From January 9 until February 23, 2012, I was in Japan on an invitational fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). My host institution was Kanagawa University and my host researcher was Prof. Mutai Shunsuke.

Every generation of historians rediscovers and then forgets the history of Western views of China: the slow process in which the admiration of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Jesuit missionaries and other European visitors to China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire turned to contempt as nineteenth-century Europe gained the upper hand in world politics and economy. Many negative perceptions - that China was weak; the government despotic and venal; the people supine, hypocritical, and dirty; and that nothing in China ever would change without European intervention - were inversions or new readings of material the more admiring Jesuits and others had put forward. To tie them to sharper observation of Chinese realities, as scholars do when they speak of the “revelation” of Chinese weakness, of “a new literature of hardheaded appraisal,” or of “new information” and “a fresh domain of realistic reportage,” is to buy into the discourse’s own representation of itself as Did reality inform imagination or vice versa? In his history of the Chinese revolution, John Fitzgerald presents Defoe’s claim that “One English, or Dutch, or French, man of war of 80 guns, would fight and destroy all the shipping of China” as a result of the real experience of buccaneer Captain George Anson’s successful bullying of Canton’s officials to let him into the port proper, while merchants were limited to the outer harbor, on his way home loaded with Spanish gold in 1743. But Crusoe’s Farther Adventures had appeared in 1719 (and Defoe died in 1731). It is more likely that Anson’s presentation of himself as a firm, manly Britisher rightfully opposing the obstructionism of timorous Chinese officials with pathetically insufficient arms was shaped by Defoe’s fiction, and by the basically Sinophilic Le Comte. The French Jesuit’s letters on China (based on a ten-years’ stay) had appeared in English in 1737, and included the observation that if only “Lewis the Great” were not so far away in France, he could easily conquer the Chinese empire, for the Chinese are “but mean soldiers.” Since Anson was specifically instructed by George II, when he set out in 1740, to come home by way of China if convenient, it is highly probable that his reference material included Le Comte’s book; indeed one of the early, unofficial accounts of his voyage drew heavily on it. Perhaps Le Comte’s observations and Defoe’s literary spleen were what gave Anson the confidence to confront the Cantonese authorities with the unequivocal demands to let him into the port - if that is even what really happened. For Anson’s bluster, expressed in his statement that “the Centurion alone was an overmatch for all the naval power of that Empire” is mitigated by the details of his account: his strident demands were accepted only after he had earned the Viceroy’s gratitude by helping to put out a fire.

Thousands of barrels of Agent Orange were unloaded on Okinawa Island and stored at the port of Naha, and at the U.S. military's Kadena and Camp Schwab bases between 1965 and 1966, an American veteran who served in Okinawa claims.

In a Jacksonville Florida interview in early April with The Japan Times and Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV network based in Okinawa, former infantryman Larry Carlson, 67, also said that Okinawan stevedores were exposed to the highly toxic herbicide as they labored in the holds of ships, and that he witnessed it being sprayed at Kadena Air Base.

In a ritual that has become as predictable as the tides, environmentalists have returned home after trading blows with Japan's whalers in freezing Antarctic waters. Sea Shepherd, the US-based anti-whaling group, says it has again successfully disrupted the Japanese fleet's bid to harpoon about 1,000 whales, sending it back to port with probably a third of that number.

A major question for the future of the environment of Japan – understood here both as natural environment and living environment – is whether pressures of population decline will prompt a more general adoption of quality-of-place and quality-of-environment strategies for local place making and place survival. A combination of very low birthrates (common to most developed countries), and an unwillingness to allow large-scale immigration (in which Japan is the exception among developed countries) means that Japan is the first large developed country in the world to face massive and imminent population decline. As discussed below, total population is expected to decline by about 28 million, to 100 million by 2050, and the proportion of the elderly will increase dramatically. Overall population decline and ageing will change the context of place-making greatly, as competition for both residents and inward investment intensifies. The impacts of these pressures on local environmental governance approaches will have major consequences for the future of the Japanese settlement system and the Japanese people. This article explores the possibility that population ageing and economic decline may be creating conditions in which Japanese local governments intensify efforts towards more livable cities with a high level of environmental amenity and quality of local services.

