Since 1990 both Japan and Korea have experienced “commemoration booms,” in which the number of private and public memorial museums and monuments has tripled. These institutions provide narratives of each nation's recent past and articulate the ideals of “nation” and “citizenship.” They recompose tales of a nation in order to make them relevant for public and private life. Like writing history, the museum collects and assembles fragments of the past and carefully re-contextualizes them into a narrative of the present. Precisely because of its role in institutionalizing social norms and values, the museum plays a crucial role in the production of national identity. It shapes the manner in which the nation creates its history, imagines its boundaries, and constitutes its citizenship.

Criticism of China in Japan's public space has intensified since the Senkaku collision incident of September 2010. Despite the resulting strain in bilateral relations, however, the Kan Naoto government seems to be laying down plans for détente as described here and here.

As Japan's government gets set to expand a nuclear evacuation area, the mayor of a city inside the radioactive zone speaks about his fears.

David McNeill in Minami-Soma City

Like most Japanese men, Sakurai Katsunobu read apocalyptic comic book stories about the future when he was a boy. He never expected to live through one of those stories himself.

A relentless Taliban insurgency, reluctant allies, political doubts, competing priorities - the pressure to change United States policy in a key region may prove irresistible.

The difficult global inheritance of the United States administration of Barack Obama is exemplified in the possible loss of the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan. This would be a painful event in any circumstance, not least as it may involve the Bishkek government making a deal with Russia that would further signal a changing geopolitical balance in the region. But the troubles the US and its allies are facing in Afghanistan means that this is a particularly bad time to be threatened with a loss of facilities and influence in another part of central Asia.

Kaneko Masaru is one of Japan's best-known students of the country's crisis-ridden political economy and public finances. He is also a very prolific public intellectual. Over the past five years, he has authored or co-authored over 20 books, co-edited six, and written dozens of articles in the monthlies and the press. Kaneko writes in a country still dominated by the absurd notion that American institutions present a “global standard” to be matched lest Japan's decline become permanent. His controversial ideas on fiscal and financial reform are thus often sought out – often surreptitiously – by LDP and opposition party politicians and intra-party study groups. He is also a frequent speaker at academic and NGO forums and a high-profile commentator on policy-oriented television and radio programmes. In short, his eminently readable and cogent critiques of contemporary economic policies have earned him a broad professional and popular following. Indeed, his books are frequently displayed in their own sections in Tokyo bookstores.

This might be one for the Guiness Book. On April 19, 2014, a ceremony was held at the fishing village of Henoko, in Nago City, Okinawa, marking the tenth anniversary of the continuous sit-in by residents and supporters opposing the construction of a new U.S. Marine Corps Airbase there. Actually it's seventeen years since the U.S. and Japanese governments announced that the USMC Airbase at Futenma, in crowded Ginowan City, would be closed, or rather packed up and moved to this new base at Henoko, as soon as it is built. Seventeen years and, far from being built, construction has not begun and isn't likely to in the foreseeable future.

Clashing views about Thailand's future are being played out on the streets of Bangkok, taking the form of forceful demonstrations, contentious commemorations and populist grandstanding by red shirted and yellow shirted rivals. Behind the searing rhetoric and policy clashes are battles of personality, in which patron-client links coalesce, regroup and solidify, rewarding loyalty with a top-down sharing of power and spoils.

Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, might also be introduced as their chief iconoclast and contrarian. In these latter roles he regularly challenges the optimistic consensus on the basis of facts and analyses that tend to be ignored as the herd embraces a new trend. For example, while numerous analysts confidently hold that asset-based (rather than income-based) consumption can continue to power the US economy, Roach has been raising doubts about this for years. As America's housing bubble slides and leaves a swathe of consumers stuck with exorbitant mortgage payments, their “propensity to consume” is falling and Roach is looking prescient (again). The American housing bubble is only beginning to slide, but this may be one reason that growth in consumption has recently slipped to 1.5% after recording a robust 4% for the past decade.

After nine years of stalling and prevarication over the replacement of Futenma Air Station in Okinawa, and nearly eighteen months of protests against its proposed replacement, a solution of sorts is finally stirring in the dusty halls of power in Kasumigaseki.

On September 24, the Yomiuri newspaper reported that the Japanese government is backing the relocation of Futenma's Marine chopper base to the Marines Camp Schwab in Nago. Tokyo had initially supported the construction of a joint civil-military airport off the coast of Henoko village to replace Futenma.

Japanese popular culture has engaged with experiences and memories of WWII since the 1950s, starting with manga (comic books) and moving on to some of the most widely known and memorable animated war films that have been produced since the 1960s, such as Barefoot Gen (1983) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988). A number of animation artists have expressed loss and hope in their works on this subject. As Napier argues, Japanese animation has explored history and memory beyond simple entertainment and has presented important issues still relevant to the audience today. This essay analyzes two futuristic science fictions, one TV and one film series, made over two decades apart: Space Battleship Yamato (produced in the 1970s) and Silent Service (in the 1990s). Both explicitly refer to WWII: in Space Battleship Yamato, after having been sunk to the bottom of the ocean off Okinawa towards the very end of the war, the battleship Yamato is revived by the Japanese government in order to save humanity from an alien attack, whereas a constant battle between Japan and international communities over the ownership of a nuclear submarine occurs in Silent Service. After a brief introduction of the narratives of the two animation series, the author examines their reception at the time of their production, and discusses the ways in which they rework the memory of loss and vision of hope in response to contemporary national and international politics.

