The G8 Summit has come and gone, and with it a missed opportunity for Japan to take center stage for helping to resolve the world rice crisis. Although significant relief from the peak rice prices in April has already been achieved, in part due to an early announcement by Japan that it would release some of its imported rice stocks, there has been no follow-up by the Japanese government to sustain the momentum achieved in May, and to keep rice prices falling back to levels more affordable by poor countries and poor consumers.

The capability approach (CA) pioneered by Amartya Sen and developed by many others has become decisively influential over the last two decades as a normative framework for assessing social arrangements, social justice, equality, and quality of life, as well as for designing policies (Robeyns, 2011). The CA has also been seen as a theory of social justice seeking to reduce social exclusion and inequalities and to enhance global justice. The CA is probably best known for having inspired the creation of the Human Development Index (HDI) in 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to annually rank countries by level of human development or well-being. This well-known approach has played a key role in advancing alternative ideas about development and welfare, rather than GDP growth. Thus, evaluated in CA theoretical terms, countries like Japan, for example, may not necessarily be judged to be rich, although on paper, by such measures as GDP and per capita GDP they may rank amongst the world's most prosperous nations.

[In recent weeks, a number of protests directed against Japan have erupted throughout China. The most widely reported have been sparked by anger at new Japanese school textbooks that elide discussion of World War II atrocities, by territorial conflicts over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands, and by the Japanese bid for a permanent Security Council seat. Participants in those protests appear to have been overwhelmingly from the ranks of students and intellectuals. The strike at the Japanese-owned Uniden factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong carries the protest movement to a new level. It is significant as one of the first actions by workers in opposition to Japanese labor practices, as well as being an action that could simultaneously impact on the American giant firm Wal-Mart that has thus far resisted Chinese government pressures to permit a union. This is an unusual example of a strike whose principal demand is the right guaranteed by Chinese law to form a union. The 12,000 workers at the plant in the heart of China's export zone, mainly women migrants from poor interior provinces, make telephones most of which end up on Wal-Mart shelves. According to a New York Times report, Uniden workers typically work eleven hour days (three hours of compulsory overtime) to earn salaries of 484 yuan (US$58) a week. The present strike, following on the heels of walkouts on November 29 and December 10, 2004, contains echoes of the strikes directed at Japanese enterprises that exploded in the 1920s fueling nationalist and revolutionary movements. It also evokes the Chinese government's worst fears during the 1989 movement upsurge: that workers might join the protests on the side of students and intellectuals. Japan Focus.]

What lies behind a series of over-the-top police interventions against antiwar activists?

Venerated by neonationalists and marinated in over a century of militarism and war, Yasukuni Shrine may well be Japan's least friendly venue for a demonstration by pacifists.

As the crisis in Fukushima grows more serious (see reports here, here, and here), international scientific organizations have begun painting an increasingly dire picture of radiation releases from the plant.

The Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics reports here on March 24 that the dispersion of certain radioactive compounds are approaching those emitted in the Chernobyl disaster. The data on cesium and iodine emissions are drawn from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna: “The three day emissions from Fukushima of Iodine-131 would be about 20% of the total Chernobyl emissions, while those of Cesium-137 would be between 20 and 60% of the total Chernobyl emissions, depending on whether one believes in the different Iodine to Caesium ratio measured in Japan.” The Institute forecasts, moreover, that the winds, which have for the most part been taking the radioactivity out to sea, were predicted to shift to carry the poisoned air inland, as it has on a few earlier occasions.

The extent of radioactive contamination in Fukushima Prefecture is at the center of important debates as some scientists, NGOs, and citizen's groups argue that the Japanese government has not gone far enough in dealing with the fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi accident and has deliberately downplayed the potential health effects of radiation. With so much attention focused on Fukushima, however, there has been less consideration of the impact of the crisis, ongoing since March 11, on other parts of Japan. The August 22 issue of AERA magazine, published by Japan's major progressive newspaper Asahi Shimbun, ran a feature on contamination in the Kanto region entitled Kanto no ko kara hoshano (Radiation Detected from Kanto Children), which broadens discussions of the Fukushima Daiichi crisis’ potential impact. Below is a summary of the AERA article, published under the byline of editor Yamane Yusaku.