On 14 October 2004, a suit filed by 45 plaintiffs against the Japanese state and Kumamoto prefecture was successful in the Supreme Court in Osaka. The case concerned the mass poisoning almost half a century ago of residents of the town of Minamata in Western Japan, when mercury contained in effluent from the Chisso Corporation's factory contaminated the Shiranui Sea and then accumulated in the bodies of those who ate its fish and shellfish. The Supreme Court found the national and prefectural government authorities responsible for administrative malfeasance. The status of the plaintiffs as Minamata sufferers, till then persistently denied by the authorities, was upheld, and compensation was ordered. This was an action launched in 1982, preceded by a long and anguished course on the path of the plaintiffs, and in the twenty-two years that has passed since the suit was launched twenty-three of the fifty-nine died (the bereaved families of fifteen of them persisting in the action), and the average age of the survivors came to be over seventy. The authorities, responsible for protecting the rights and health of the people, had caused these citizens continuous pain by denying them their just rights.

On August 31, President Obama delivered a speech from the White House. Because he was expected to declare the end of the Iraqi war, the entire nation focused its attention on the content to the speech. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom is over. … We have spent over a trillion dollars on this war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.… Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work’. It marked the beginning of a new era, and under other circumstances this speech would have impressed people. The president, however looked troubled, and the atmosphere was gloomy – hardly the context for a forward-looking policy announcement; this was largely due to the severity of the economic crisis the US currently faces.

The exhibit was in Tokyo from August 6-24, 2008. An exhibit is also planned for Okinawa in 2009.

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” 〠€ Article 9, Japanese Constitution

On May 14, 1946, ten days after the opening of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (popularly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal), Captain George Furness, a member of the defense counsel, cast serious doubt on the fairness of the Tribunal conducted by the victorious nations in World War II:

The livelihood of Iwahara Yoshimi, a lettuce farmer living a few kilometers from The Windsor Hotel, was threatened by the G8 Summit. A temporary heliport had been set up by the Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF) adjacent to his fields as part of the security and logistical preparations for the summit. The helicopters were blowing soil over his crop and lettuce heads were being damaged by the strong gusts. On learning that the heliport would be built, Iwahara had planted some of his crop in another field further from the heliport, but with inadequate soil preparation and fertilization the crop was blighted. While hoping that the Hokkaido Toyako Summit would be a success for his hometown, Iwahara faced an uncertain future.

Major Owen Sweet's campaign against prostitutes began shortly after his arrival in Jolo, in the southern Philippines, in May 1899. The situation was urgent. Four months into a war against the Philippine Republic, the 23rd Infantry had taken control of the area from Spanish forces, but, as Sweet lamented, his troops had fallen “heir to the lax moral conditions incident to the Philippines and Oriental countries generally.” Lacking barracks space, his soldiers had been forced to live “in close contact” with “mixed races,” and Sweet had been “confronted with the same status of immoralities and the lawless community” as commanders had in Manila, Iloilo, Cebu and elsewhere. A “personal” investigation in November involving a “house to house examination and inspection” had revealed gambling houses, grog-shops, saloons, “joints where the vilest drugs were dispensed,” and “several resorts of prostitution” inhabited primarily by Chinese and Japanese, but also Filipinos, Moros, and “other immoral women scattered throughout the villages.” Sweet feared that these conditions might spark local tensions, opening a second, Muslim-American front that the Americans could not afford.

“… the only government in the world today that can be identified as being actively involved in directing crime as a central part of its national economic strategy and foreign policy. … In essence, North Korea has become a ‘soprano state’ - a government guided by a Worker's Party leadership whose actions, attitudes, and affiliations increasingly resemble those of an organized crime family more than a normal nation.

From September 2005, the US shifted the primary focus of its North Korea attention from nuclear weapons to crime and human rights, denouncing North Korea as a “criminal state” or “soprano state.” This paper reflects on why it might have done this and considers the implications.

In his brilliant and hilarious short story – “Winding Road To Heaven” – Tongan writer Epeli Hau'ofa unwittingly described Indonesia: …“And not so long ago, when five very, very important men discovered that they had together helped themselves to half a million dollars of public money to which they had no right to help themselves, they prayed for God's forgiveness, they forgave each other, and they neither had to resign from their very important jobs nor return any money to anyone.”

Over 35 years since returning home from the Vietnam War, a former US soldier has returned a poignant diary he recovered from a young Vietcong military doctor. The diary has sparked a patriotic revival in Vietnam, turning the two former enemies into national heroes.

