publication with a reported circulation of 2 million.

The high occurrence of pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia has prompted an increase in the number of nations planning to send naval units to fight them. In the Asian continent, India has become the first to sink a pirate vessel, South Korea has announced the deployment early in spring of the 5,000 ton-class KDX-II destroyer Gang Gam-chan, and China is sending two destroyers and a supply vessel.

While these three countries have shown no qualms about deploying their navies in the Gulf of Aden, Japan has once more embarked on a painful debate on the legality of such a move, with the government looking for a legal basis on which MSDF units might be deployed and a number of commentators doubting this would be possible without either a constitutional amendment (or of the official government interpretation of the Constitution's warrenouncing Article Nine) or the passage of new legislation.

This summer I saw three Japanese movies – two documentaries and a feature – depicting the plight of World War II victims.

“Hito no Ishibumi (Human Monument)” is about the battle of a woman who, having lost an eye in a U.S. air raid, demanded enactment of a law to compensate ordinary citizens for war-related injury and damage.

Nazery Khalid - Research Fellow, Center for Economic Studies and Ocean Industries. Maritime Institute of Malaysia - reports that 7 of the world's 20 busiest terminals are in China. The port to watch is Shanghai, which is poised to overtake its main rivals (Hong Kong and Singapore). In 2005, Shanghai handled 443 million tons of cargo in total and 18.09 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containers, an increase of 24.2 percent compared with the previous year (Hong Kong handled 23.2 million TEUs and Singapore 22.43 TEUs). The Shanghai region is expected to handle 35 million TEUs of container traffic by 2010. This is because the port of Ningbo will continue its own frenetic expansion of capacity as well as install the world's longest bridge (the US$ 1.4 billion Hangzhou Bay Bridge) to cut the travel time to Shanghai to two hours. In addition, Shanghai is adding a deepwater facility in nearby Yangshan and working out deals with other North China ports to provide international service for them.

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.

スティーブン・ローチ（Stephen Roach）は、日本で起きた3月11日の地震が世界経済に与える影響について、のんびり構えていてはいけないと警告する。彼が批判する視点、つまり世界経済における近年の日本経済の地位低下――世界における輸出とGDPで日本がシェアを落としていることや中国の台頭、そして成長が見込まれる重要な工業製品のなかで日本でしか生産できないものが少ない――にもとづく「狭い視点」の概要を説明したのち、ローチはこの観点から導かれる次のような「表面的な」結論を受け入れるべきでないとする。彼が批判する結論とは、日本は「すでに重要な役割を果たさなくなっており」、東日本大震災とその余波が世界経済にもたらす混乱は「一時的なもの」で「小さい」というものだ。

In China's international relations, 2010 has been the Year of Zero Sum.

On a series of issues, the Western and Asian democracies have demanded that China accept policies that advance their agendas while sacrificing Chinese interests.

On one level this is the inevitable outcome of the Obama administration's repositioning of its foreign policy away from the amoral, Westphalian-style horse-trading of national interests of the Bush administration.

As the essays in this collection suggest, representations of war are varied and memories of war are expressed in many different ways. Apart from works that seek to represent the Asia-Pacific War directly, there are also examples of popular culture that refer to the conflict obliquely or even use fantasy or science fiction scenarios as a metaphor or allegory to address the historical conflict and its postwar ramifications.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the broadcast of the NHK documentary on Comfort Women, Senso wo do sabaku ka: Towareru senji seiboryoku (How to Put War on Trial: Wartime Sexual Violence Considered) broadcast on January 30, 2001, the recently presented a feature on the program and the controversy over its showing that ensued in Japan.

[At a moment when the “comfort women” controversy is dominating the growing global discussion about Japanese war responsibility, the Japan Supreme Court is set to permanently foreclose the possibility of redress for Chinese war victims within the Japanese court system. Japan's top court will hold a special hearing on March 16 in a compensation lawsuit brought by Chinese forced labor survivors against Nishimatsu Construction Corp. and the Japanese government. If, as expected, the Supreme Court rules that the victims' right to file the claim has been extinguished by state treaties, it will ensure final defeat for all lawsuits by Chinese victims filed in Japanese courts.