As the US-India-Japan-Australia-Singapore joint military exercise styled Operation Malabar was conducted in early September, reverberations were felt not only in China, but also in India. The US-India nuclear agreement, driving a nail deep into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has produced sharp debate within Indian politics, including in the ruling coalition, as described by Praful Bidwai. Japan Focus.

New Delhi - As India's coalition government tries to complete the controversial nuclear cooperation deal with the United States, it finds itself caught between domestic opposition to the agreement from its Left-wing allies and pressure from Washington to seal the deal.

In 2010, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) launched a highly successful TV show called The Gruen Transfer. The title refers to the disorienting psychological effects produced on consumers by the architecture of shopping malls, whose dazzle and noise are deliberately designed to mesmerize: on entering, “our eyes glaze over, our jaws slacken… we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers”. The ABC's Gruen Transfer explored the weird, wonderful and disorienting effects produced by the advertising industry. Its most popular element was a segment called “The Pitch”, in which representatives of two advertising agencies competed to sell the unsellable to the show's audience - creating gloriously sleek videos to market bottled air, promote the virtues of banning religion, or advocate generous pay raises for politicians.

A free trade agreement is one form of trading bloc, a preferential economic arrangement amongst a group of countries that reduces barriers to trade. Trading blocs have emerged as the most debated topic in world trade. While countries around the world are making efforts to harmonize interests through trading blocs, these groupings are also emblematic of difficulties associated with the current global trading system under the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote Enduring Legacies: Economic Dimensions of Restoring North Korea's Environment. This essay not only described a set of urgent environmental problems in North Korea, but also described its institutional and legal framework for environmental management. At the time, I had no idea that so many years would pass with no improvement in North Korea's situation. It has actually become far worse than I could then imagine. In 1994, I led a UN mission charged with helping North Korea to compile its first greenhouse gas emissions inventory for its national report under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which North Korea had signed. Part of the justification for providing Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding for greenhouse gas reduction projects in North Korea was the creation of other benefits such as biodiversity. For this reason, I was looking into reforestation in North Korea as a way to capture carbon from the air as a way to preserve and restore biodiversity. I was talking over dinner with the head of North Korea's biodiversity program about such a project. He offered to pour me a shot of liquor from a bottle containing a snake. I demurred but he insisted, saying the snake liquor for public sale was low grade whereas this one — a snake with a diamond head not a square one — was the real thing, made from a rare and endangered species!

So often, Okinawan voices go unheard outside of Okinawa. So often, probing TV documentaries on such sensitive issues as the Battle of Okinawa or on Okinawa-Japan-U.S. relations are shown once and archived, never to return to public view. So often, even if they are broadcast outside of Okinawa, they are aired at odd times. This was the fate of this documentary on Oura Bay, which TV Asahi scheduled at 2:40 a.m., but it deserves the attention of more than a few night owls. The documentary, “Nerawareta Umi: Okinawa, Oura-wan - Maboroshi no gunko keikaku 50 nen” (The Targeted Sea - A 50-year Unrealized Plan for a Military Port in Oura Bay, Okinawa), was produced by QAB (Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting) and broadcast in the first week of October 2009. This program reveals the little-known fact that the plan to build a large-scale U.S. military complex in Oura Bay, including a military port, was initiated as early as the mid-1960s. Oura Bay is located on the northeastern shore of Okinawa Island, adjacent to USMC Camp Schwab and Cape Henoko, where the U.S. and Japanese governments are planning to build the controversial “replacement facility” for the Futenma Air Station. While it is widely believed that this facility is being built as a substitute for the dangerous Marine airbase in a crowded residential area of Ginowan City, the evidence disclosed here confirms that the U.S. aims to take advantage of this opportunity to close an obsolete base and build (for the most part at Japanese expense) the brand-new military complex that it has sought to build since the 1960s.

In 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer declared, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” after he witnessed the first nuclear explosion under the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His statement, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita, displayed his own apprehensions with helping to create weapons capable of overwhelming destruction Almost 60 years later, Los Alamos, located in northern New Mexico, once again stands at a major crossroads in nuclear weapons development, but this time around lab officials do not openly harbor the same reservations as Oppenheimer. In fact, Los Alamos, in its own entrenched institutional interest, has been driving drastic changes in national nuclear weapons policy. Now that Bush has been reelected and Congress has drifted farther right, these troublesome developments are sure to continue.

With the recent ethnic riots in France, The Economist (London) ran a thoughtful article (“Minority Reports”) on their causes. It posed an important question: Why are some countries able to assimilate immigrants and their children more peacefully than others? It took a stab at comparing “integrationist” vs. “assimilationist” public policies in France, England, Germany, Holland, and the United States.

The United States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s deterrence theory worked—nations knew that if they used the awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant and the equations of military power that existed in the period after World War Two no longer hold.

[This article illuminates the geopolitical background and implications of the continuing Russia-Ukranian gas dispute whose reverberations extend across Western Europe and beyond. Many market analysts regarded Russian President Vladimir Putin's early January decision to threaten cutting gas supplies to the Ukraine (and by extension, Europe) as insane. The business press filled with claims that Putin was shooting himself in the foot and that he had embarrassed Russia just as it was slated to assume leadership of the G-8 in January (on a platform of energy security, no less!).