“I had to do an appendix operation without enough medicine. Only a few tubes of Novocain, but the wounded young soldier never cried out or yelled. He continued to smile to encourage me. Looking at the forced smile on his dry lips, knowing his fatigue, I felt so sorry for him…I lightly stroked his hair. I would like to say to him: ‘Patients like you who I cannot cure cause me the most sorrow, and their memory will not fade.’“

A common factor in conventional war movies, whether they are made by Americans, Europeans, or Asians, is the lack of visible enemies. They are there, in the way Indians were there in old westerns, as fodder for the guns on our side, screaming Banzai! or Achtung! or Come on! before falling to the ground in heaps. What is missing, with rare exceptions, is any sense of individual difference, of character, of humanity in the enemy. And even the exceptions tend to fall into familiar types: the bumbling or sinister German, hissing about ways to make you talk, the loud, crass American, the snarling Japanese.

A few years ago, when Milton Minoru Takahashi first set out to improve conditions for Brazilian guest workers living in Nagoya, he thought he'd be telling Japanese about soccer, samba and Brazilian beaches. They were the sales hooks the Brazilian-Japanese Takahashi—who works for a nonprofit foundation that aids the 60,000 foreigners in Nagoya—thought could open locals' eyes to the beauties of Brazilian culture. But, he says, “the Japanese didn't want to hear about those things. They wanted to talk about noise and garbage”—problems allegedly caused by the Brazilian immigrants in their neighborhoods.

In his Sociology of Religion, Max Weber suggested that one of the significant social impacts of religious ideas was to be found in what he called “the problem of theodicy,” the effort to reconcile a vision of cosmic order with the suffering, injustice and waste that marks so much of human experience. Among these religious responses to the problem of evil, he included the doctrine of karmic cause and effect, a notion that has since become commonplace in Western popular discourse. As the following piece by Brian Victoria suggests, karma theory has often been used by those in positions of authority, not simply to explain, but to justify social inequality and oppression. In his survey of twentieth-century Japanese writings on karma and society, Victoria describes some of the ways in which Buddhist doctrines like karma were placed explicitly in service to the state. The idea that our experiences in this life are the result of our actions in a past life was put to use, not only to dismiss calls to social and economic equality, but to redirect responsibility for the death and devastation caused by war from political leaders to the victims themselves. As he notes, however, dissenting voices have argued for a very different view, one more in keeping with Buddhist injunctions to compassion.

[As China-Japan relations entered their tensest period since the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1972, Japan's Asahi Shimbun appraised the situation in an article by its China bureau chief and an editorial. Noting the role of the Chinese government in fueling the current wave of protests and of the police in failing to curb violence directed against the Japanese embassy, the newspaper called on it to rein in nationalist actions that could jeopardize the flourishing economic relations between the two nations. The Asahi locates the protests in the context of Chinese responses to Japan's textbook controversy and its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. It warns the governments of both countries that the genie of nationalism, once out of the bottle, may be difficult to curb, a warning with deep historical roots in the China-Japan relationship. The Asahi texts make no mention, however, of rising nationalism in Japan, nor do they specify ways in which Japanese government and people might contribute to easing the tensions that threaten the relationship between Asia's most powerful nations. Japan Focus]

Humankind is truly at a crossroads. It may either degenerate into oblivion destroying its abode, the Earth, or it may change course and sustain its civilization for the foreseeable future. The material that is available to humankind and all our co-inhabitants of the Earth is physically limited, and the energy that is usable for long is only that from the Sun. All other energy sources are exhaustible, and will not last long at the current rate of exploitation. Materials naturally available (or at least readily usable) are usually present in a relatively low-entropy state. Once such materials are processed, utilized and discarded/dispersed into the environment, their entropy is enormously increased. Then it is hardly possible to recover it in a low-entropy state. Hence, though they never disappear, such materials are non-renewable in practice. This writer has attempted to estimate the resource availability of major elements on the Earth and the anthropogenic exploitation rate (Ochiai, 2004).

“To go or not to go is the question. Our man Prime Minister Koizumi, just celebrating his 60th, states that decisions should be ‘based on the situation, whether it is ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. I, being over 60 myself, am at the same crossroads in a way. The difference is that our friend [Koizumi] will proceed if it is safe and will not if there is danger, whilst I take the opposite position. Koizumi in his wavy lionesque ‘do’, and me bald as an elephant, our thinking as opposite as our hairstyles.” – Hashida Shinsuke (1942-2004), from his diary, Screaming ‘Idiot’ in the Middle of Iraq.