Foiled in their attempts to change the Constitution and Article Nine in particular by the cumbersome democratic process of public consensus, the militant nationalist wing of the political establishment has set its sights on education by creating a document operationalizing changes to the Basic Law in Education. The Curricular Guidelines issued last February are a set of policy directives of unclear legal status created by the government's General Council for Education based on suggestions from the advisory Education Rebuilding Council.

This is a revised, updated and abbreviated version of the introduction to the two volume collection by the authors of Pan-Asianism. A Documentary History Vol. 1 covers the years 1850-1920; Vol. 2 covers the years 1850-present, link.

The economic and political power of Asia, the world's largest continent, is increasing rapidly. According to the latest projections, the gross domestic products of China and India, the world's most populous nations, will each surpass that of the United States in the not-too-distant future. China's economy, like Japan's, is already larger than that of any single European country. With this new economic might comes growing diplomatic influence. The twenty-first century, many pundits agree, will be an Asian century. This undisputed Asian success story, together with its accompanying tensions and discontents, has attracted much media and scholarly attention. Yet for all this talk of Asia, there is no consensus on what Asia actually stands for as a whole. Is the vast Asian landmass a single entity? There has never been—and perhaps never will be—universal agreement on this question.

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s prodded open the archival doors of once closed regimes releasing interesting information on Soviet-North Korean-Chinese relations during the Cold War. Documents released from these archives contributed new evidence to enrich our understanding of old questions. One such question concerns the origins of the Korean War. Documents from these archives demonstrate an active correspondence between the three communist leaders in Northeast Asia—Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il Sung—regarding the planning and orchestration of this war fought primarily among the two Korean states, the United States, and China. This new evidence has encouraged scholars to reformulate fundamental views of this war, particularly its place in Cold War history.

In 1995, when Chinese victims of forced labor in wartime Japan began filing compensation lawsuits in Japanese courts, the elderly plaintiffs and their supporters were well aware that the legal path to justice would be neither fast nor smooth. Eleven years on, Chinese forced labor lawsuits against the Japanese state and private corporations have resulted in four court-ordered compensation awards. All are now under appeal, and there have been two court-mediated financial settlements. Even in decisions rejecting the Chinese claims due to statutes of limitations and state immunity, moreover, Japanese judges routinely rule that brutal forced labor in fact occurred. And some suggest that the government could pass legislation establishing a national compensation fund.

Japan seems on the verge of a second defeat. The March 11 magnitude 9.0 East Japan earthquake shoved the entire country 2 metres and brought even more mayhem in a tsunami that wrecked whole communities and snatched away the lives of thousands. Now we see 100,000 troops from the Self-Defense forces dispatched to rescue operations amidst the pall rising from massively damaged nuclear reactors. Radioactivity is drifting out to sea and over the surrounding prefectures, poisoning farm produce and forcing restrictions on their shipment and sale. The crisis has extended even to drinking water in the capital of Tokyo. The scale of disasters evokes embedded memories of the cusp of postwar reconstruction, the moment when rebuilding economy and society was about to harness prodigious resources and time.

Many Japanese and long-time Japan observers have expressed dismay about the recrudescence of self-righteous nationalism under PM Abe Shinzo who has emboldened rightwing extremists now threatening democratic institutions, civil liberties and Japan's relations with its neighbors.

In March and April 1948 Koreans across Japan rose up in protest after the Japanese government began to enforce an order handed down to them by the American Occupation administration to close Korean ethnic schools. One such protest took place in Kobe on April 24 when Koreans stormed the Hyogo Prefecture offices in an attempt to get the governor to rescind the order to close the four Korean ethnic schools in the prefecture. American and Japanese administrations reacted harshly to the Korean actions. Police arrested thousands of Koreans and inflicted stiff penalties on the incident's leaders. As was often the case, the Occupation administration misinterpreted Korean intention to keep the schools open as a leftist attempt to disrupt U.S. occupations in Korea and Japan. Here the incident is examined through the eyes of one Occupation employee, Elizabeth Ryan, a 31-year old court reporter who included detailed information on the incident and its participants in personal letters that she sent to her family in the United States.