At the Chicago Liberty Meeting in April 1899, organized to protest U.S. imperialist advances in the Philippines, Jane Addams was the only woman of eight plenary speakers. There she stated, “To ‘protect the weak’ has always been the excuse of the ruler and tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of ‘the white man’” (Addams 1899). A few months earlier, in late 1898, the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain in the Treaty of Paris despite a preexisting revolutionary movement for independence. Subsequently, the Philippine-American War broke out, with Filipinos continuing to seek an end to colonial rule, be it the rule of Spain or the United States. President Roosevelt officially announced the war to be over on July 4, 1902, although fighting continued in some provinces through 1913.

Two years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began two media experts dissect how it has been covered by the media in Japan. Uesugi Takashi is a freelance journalist and author of several books on the Fukushima crisis, including Terebi Wa Naze Heiki De Uso Wo Tsukunoka? (Why does television tell so many lies?). He is also one of the founders of The Free Press Association of Japan (www.fpaj.jp), which attempts to offer an alternative to Japan's press club system. Ito Mamoru, is professor of media and cultural studies at Waseda University and author of Terebi Wa Genpatsu Jiko Dou Tsutaetenoka? (How did television cover the nuclear accident?).

The new Abe administration in Japan plans to re-examine the 1993 Kono statement in which Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei, apologized and admitted the Japanese government's responsibility for the comfort station operations. If it proceeds with this plan, the Abe government is likely to whitewash or revoke the Kono statement, which has been the consistent object of resentment and criticisms among neonationalists. Mr. Abe has been arguing that no historical documents exist to support the claim of forcible recruitment of girls and young women into wartime military sexual slavery. Suga Yoshihide, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, has stated that the government will invite a group of historians to study the warfront brothel operations (Morris-Suzuki 2012).

Biggs and Horie have written a thoughtful report on the recent rise in numbers of the homeless in Japan. Its value lies in the links it draws to a serious crisis in the Japanese system of social insurance and welfare support.

It is clear from this report—as also described in Toru Shinoda's recent essay on the New Years Dispatch Workers Village—that the plight of those recently labeled as the “working poor” in Japan is worsening rapidly. Where much other reporting on this problem has tended to focus on the younger homeless who spend their nights in internet cafes or rental video rooms, this report goes beyond that to look at older as well as younger workers, including those in the Airin district of Osaka.

As international pressures build to create a new international financial and currency order in the wake of the most severe global crisis since the 1930s, interest—and fantasy—center not only on the critical role of the United States but equally on China. China is now in the spotlight not only because of its position as a rising economic power, not only because of its vast financial currency reserves in the range of $2 trillion, but also because of currency strategies that align the yen to the dollar to keep its value low in order to maximize exports. Here Sebastian Mallaby looks back and forward to envisage a new financial order that would place China at the center. Japan Focus

Recent reports of Kim Jong-il's death may have been, to quote Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated,” but they did reveal a great deal about South Korean thinking regarding the future of North Korea. Anonymous officials leaked information that the government was looking at operationalizing ConPlan 5029, the contingency plan for joint US-South Korean intervention in the North that had been suspended under the previous administration. Given the lack of any signs of unrest in Pyongyang, the urgency of such planning was questioned by critics.1 But it reflects an ongoing concern that has been building in South Korea over the years: that if North Korea ever does collapse, the opportunity to determine the future of the peninsula may not fall to South Korea, but rather to China.

By the Guahan Coalition for Peace and Justice – On February 25 the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and units from the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) were scheduled to wrap up Cope North, an annual military exercise run in Guam that is designed to improve US-Japan joint air operations in the Pacific.

