So much has happened to the Okinawan protest against the Futenma base relocation in the past 10 years: the formal and informal local resistance has been such that the new U.S. military sea base that was to replace Futenma Air Station has not been built. However, the election results in Okinawa continue to produce mayors and governors ready to accept relocation, largely for economic reasons. What explains this contradiction? How democratic have the local political processes regarding the base issue been? Miyagi Yasuhiro addresses these questions in a report, originally written for the research group Okinawa jizokuteki hatten kenkyukai (Sustainable Development in Okinawa Research Group, headed by Miyamoto Ken'ichi), which reflects on the ten years since the Nago referendum of 1997 on relocation of the US Marine Air Station from Futenma. The relocation proposal was rejected by a majority.

In late October 2007 an odd story appeared in the press. A Japanese-owned chemical tanker called the Golden Nori was hijacked off the coast of Somalia. There were no Japanese nationals on board, but the East Asian nation had become entangled, quite unusually, in an East African affair. Unforeseen at that time was that this curious incident would eventually become one of the top foreign policy issues in Tokyo: Somali piracy has emerged as a potential turning point for Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, and is significant for other reasons as well. The following essay reviews the record of Japanese encounters with Somali pirates and explores the motives and political pressures driving the Maritime Self-Defense Forces (MSDF) toward a proactive role in suppressing East African piracy.

From the centre of empire, the map of the rest of the world is largely blank, assumed either to be “just like us” and hence boring, or alternatively “not like us” and hence of marginal interest. Either way, the rest of the world is of little concern to those at the centre, at least until ugly blotches of “trouble spots” crack the surface glaze of imperial narcissism.

Officially received by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta at a ceremony on the Indonesian island of Bali on 15 July, the long awaited report of the joint Timor Leste-Indonesian Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF), set up in 2005, has received mixed reviews.

Attention in Japan and elsewhere has focused recently on the seaside village of Henoko (Ryukyuan: Hinuku) in northern Okinawa where a powerful protest movement has stymied the Japanese and U.S. governments from building an offshore air base. Attempting to ameliorate outrage in Okinawa after three U.S. servicemen raped a twelve-year-old schoolgirl in 1995, the governments in Tokyo and Washington announced an agreement in 1996 to close Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, located in the middle of Ginowan City. However, the agreement stipulated that a “replacement facility” be built in Okinawa “within five to seven years.” Yet, after more than fifteen years and numerous bi-lateral declarations reiterating the two governments’ determination to build the base, construction has yet to begin. In 2006 they announced a related agreement to transfer 8,600 of the 18,000 Marines in Okinawa and their 9,000 dependents to Guam, but this is conditioned on relocation of Futenma MCAS to Henoko and remains on hold.

The Fox-ification of the US media proceeds apace. In Italy, the country's media mogul doubles as Prime Minister. In Britain public broadcasting is under pressure from Blairite forces. Japan, the world's No 2 capitalist power, is left out of most discussion on global media trends, but is undergoing the same pressures. Allegations of political intervention to tailor the way the issue of “comfort women” in 1930s and 1940s Asia should be addressed in a 2001 documentary stirred a full scale media war in 2005.

The air turned chilly as the sun sighed into the nearby hills. It picked up the smells of dust mixed with metallic and dung flavours. Miss Phaeng watched, holding her breath as the last sliver of red fell out of sight. Casting a quick mantra to the spirits of nature, she swallowed a glass of lao lao to start the evening.

Three national newspapers and Nihon Keizai Shimbun headlined the death of playwright and preeminent Shakespeare translator Kinoshita Junji on December 1, 2006. This article considers the fate of his classic play Yuzuru (Twilight Crane), once condemned as “one-sided” (or “ideologically biased”) and inappropriate as teaching material, only to be resurrected a generation later. The article was published in Shukan Kinyobi on December 15, 2006, the same day that the Education Reform Bill passed the Upper House of the Diet.

Chinese fans subjected the Japanese team to intense booing at the Asia Cup Games held in China in August. They also made their disgust evident when Kimigayo, the Japanese anthem, was sung. Chinese fans vandalized Japanese Embassy cars in Beijing after the final match. These events sent shockwaves through Japan and the incidents were taken up by the foreign media.

The impact was not limited to the attention given to the radical actions of the Chinese fans by the Japanese media. Japan's China experts also categorized the violent behavior of the Chinese fans as a product of the nationalistic anti-Japanese education that young Chinese receive. Some like Professor Kojima Tomoyuki of Keio University harshly criticized China. “The anti-Japanese bias in their education has gone too far,” he wrote in The Asahi Shimbun of August 31, 2004. Television news and variety “Wideshow” Programs went as far as to assert that if China continues to drag politics into sports, it is not qualified to host the 2008 Olympics. An August 8 editorial of the Asahi Shimbun states, “[The actions of Chinese fans] at the final match between China and Japan gave us an opportunity to see the mindset of the Chinese who will be welcoming us at the Olympics in four years.”

The rebuilding of both a nuclear nonproliferation system and a framework for multilateral consultations in Asia toes the line of postwar Japanese foreign policy.

There is no denying that Japanese diplomacy is being tested by the threat of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. However, the problems of Japanese foreign policy lie not only outside Japan but also within.

