These drawings and paintings by Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb were created more than a quarter century after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. They are provided courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and form part of a much larger archive of more than 2,000 images and annotations. Posted at Japan Focus on April 27, 2005.

On April 11, the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability published a report entitled The Path from Fukushima: Short and Medium-term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on Japan's Electricity System (Executive Summary). The document, authored by a team headed by David von Hippel and Kae Takase, looks at an issue that has been frequently overlooked amid radiation concerns and attention to the tsunami-ravaged north – demand for electricity. Will Tokyo and surrounding regions have enough power to fuel revival? How will Japan's energy industry change in the wake of the Fukushima disaster?

Around 10pm on 5 October 1948 a small boat made its way along the coastline of Cape Sada Peninsula, the long finger of land that juts west from Ehime Prefecture on the Japanese island of Shikoku. The darkness was intense. It was a moonless autumn night, and the forested spine of hills above the jagged cliffs of the peninsula was devoid of lights.

The boat – a 20-ton wooden vessel called the Hatsushima – had left the heavy swell of the open ocean and now moved slowly and quietly through the calmer waters of the Uwa Sea. No doubt the captain believed that his craft's progress along this remote stretch of Shikoku coastline was unobserved. In the little fishing villages which dotted its rocky inlets the working day began and ended early, and most of the villagers were already asleep. But from the hills above, eyes were watching.

This article introduces the concept of “Insider minorities”, those whose difference is of a sort that currently does not deny their Japanese-ness in the eyes of other Japanese, as opposed to outsider minorities, who are considered foreign despite their long, even multigenerational, residence within Japan. Most surveys of minorities in Japan have focused on ethnic minorities, including Koreans and Chinese, as well as the indigenous Ainu and Okinawans. The Burakumin ends up being the only non-ethnic group to be included (see De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995; Weiner, 1997; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1998). Such a focus on ethnic and racial minorities, however, fails to recognize the extent of difference that exists in Japan. Indeed, ethnic minorities in Japan, together with the Burakumin, account for only 4 to 6% of the Japanese population (De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995, p.272), making it easy for many Japanese, most notably former Prime Minister Nakasone, to claim ethnic and racial homogeneity in contrast to other countries such as the U.S. (Creighton, 1997).

Japan's Ogasawara (or Bonin) Islands (Ogasawara shotou), dubbed ‘the ‘Galapagos of the East’, are a group of oceanic islands situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Many of their numerous indigenous fauna and flora are at the brink of extinction, mainly caused by human settlement and construction during the last half century. Among those destructive factors, a plan to build a commercial airport was the most controversial and divided the community. Although the airport plan was withdrawn by the Tokyo Municipal Government in 2001, the native species are still facing various dangers.

The zanryu fujin (stranded war wives) [1] are former Japanese emigrants to Manchukuo who remained in China at the end of the Second World War. They were long among the forgotten legacies of Japan's imperialist past. [2] The reasons why these women did not undergo repatriation during the years up to 1958, when large numbers of former colonial emigrants returned to Japan, are varied but in many cases, the ‘Chinese’ families that adopted them, or into which they married, played a part. [3] The stories of survival during the period immediately after the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War on 9 August 1945, the civil war that followed, and throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, are testament to their strength. At the same time, the history of how the zanryu fujin came to be in China is useful for understanding the Japanese government's colonial policies, its wartime attitudes toward women, and its post war handling of inconvenient war legacies.

This is the first of a two article series on developmental and cultural nationalism. The articles by Radhika Desai and Laura Hein are both substantially excerpted versions of essays that form part of a special issue of Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2008, pp 397 – 428. Other essays in the collection discuss China, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East.

For six decades, the inhabitants of Okinawa have lived alongside thousands of US troops. Now new plans for base expansion have provoked fierce resistance.

Taira Natsume is a mild-mannered, bespectacled parson and pacifist in the Martin Luther King mode, but he warns he will not be pushed too far. “If the authorities come back with more people we'll be waiting for them,” he says. “I'm not a violent man but they're not going to get through.” It is a baking hot day in Henoko, a tiny fishing village in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture. For 110 days, the reverend and 8,000 supporters have been coming to this sun-bleached beach to fight off government engineers trying to begin drilling surveys for a proposed offshore helicopter base for the US military.

These are tough times for the people of Burma. They have endured decades of economic mismanagement, low living standards and brutal political oppression under an incompetent and negligent military that shows no signs of relinquishing its grip on power. Indeed, as the country approaches elections in 2010, the regime has cracked down on those it targets as opponents, imposing prison terms of up to 65 years on relief workers, comedians, writers, intellectuals, monks and others engaged in peaceful demonstrations or relief activities. No challenges to the junta are allowed and even local disaster relief workers are subject to arrest for embarrassing the regime. Those who joined peaceful demonstrations in the Saffron Revolution of 2007, or tried to help the survivors of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, have been singled out by the military junta for sentences that in many cases ensure the imprisoned will die behind bars. Moreover, political prisoners have been sent away to remote prisons where it is difficult for relatives to visit or to monitor their condition. Although the junta released about a dozen political prisoners in February 2009, the number of political prisoners has more than doubled since 2007 and stands at an estimated 2,100.

