On August 6, 1945, the day that was to prove the blindingly bright dawn of the atomic age, Little Boy, a 9,700 pound baby with the look of “an elongated trash can with fins,” had already been loaded into the specially prepared bomb bay of a B-29. The night before, in large letters, mission commander Col. Paul W. Tibbets, jr., had had painted under the pilot's window, “Enola Gay,” the name of his beloved mother, who had supported him against his father in his desire to enter the U.S. Air Force. The mission was blessed on the spot by a Protestant chaplain, who delivered an impromptu prayer he had scrawled on the back of an envelop, asking the Almighty Father “to be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven and who carry the battle to our enemies.”

“Rather than feeling liberated from (Dutch) colonial rule, Papuans have felt subjugated, marginalized from the processes of economic development, and threatened by the mass influx of Indonesian settlers. They have also developed a sense of common Papuan ethnicity in opposition to Indonesian dominance of the local economy and administration. These pan-Papuan views have become the cultural and ethnic currency of a common Papuan struggle.” Chauvel (2005)

“Papuans have less access to legitimate economic opportunities than any group in Indonesia and have experienced more violence and torture since the late 1960s in projects of the military to block their political aspirations than any other group in Indonesia today.” Braithwaite et al (2010)

In early 2007, the Indonesian government decided to withhold its bird flu virus samples from the World Health Organisation's collaborating centres pending a new global mechanism for virus sharing that offered better terms for developing countries. In breaking with the existing practice of freely sending flu virus samples to these laboratories, Indonesia expressed dissatisfaction with a system which obliged WHO member states to share virus samples with WHO's collaborating centres, but which lacked mechanisms for equitable sharing of benefits, most importantly, affordable vaccines developed from these viral source materials.

For half a century, Japan has permitted ethnic minorities, notably Koreans, to run their own schools while refusing to recognize these schools graduates by denying their students the right to sit for entrance examinations at national universities. The controversy has centered above all on the rights of graduates of pro-North Korean schools. The issues came to a boil recently when the Ministry of Education extended this right to three international schools while continuing to require that graduates of ethnic schools take a preliminary examination to determine eligibility to sit for the regular examination. The issue has long been central to the movement for the rights of ethnic minorities in Japan. Eriko Arita is a staff writer for The Japan Times. This article appeared in The Japan Times on April 12, 2003.

[The American war in Southeast Asia featured the most widespread use of chemical warfare since World War I. Earlier, the British had resorted to chemicals in their colonies, Italy did so in Ethiopia, and Japan in China in the 1930s and 1940s. These were lethal chemicals where the Americans thought theirs were not. Iraq in the 1980s made the largest-scale known use of lethal chemical weapons in its Iran war and against its Kurdish minority. But two elements distinguished the U.S. effort in Vietnam. First, massive quantities of these chemicals were used, as the below article makes clear. The amounts cited are equivalent to roughly 60,000 tons of chemical agent. By comparison, in the 1972 Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam, which some hold to be the decisive air campaign of the war, and including both B-52 bombers and tactical aircraft, the Nixon administration loosed some 36,000 tons of munitions over Hanoi and its environs.

On October 31, 2008, General Tamogami Toshio, Japan's Air Self-Defense Force [ASDF] Chief of Staff was abruptly dismissed from his post in the Defense Ministry, but allowed to retire with his full pension rather than be summarily fired. At a press conference several months earlier, Tamogami, who had also been the superintendent of the SDF Joint Staff College, publicly expressed contempt for a ruling by the Nagoya High Court that the Japanese military mission in Iraq was unconstitutional. On this occasion, the outspoken General, widely known among his peers for provocatively hawkish views, crossed several more lines.

America's unprecedented and growing dependence on foreign capital to finance its ballooning trade and budget deficits periodically merits a piece in the business pages. Readers shake their heads, and then forget about it. Even academic economists tend to shy away from the issue, at least in print. Most recognize that a severe crisis is brewing, but they are wary of looking foolish by writing about it and then watching nothing happen in the short run. And plenty of business economists, convinced that America's deficits and their precarious financing are the pillars of a robust economy, rudely dismiss any cautions as hyperventilating. But some staunchly market-oriented analysts are worth heeding, including Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach. During America's stock-price bubble, Roach was one of the first to bell the cat. Being a skeptic in an era of blind faith and herd instinct takes guts, but he turned out to be right. For some months Roach has been warning that the US dependence on the inflow of money from Asian central banks is showing dangerous signs of reaching its limits. He points to the increasing role of central banks as the buyer of last resort, and its worrisome parallel in the Black Monday stock market collapse of October 1987. He's warned for months (http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20040823-mon.html) that a serious crisis is unfolding, especially as it's fed by such ancillary forces as skyrocketing oil prices and the erosion of trust in America. The pangloss crowd dismiss this of course, but reports indicate that Warren Buffet, the world's most savvy investor and its richest man, has already pulled his fortune out of American-dollar investments. If Asian central bankers back off too, we will all painfully relearn that - as economist Herbert Stein used to say - if something is unsustainable, then someday it will stop.