One of the tragic ironies of the recent earthquake in China is that it has created numerous new, extremely dangerous dams in a country that already is the most dam-populated country on earth. At more than 85,000 dams and counting, Chinese leaders already boast of having the tallest dams, the largest by reservoir capacity, the dam with the highest ship lift, and the most powerful electricity producer. From arch dams, earthen dams, and gravity dams to cascade and concrete-faced rockfill dams, China has it all.

The phrase ‘sixty years of the post-war’ is often used to mean ‘60 years since the end of the war’ or ‘these past sixty years’. However, the term ‘post-war’ itself is premised on a ‘pre-war’ and a ‘wartime’. In other words, prior to the sixty years of post-war, there is the disjuncture between ‘post-war’, on the one hand, and ‘pre-war’ and ‘wartime’ on the other. For me, it is this experience of disjuncture that is the starting point of ‘post-war’.

Nakazawa Keiji, atomic bomb survivor, peace activist, and creator of the famed Hiroshimathemed manga Barefoot Gen passed away on December 19, 2012 after a long struggle with cancer. He was 73. Asia-Pacific Journal Coordinators Yuki Tanaka and Satoko Norimatsu offer their memories of Nakazawa and thoughts on his life and work.

QUESTION: Choose the correct statement about Korea under Japanese rule.

1. 1) A government-general was established and Ito Hirobumi was the first governor-general.

2. 2) Korea was the first foreign territory acquired by Japan after the Meiji Restoration.

3. 3) The system of giving Koreans Japanese names was implemented at the time of annexation.

4. 4) Koreans were forcibly transported to Japan during World War II.

Over the last two decades, Japanese popular culture products have been massively exported, marketed, and consumed throughout East and Southeast Asia. A wide variety of these products are prominently displayed in the region's big cities. Many Hong Kong fashion journals, for example, can be found in either the original Japanese or Cantonese versions. Japanese manga are routinely translated into the local languages of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, and China, and they dominate East Asia's comic book market. The Japanese animated characters Hello Kitty, Ampan Man, and Poke'mon are ubiquitous, depicted on licensed and unlicensed toys and stationary items in the markets of every Asian city. Japanese animation, usually dubbed, is the most popular in its field, particularly in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Astro Boy, Sailor Moon, and Lupin are animated characters seen in almost every shop that sells anime in Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. In China's big cities, too, Japanese popular culture products fill local stores, opening doors into the country's expanding cultural market, though in some markets they also face stiff competition from Korean and Chinese products. The success of Japanese popular culture in East and Southeast Asia has occasioned a flood of academic writing, notably in the fields of cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnography. The majority of works have focused on particular examples, emphasizing the reaction of audiences to cultural exposure in relation to the global-local discourse (Allison 2006; Craig 2000; Ishii 2001; Iwabuchi 2004; Martinez 1998; Mori 2004; Otake and Hosokawa 1998; Treat 1996). These studies consist of specific case studies with a strong tendency to privilege the text and its representational practices. No single study has yet comprehensively assessed the newly created Japanese cultural markets in East and Southeast Asia, nor framed these issues within a regional paradigm.

On June 29, 2014 a man set himself on fire in Tokyo to protest PM Abe Shinzo's bid to lift constitutional constraints on Japan's military forces and in subsequent days tens of thousands of citizens gathered outside the prime minister's residence to loudly protest this initiative. Opinion polls, even those conducted by reliably rightwing news organizations, indicate widespread opposition to his renunciation of pacifism and very little support for collective self-defense (CSD).

What Japan can teach Americans and the world about financial crises is a question that has been cropping up for some time. References to Japan in fact appear to be increasing, with a recent turn to worries of “becoming Japanese” through a decade or so lost to malaise and marginal growth, perhaps interspersed with bouts of financial panic. Heralding this Japanization is America's seeming onset of deflation and a liquidity trap in tandem with a virtually zero interest rate policy. These developments have largely eroded American policy options on the financial side. In Japan, this impotent, “pushing on a string” stage of the post-bubble shakeout left the state sector largely moribund, especially after it vainly tried to spend its way out of the crisis. It remains to be seen whether the US, under Obama, will pursue an effective fiscal policy or repeat this year's tax rebates, the equivalent of simply throwing money in a hole. This commentary reviews the highlights of our current crisis as well as what we can learn from Japan and whether we are, in fact, learning from Japan.

On October 2007 I peered from a window of a Boeing 737 approaching Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), pulled out my professional camera and began snapping photos of the enormous bay which serves as a missile range for the US star wars program. Kwaj island is rimmed by rotting metal pieces (whatever they are), dotted with huge radar installations, missile interceptors and who the hell knows what else?

After landing, I was taken to the military checkpoint. My hand luggage had to be left on the floor; a dog sniffed at it; a policewoman explained security regulations; outrageous military propaganda posters decorated the walls. The small and humble immigration checkpoint of the Marshall Islands was humbly stuck in a corner of the room. I had a hard time explaining that I was actually traveling to Ebeye, a small island 4 miles away, a place that provides cheap labor to the US military base, a place of misery - an over-populated and desperate byway of the Marshall Islands.