When I heard the sudden news of the death of North Koreans leader Kim Jong-il,I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. Since his miracle recovery from the 2008 stroke, he had been busy travelling in and outside North Korea. Both he and others around him would have been concerned about his health, and also prepared for this moment. His death must have been such a huge regret for Kim himself, who was single-mindedly focusing on keeping his public promise to open a ‘big gate’ for a ‘powerful and prosperous Korea’ by the 100th anniversary of the birth of his father, Kim Il- song in 2012. As one Japanese who has been hoping for normalization of Japan-North Korea relations for the last 10 years, I could not but grieve over the death of the leader of our neighbouring country, who, more than anyone else, hoped to realise this goal. The Japanese government and people have lost their best chance to achieve normalization. The last decade has now become a lost decade.

Governments come and go in Japan, Noda Yoshihiko's the most recent, being the third since the general elections of 30 August 2009 brought the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to power, following those of Hatoyama Yukio and Kan Naoto. In the weeks following his assumption of office, Noda has stated his core vision for the office on many occasions, including his inaugural Diet speech as Prime Minister on 13 September. He promises to confirm, deepen, and strengthen the alliance with the US, “the axis of Japan foreign policy and security.” That means, above all else, he will construct the base for the Marine Corps in northern Okinawa designed to substitute for the Futenma base that squats dangerously in the middle of the township of Ginowan.

On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, it dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These nuclear weapons killed over 200,000 people, almost all civilians, and injured many more.

On Tuesday morning, June 20, 2006, a Roman Catholic priest and two veterans were arrested at a nuclear missile silo in North Dakota. Fr. Carl Kabat, 72, Greg Boertje-Obed, 51, and Michael Walli, 57, sit in jail in North Dakota awaiting a federal criminal trial because of weapons of mass destruction and because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The always contentious, sometimes highly emotional, debate over D.T. Suzuki's relationship to Japanese fascism continues unabated. Among other things this is shown by reader reactions to a recent article in Japan Focus entitled “Zen as a Cult of Death in the Wartime Writings of D.T. Suzuki”. This debate can only intensify by the further assertion of a wartime relationship between D.T. Suzuki and the Nazis or, more precisely, a positive or sympathetic relationship between Suzuki and the Nazis. This article, in two parts, will explore that possibility though conclusive proof of such a relationship will not be included until the second part.

In this three part series, we introduce historical museums in Japan and their role in public education. Following this introduction to peace museums, Ms. Nishino Rumiko, a founder of the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), introduces WAM's activities and the 2000 Citizens Tribunal on the ‘comfort women’. The final article is by Mr. Kim Yeonghwan, the former associate director of Grassroots House Peace Museum who describes the peace and reconciliation programs that the Museum sponsors.

The increasingly fierce competition between Japan and China over energy and political influence is spilling over into Africa.

Following in the footsteps of Beijing, Tokyo has recently begun to turn to the continent as a new source of oil. Meanwhile, the leaders of the two Asian neighbors have recently made whirlwind tours of Africa.

Buried beneath the heaps of hot words on North Korea's nuclear test, the announcement in Moscow on Monday about the Shtokman natural-gas deposit off Russia's Arctic coast almost escaped attention, despite its comparable lethal fallout in world politics.

More than six months after dozens of rusty chemical barrels were unearthed from former U.S. military land in Okinawa City, their contents have been identified - and they appear to offer conclusive proof that the toxic Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange was buried on the island.

Announced in early July, the results of two separate studies - one conducted by Okinawa City and one by the Okinawa Defense Bureau - both detected the three signature components of Agent Orange: the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D as well as highly-toxic TCDD dioxin.

On 6 June 2008, the Ainu were recognized as an indigenous people. A new set of policies was promised for Autumn 2009 in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This article offers a major review of this policy-making process. It contends that because of the nature of the UN Declaration, the structure of contemporary Japanese politics, and the recommendations of concerned bodies of “experts”, the result has merely been an incorporation of the Ainu within the remit of contemporary neoliberal politics. Taking its inspiration from the writings of the 1970s Ainu poet and thinker, Sasaki Masao, it argues that the time has surely come to ask just why Ainu are repeatedly construed as being somehow in need of “protection”, “aid” and “respect.” and whether or not alternative ways of thinking about Ainu history and politics are possible.

