People still clearly remember that on April 5, 2009 the U.S. President Barack Obama excited an audience in Prague by declaring that his government “will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.” As the only nuclear power to have ever used a nuclear weapon, he said, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. Indeed, the U.S. has not only moral responsibility but also legal responsibility for the victims as the nation that committed a crime against humanity by indiscriminately killing tens of thousands of people and causing lifelong radiation sickness to many survivors. In his speech, Obama also added ‘this goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime.’ Clearly, this goal will never be reached if the U.S. continues to spend ever larger sums on nuclear weapons, overshadowing all other nuclear powers, as the Obama Administration has been doing since the speech in Prague.

Greenpeace has released a report Toxic Assets: Nuclear Assets in the 21st Century, which presents evidence on the costs of nuclear accidents from the point of view of risk to investors. Greenpeace is not following the capital because of any corporate attachment. The report counters the common post-Fukushima argument that nuclear power is both inexpensive for consumers and a good investment for investors. The “cheap nuclear” mantra, they argue, fails to take into account the fact that nuclear plants can break a company and pass huge liabilities on to taxpayers. According to this report, nuclear seems represents everything wrong with contemporary capitalism – private companies reap profits while the public underwrites tremendous and obvious risks while concerns about sustainability are muted to assure short-term profits. The Japan Center for Economic Research places the likely Fukushima clean-up total at between 72 and 250 billion $US. This is at least several times the company's market value before the Fukushima disaster, an indication that the massive risks tied up with nuclear power are simply not being factored in to market valuations, which reflect estimates of future profitability.

The hydrogen explosions at the three Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in March 2011 launched one of the largest disasters in industrial history. A year after the Japanese government declared that the reactors were under control, experts continued to find radioactive leaks. According to TEPCO's latest estimate, cleaning up the mess—removing fuel rods and debris, decommissioning the reactors, and decontaminating some of the surroundings—will take four decades and cost at least $125 billion.” Along the way, thousands of workers will be exposed annually to levels of radiation well in excess of 20 milliSieverts, the internationally recognized maximum limit for normal working conditions.

Korean students secretly planned a rebellion in the 30th Division of the Japanese army based in Heijyo (now Pyongyang, in North Korea). Cheon Sanghwa, a staff officer, was a participant in the plan. He fought against Japan for an independent Korea. [2] By sabotaging the Japanese army from inside, he contributed to Japan's defeat in the Second World War. This was in 1944. Now eighty-seven years old, he lives in Seoul. This year is the 65th anniversary of Korean students departing for the front. These students, who were not subject to the normal draft, were forced to volunteer for the Japanese army. Wishing for the independence of their country from Japan, they must have felt conflicted over volunteering. This is “the verbatim record” of the life and death experiences of Cheon Sanghwa.

Description: Bret Fisk provides a brief description of the types of first-person accounts that exist in Japanese regarding the civilian experience of the Tokyo air raids. Examples of such accounts are given under the headings: “Complete Personal Narratives,” “Incomplete Episodes and Incidents,” and “Sites of Mass Suffering.”

The present paper examines the military chaplaincy in the context of a problem which has long intrigued researchers, namely the reasons for the rapid growth of the Christian (Protestant and Catholic) churches in 1950-80s South Korea compared to Japan or Taiwan. The author suggests that, whereas a general answer to the question may be the use of Christianity as a de facto state ideology in the years 1948-1960 and its functioning as an ideology of capitalist modernisation in the 1960s-80s, a particularly important part of government-induced Christianization of South Korea was the institution of military chaplaincy. In 1951-1968, Christians—despite being a numerical minority!—monopolized the chaplaincy in the military, and fully utilised this monopoly, “solacing ” vulnerable youth forcibly conscripted for military service and making many “church family members”. The loyalties won in such a way, often lasted for life, thus providing the churches with new recruits and the hard-core anti-Communist state—with docile anti-Communismt Christian subjects.