Most impartial observers of the China-Japan imbroglio over tiny islands claimed by both in the East China Sea—known in Japan as Senkaku and in China as Diaoyu—believe it has reached a dangerous point. The importance of the dispute is essentially two-fold. First, historical memory counts heavily in China-Japan relations. Despite their wide and deep economic ties in terms of trade, investment, and (at one time) Japanese development assistance, the dislike between peoples and governments is palpable. The Chinese are unrelenting in demanding Japanese apologies for aggression in World War II and insisting that Japanese political leaders stop behavior (notably, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine for war dead and endorsing school textbooks that elide such fraught issues as the Nanjing Massacre and the military “comfort women” system of sexual slavery) that suggests a lack of contrition. The Japanese say they have apologized enough and have every right to honor those who have served the country and display patriotic symbols.

On September 29, 2007, 110,000 people demonstrated in Okinawa to protest textbook revisions announced by Japan's Education Ministry that would delete references to the Japanese military's coercive role in so-called “group suicides” (shudan jiketsu) of civilians during the Battle of Okinawa. Speakers at the protest included Okinawan survivors of the battle who had witnessed the military rounding up civilians at “assembly points” (referred to in war propaganda as “places of shattering jewels”), and distributing hand grenades to them with orders to kill themselves to avoid capture by advancing U.S. forces. Yoshikawa Yoshikatsu, a battle survivor from Kakazu Village, recalled, “After the mayor of the village yelled “Long live the Emperor! “(Tenno Heika banzai), hand grenades exploded all around us. I could hear the screams of the dying.” A few days after the protest, author Kamata Satoshi interviewed a battle survivor at her home on Tokashiki Island, another site of what Norma Field has more accurately termed “compulsory suicide.” “Kitamura Tomi remembered hearing shouts of ‘Long live the Emperor’ as grenades exploded all around her. When she became aware again of her surroundings, her eldest daughter, sitting beside her, and her husband's younger sister were both dead.”

It is 63 years since mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age. The attacks on the two cities are now solemnly commemorated on 6 and 9 August, when the two city mayors issue their messages calling on the world to disarm, messages as necessary as they are certain to be ignored by the powers.

The September 7 decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award the 2020 games to Tokyo is potentially of monumental importance. That significance is not merely due to the fraught geopolitics of the so-called pivot to the Asia-Pacific or the collective angst of all those analysts waiting for Abenomics arrows.

Three concerns – oil, China and the war on terror – are pushing the United States toward greater involvement in Africa.

The new United States defence budget involves a substantial increase in spending and a redirection of many military programmes towards counterinsurgency and responding to asymmetric warfare (see “The costs of America's long war”, 8 March 2007). It also entails a relatively little-noticed change in the orientation of the US military towards Africa, announced on 9 February 2007: the planned establishment of Africa Command (Africom).

[Leuren Moret is an internationally recognized geoscientist and critic of nuclear power who has maintained a long interest in Japan's nuclear power program. As she points out in this article, Japan is the world's 3rd largest nuclear producer, with 52 reactors (versus 72 in France and 118 in the United States). Japan's reactors produce about 30 percent of the country's electricity. Japan is also one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, with a multiplicity of active fault zones. In persuasive detail spelled out in a map, Moret shows that Japan's nuclear industry has generally neglected the earthquake threat and built its reactors close to fault zones. She shows that Japanese government and industry has no serious emergency planning in the event of a disaster. For example, Japan's most seismically dangerous nuclear plant - the Hamaoka reactor in Shizuoka Prefecture - has Emergency Response Centres (ERCs) equipped with tiny decontamination showers that would be of little avail in the event of a serious emergency. In fact, planning for a very serious nuclear emergency is in many respects not possible. According to Moret, the scale of the disaster would be of such magnitude as to render any conceivable emergency response totally inadequate and ineffective. She shows why the only adequate response ultimately is to prevent accidents by turning away from nuclear energy.

India and China, the most aggressive shoppers for oil and gas assets in the world, and normally archrivals in the race for overseas oilfields, have finally come together to pursue their energy security in the global arena.

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), the two largest oil companies in the respective countries, announced on December 20 that they had jointly won a bid to acquire 37% of Petro-Canada's stake in