I’m staring at a blank white screen that awaits my text, but to type feels like a violation. What can be added to the sheer luminous emptiness in light (in the impossible violence of light) of the cataclysm of Hiroshima 1945? By taking on the incomprehensible destruction wrought by the atomic bomb in her book After Hiroshima, artist elin o’Hara slavick faces a void of annihilation that transcends expression, and yet, with meticulous care and consciousness, she produces photographic exposures that illuminate the unspeakable. Through works of troubling beauty, slavick enacts a temporal rupture, unearthing a moment that has been relegated to the historical past by saying, with stark but quiet clarity, that Hiroshima 1945 is not over.

When Miyazawa Kenji was writing his stories and poems nearly a century ago, Japan was a country with a two-pronged mission: to become the first non-white, non-Christian nation to create a modern prosperous state — and to be the leader of an Asian revival.

The Japanese people were obsessed with their cultural identity and their place, as an imperial power, among the first rank of nations in the world. It was an obsession that would lead them to prosecute an aggressive and brutal war in Asia and the Pacific.

President Xi Jinping's call for a “new type of great-power relationship” in meetings in 2013 with President Obama raises important questions about the future of US-China relations. On the surface, it appeared that the two leaders were on the same page. At the June summit, Obama agreed with Xi that “working together cooperatively” and bringing US-China relations “to a new level” were sound ideas. When the G-20 countries convened at St. Petersburg in September, Obama said of Xi's proposed new model: “we agreed to continue to build a new model of great power relations based on practical cooperation and constructively managing our differences.” But he added that “significant differences and sources of tension” remain with China, implying that China's “playing a stable and prosperous and peaceful role” in world affairs remained a matter of US concern.

Japan Focus is pleased to present an introduction to, and excerpts from, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller and Anthony Weller, with a foreword by Walter Cronkite. The story presented here explores MacArthur's censorship of Weller's reportage as the first journalist to enter Nagasaki, where he interviewed military and medical personnel, and the first to write at length on Japan's POW camps, where he interviewed hundreds of allied prisoners. Weller brings direct experience to bear on questions of US censorship of the atomic bomb, and particularly issues of radiation. Extraordinarily, not only were his Nagasaki dispatches censored, but his detailed interviews with POWs were also censored. Weller's reports, censored for sixty years, have only now become available.

On November 1, Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., the man who piloted the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died at his Columbus, Ohio home at age 92. Throughout his adult life, he was a warrior. He bravely fought the Nazis in 1942 and 1943. He fought the Japanese in 1944 and 1945. And he spent the next 62 years fighting to defend the atomic bombings.

Robots were a major force in the automation drive that made Japan the most competitive nation in manufacturing in the 1980s. That glory seems to have faded in recent decades, and Japanese robotics are no exception.

The two articles that follow highlight the failures of R&R in Japanese robotics engineering that were dramatically and tragically revealed by the earthquake and tsunami-driven meltdown of TEPCO's nuclear power plants at Fukushima. Contrary to expectations that Japan would be a leader in manufacture of disaster relief robots that could have been used in problem solving and cleanup in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, three months after 3.11, Japan's robots have yet to make a significant contribution. These articles explain why Japan, in general, its robotics industry in particular, proved unprepared for severe nuclear accidents, and how haphazard the government and the nuclear industry has been in developing robots that could have eased the crisis.

See the revised and updated version of this article.

Just as Nazi Germany did in Europe during World War II, Imperial Japan made extensive use of forced labor across the vast area of the Asia Pacific it once occupied. Today, however, Japan's government and corporations are dealing with the legacy of wartime forced labor very differently than their German counterparts.

A geopolitical convulsion measuring six points on the Richter scale is bound to produce aftershocks. The reverberations of the conflict in the Caucasus are beginning to be felt. We may be unwittingly bidding farewell to the “war on terror”. In any case, the international community has lost interest in Osama bin Laden.