[The issue of whale hunting, centered on species extinction has produced a firestorm of criticism by Greenpeace and other environmental groups of the whaling practice of Japan and other powers. Kjeld Duits here opens the door on an ethical issue that does not pivot on questions of extinction but poses questions of the smallscale but brutal killing of dolphins. The questions extend far beyond the dolphin hunt in a small sea community to the killing of cattle and chickens on a massive scale, practices that take place throughout the industrial world and beyond. Japan Focus.]

On the coast of the small Japanese town of Taiji some ten fishing boats are bobbing quietly up and down on the quiet waves. Fishermen on the boats beat on long metal poles which are stuck into the water. At the end of each pipe is a metal disc which drives the noise into the water like a loudspeaker. About five dolphins flee the terrifying sound, in front of the bows of the boats. For hundreds of years this dolphin hunt has been taking place. Now it has to stop say nature activists.

Korean-American writer Paul Yoon's 2009 short story collectionOnce the Shore (Sarabande), which won the prize for fiction at the 13th Asian American Literary Awards, is set on a fictionalized version of Jeju Island and deals with the devastating impact of militarism, colonialism, and the cold war on a rugged island culture.

In early December 2011 the Nippon Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) “posted” Yu Darvish, making him eligible to field contract offers from Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in the United States. Darvish, a tall, handsome then 24 year old who, from 2005-2011, was the team's ace pitcher, had been the frequent subject of speculation: would he, and if so when, leave Japan for American baseball. By December 19 the Texas Rangers had won the posting process with a bid of $51.7 million dollars, paid entirely to Nippon Ham, payable upon the successful negotiation of a contract with Darvish. Several weeks later a six year, $60 million dollar agreement was signed and the next round of Darvish's athletic endeavors was set to unfold outside Japan. The month long process assumed its place alongside other moves by prominent Japanese baseball players to the United States, with baseball fans in both countries discussing and dissecting how he would fare against MLB competition.

On June 13, 2007, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs created a commission to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding the relocation, internment, and deportation of Latin Americans of Japanese descent to the United States during World War II. Among these were almost two thousand Peruvian citizens and permanent residents. Though not as widely known as the famous saga of internment and redress of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, in many ways the story of the Japanese in Peru is more intriguing, as much information still lies in the shadows, and is only now coming to light. Likewise, the issues of civil liberties that underscore this story—how a powerful nation can coerce a weaker ally into handing over some of its own people for imprisonment in another country without due process, on the ground that they are potential subversives—are all too obvious in a post 9/11 world fighting a “war on terrorism”. Also, while many people know that Peru's Alberto Fujimori was the first person of Japanese ancestry to be elected leader of a nation outside of Japan—thereby indicating a potential immigrant success story—few are aware of the cultural and social conflicts that still plague today's Peruvian Japanese population. Even fewer are likely to know about struggles of Japanese Peruvians who “return” to their ancestors' homeland for work for higher wages than the unstable Peruvian economy can provide. The short story of the Japanese in Peru, then, is many ways a microcosm of the larger saga of migration, discrimination and assimilation in the globalized, racialized, transnational twenty-first century world.

As I was researching Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese, I wondered whether Orwell ever wrote about China. His interest in India, where he was born in 1903, is well known, and he served in the Burma Police after leaving school and before becoming a writer, but my guess was that China didn’t concern him greatly. But when I went to the British Library to check in his massive, 20-volume Complete Works [CW], I was surprised to discover that he wrote quite a lot about China and its fate under Japanese occupation, in particular when he was working for the BBC's Eastern Service during World War II.

Blaxell treats the naturalization and Japanization of the land formerly known as Ezochi (literally “land of the barbarians”) into Hokkaido. Blaxell discusses the transformation of the urban space of Sapporo in the 1870s and 1880s by Japanese working with American advisors. The result was neither Japanese nor American, but distinctly modern and evocative of the imperial age. Blaxell touches upon the simultaneous erasing of the indigenous people, the Ainu, from the land during this re-conceptualization of Hokkaido as Japanese space and land. (The policies directed toward the Ainu after Hokkaido's colonization are discussed in Hirano Katsuya's article in Part II.) Blaxell uses the importation of a quintessentially Japanese characteristic—rice—to the unforgiving climate of Hokkaido and its eventual acculturation as an example of how the processes of colonization helped to naturalize a landscape as Japanese. Her article encourages us not to take for granted the geographic space—whether urban or “natural” —and understand how it is the result of both constructive (for some people but not others) and destructive human actions.