Austria is a great country for many reasons, but with just 8.4 million citizens and locked in the center of the European continent, it is hardly a global player. However, even here the death of Kim Jong Il, the details of the mourning procedure, and the assignment of titles and functions to his son Kim Jong Un, were reported by almost all media as top news.

This tells us something about globalization and our own profession. News is being produced and fed by a few globally operating press agencies that make hundreds of national media outlets look like clones with minor local mutations. It also shows how visually oriented the consumption of news has become. We have reason to believe that without the particular features of Kim Jong Il's appearance, and without the TV broadcasts of thousands of ecstatic mourners [Erich Weingartner: The reality of tears], attention in the West would have been much lower. I was asked by one journalist why our public does not seem to be too worried about the humanitarian situation in North Korea. My answer was: because they cannot see it on their TV screens.

If acknowledged at all, Japan's indigenous population the Ainu are usually represented as a rural, exotic group, bound to ancestral homes in Hokkaido and the Northern territories. Yet, large numbers of Ainu, perhaps even the majority of their population, now live in urban centres outside Hokkaido. The recent documentary TOKYO Ainu challenges traditional, detrimental representations of Ainu culture as solely rural and sedentary, and records the complex contemporaneous reality of urban indigeneity lived by those Ainu within Greater Tokyo. This article firstly reports the main themes of the film. It then compares the relative success of TOKYO Ainu in broadening discourse and understanding of Ainu identity to the Japanese government's recent living conditions survey released this year.

Okunoshima, Hiroshima Pref. – With its turquoise waters, quiet forest paths, palm trees and spectacular views of the mainland and other islands of the Inland Sea, Okunoshima Island has the feel of a resort somewhere in the Aegean Sea or the South Pacific.

It has been seven years since the US military launched air strikes in revenge for the 9/11 terror attacks. The Taliban have not been suppressed and Afghanistan remains in a state of war. Although overshadowed by the war against Iraq, this too is a war of aggression. A Japanese photo journalist examines the US-Afghan War.

Foreign ministers are busy people - especially energetic, creative diplomats like Russia's Sergei Lavrov and Iran's Manouchehr Mottaki, representing capitals that by tradition place great store on international diplomacy.

Therefore, the very fact that Lavrov and Mottaki have met no less than four times in as many months suggests a great deal about the high importance attached by the two capitals to their mutual understanding at the bilateral and regional level.

Ikiteiru heitai (Living soldiers or Soldiers alive) by Ishikawa Tatsuzo (1905-1985) is arguably the best piece of war literature to emerge from the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945. In Japan, the novella has been published and republished throughout the postwar era, most recently as a Chuko Bunko in 1999, and is now available for the first time in English [1]. Providing a strong indictment not only of the conduct of the Japanese military in China but also of war itself, Ikiteiru heitai is a powerful, deeply disturbing work

On August 9, 1945, President Truman, who had just returned to Washington from the Potsdam Conference, addressed the American people in a radio report:

In May 1972, following twenty-seven years of direct American military rule, the Ryukyu Islands reverted to being a Japanese prefecture under the name “Okinawa.” The year 2012 therefore marks its fortieth anniversary. These islands have a complex history and every year is punctuated by anniversaries, many with painful associations. Okinawa today looks back upon a history as an independent kingdom, enjoying close affiliation with Ming and then Qing dynasty China (1372–1874); a semi-independent kingdom affiliated with both China and Japan but effectively ruled from Satsuma in southern Japan (1609–1874); a modern Japanese prefecture (1872–1945); a US military colony, first as conquered territory and from 1952 subject to the determination of the San Francisco treaty (1945-1972); and then, from 1972 to today, once again as a Japanese prefecture but still occupied by US forces. Before the recent and contemporary disputes that are at the center of the US-Japan relationship can be understood, something of this checkered history as a region alternately in and out of “Japan” has to be recounted.

Since when have retrogressive “masturbatory views of history,” represented by the “liberal view of history,” come to dominate bookstore shelves? They became noticeable to the eye around the time of the Gulf War. In fact, Fujioka Nobukatsu, the leading proponent of the “liberal-view-of-history” [jiyûshugi shikan], begins both of his books—Reforming Modern History Education (1996) and A Modern History of Shame (1996)—with prologues describing the impact of the Gulf War. He observes that “many Japanese, relying on the idealism of article nine in the constitution, were able to steep themselves completely in sentimental pacifism.” Furthermore, “the Gulf War was a shocking event that demonstrated that the ideal of ‘pacifism’ contained within article nine, and upon which ‘peace education’ was based, failed in the face of the reality of international politics.” In short, according to Fujioka's reminiscences, the Gulf War was a sensational event that exposed the defects of Japan's “postwar democracy.”

One of Japan's longest-running legal feuds may be about to erupt again, driven by worsening Korea-Japan relations.

Bony, 80-year-old body floating around inside a nylon shirt and cigarette permanently clamped between what appear to be her two remaining front teeth; Kan Kyon Nam is an unlikely illegal squatter.

How will the history of the US-led military aggression against Iraq be told? In many ways this question for tomorrow was answered yesterday: it's done. The history that glorifies military aggression, racism and state violence has been written. It is being taught, absorbed and institutionalized in various ways as historical fact. Not only is this history taught, but it is experienced.