Hayashi Kyoko, born in Nagasaki in 1930, spent much of her childhood in wartime Shanghai. Returning to Nagasaki in March 1945, she attended Nagasaki Girls High School and was a student-worker in a munitions plant in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing on August 9.

Hayashi made her literary debut with the Akutagawa Prize-winning “Ritual of Death”, which records her exodus from the area of devastation and eventual reunion with her family. Her atomic bomb novella, “Masks of Whatchamacallit” (Nanjamonja no men) appeared the following year, followed shortly by a sequence of twelve short stories called Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Giyaman biidoro, 1978). These works established her as an important chronicler of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the lives of hibakusha in the wake of the bomb, themes she would elaborate in future work. A recent work “From Trinity to Trinity” (Torinitii kara Torinitii e) records her trip to Los Alamos New Mexico, the site of the first atomic bomb experiment, the source of her fifty-five years of experience of living with the bomb.

On the eve of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War Two, and the first anniversary of progressive political leadership by the Democratic Party of Japan, redress campaigns for wartime forced labor are bearing promising fruit and entering a decisive phase.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced on July 14 it would start talks on compensating the 300 Korean women who were deceived as teenagers into toiling without pay at a Nagoya aircraft factory. The so-called “teishintai” (volunteer corps) workers lost their lawsuit at the Japan Supreme Court in 2008, but last December the Japanese government issued seven of the women refunds of 99 yen (about one dollar) for pension deposits withheld during the war. The move enraged the Korean public and led to persistent protests at Mitsubishi offices in Tokyo and Seoul.

The Obama administration took office in 2009 determined to move beyond might-makes-right-makes-might unilateralism of the Bush years, and reassert America's global influence as the most principled and powerful guarantor of rule-based multilateralism.

With respect to China, this approach was presented as a doctrine of “strategic reassurance”.

Duara argues that the relationship between Manchukuo and Japan was a new form of imperialism, rather than a mirror-image of European imperialism. As Duara explains, the political relationship between the two showed “a strategic conception of the periphery as part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power.” The Japanese developed this strategy in response to growing nationalist movements by colonized people for independence after World War I. Many Japanese also thought they could win the cooperation of those movements by stressing their own frustrations at racial discrimination in the international sphere. Further exacerbating the sense that they were criticized by everyone, the Japanese faced racial discrimination when they tried to emigrate to Europe and North America and were refused even the principle of racial equality at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. Japan thus began to articulate itself as the anti-imperialist leader in Asia, set to lead the other Asian nations and throw off the yoke of western imperialism.

On January 17, PBS documentary program Frontline ran a feature on the Fukushima nuclear meltdown entitled Nuclear Aftershocks. It is available online here. The show has generated buzz, but also drawn significant critiques. The most powerful criticisms come from author Gregg Levine, writing on the website my FDL. The review is reproduced below. Please view the original here.

ULSAN, South Korea — Led by fast-growing China and India, Asia is going nuclear in a big way to feed its ravenous appetite for energy.

The strains of economic growth are already showing. Energy shortages have forced Chinese factories to scale back production, and farmers in India often have power for only half the day. Both countries say their future growth is at risk unless they diversify their energy mix.

Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neoconservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.

Writing in publications from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neoconservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by “realist” and other critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday's test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with “rogue” states like North Korea are useless and that “regime change” -by military means, if necessary – is the only answer.

The renowned architect's life work and his new book, My Place, reflects an awareness of humanity's close affinity to the world around us

“I wanted to go to a place that wasn’t neat and tidy, somewhere dangerous. I was bored, and it had something to do with the era and something to do with myself too.”

In a recent letter to fellow architect Sejima Kazuyo, Kuma Kengo expressed in the above words the tenor of his mood and the disarray of his esprit during his student days.