Translator's foreword: For the last two and a half years, I have been studying the inhabitants of Nagadoro, one of the twenty small hamlets in Iitate village, which has been evacuated and barricaded due to particularly high levels of radiation. Present government policy is to maintain the status of Nagadoro as a no-go zone for at least another four years. Among the 250 inhabitants is Shoji Masahiko, who until the nuclear disaster supported his wife and

Is there a more enduring World War image than the kamikaze pilots: those super-patriots who, according to the stereotype, willingly, even joyfully, pledged loyalty to their beloved emperor as they flew their doomed planes into Allied ships? The image still produces sympathetic tears and angry sneers: prime minister-to-be Koizumi Jun'ichirÅ▯ weeping at the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots in 2001; an American college history textbook referring to Japan's late-war air force as “a band of fanatical suicide pilots called kamikazes.” Indeed, Risa Morimoto began working on her provocative new movie, “Wings of Defeat,” out of a desire to understand how her own uncle, “a funny, kind, and gentle man,” could have been such a “crazy lunatic,” one of those “jumping at the chance to die for their emperor.”

Japan had the predominant role in creating the discourse of Pan-Asianism because it won the Russo-Japanese War. Gerhard Krebs's “World War Zero? New Literature on the Russo-Japanese War 1904/05” surveys some of the recent work on that war and the impact of Japan's victory around the world. It captured global attention as a racial war, since it was the first time an Asian nation had defeated a white nation. The greatest impact was in China and Korea, but Japan's success also influenced Pan-Islamic thought and the “Japanizers” of Ethiopia.

Although the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5 had radically changed the relationship between Japan and China, it was the Russo-Japanese war that lifted Japan out of the mass of Asian nations and into the status of a world power. Victory in this war first gave Japan a chance to speak as the voice of Asia to the Western powers. This achievement encouraged many in China and elsewhere in Asia to model their national reconstruction efforts on Japan. In Southeast Asia colonial subjects of the European empires hoped that Japan would help them gain independence. Although these hopes would not be dashed immediately, some people became aware of the contradictions between Pan-Asianism and the growing Japanese empire very early. Chinese intellectual Zhang Taiyan (who had famously said that the relationship between Japan and China should be as close as “lips and teeth”) became convinced that Japanese Pan-Asianism was not leading to what he desired, an “Asian Humanitarian Brotherhood,” but to Japanese imperial domination. By 1907 he was denouncing Japan as the “public enemy” of Asia.

Police death squads are out of control in The Philippines say human rights campaigners, murdering slum children, the poor and political enemies with impunity.

As an agent of global social reproduction, the World Bank itself is also subject to forces pushing for privatization (in this case, divestment of its development lending role to private capital markets), much in the way that welfarist states are urged to selectively offload their more profitable (or commercially viable) social services to the private sector. Jessica Einhorn's call to wind down the World Bank's lending arm for middle-income countries, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006) follows upon the recommendations of the Meltzer Commission (US Congress, 2000) for a triage of borrower countries: debt cancellation, performance-based grants for the most destitute of highly-indebted countries, as opposed to the more “credit-worthy” borrowers with access to capital markets, who should be weaned from multilateral lending agencies and henceforth be serviced by private lending sources (i.e. the financial analogue of “targeted” programs in health services). Indeed, this targeted approach is the persuasive face and generic template for the privatization of social services. What will be the consequences of such a change?

Mario Katosang, Palau's minister of education, is no stranger to foreign travel. His ministry forged close cooperation with Japan. He is also regularly flown to Taipei and his ministry received a total amount of $1 million in 2006 and 2007 for infrastructure improvements to government-run schools. The government of Taiwan gives generous scholarships to the students of Palau and recently it began supplying the small Pacific Island nation's schools with brand new PCs.

The decade after the Korean War (1950-1953) was a formative era for North Korea. Many of the striking features of the country's political and social system visible today took root during the postwar era, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s.

The era was, above all, a time of proud achievements for North Korea. Socialist politics are often referred to as substantive economic democracy based on the principle of egalitarian access to and distribution of social goods, in contrast to the formal democracy of liberal states founded on ideas of universal suffrage and personal liberty to pursue greater access to social goods. In the early postwar years, North Korea achieved great success in building a state and economic system on the model of substantive democracy, rapidly transforming a war-torn, and previously highly stratified, primarily agrarian society into an energetic, industrial society enjoying distributive justice and universal literacy.

Japan Focus first reported in May 2006 that 300 Allied prisoners of war performed forced labor for Aso Mining Company in 1945. (See English and Japanese versions.) The ensuing Aso POW controversy led then-Foreign Minister Aso Taro to hastily withdraw an invitation to a POW memorial service near Osaka that he had issued to foreign ambassadors, as reported in August 2006. When a New York Times reporter mentioned forced labor at Aso Mining in November 2006, the Japanese government launched a counteroffensive. (See English and Japanese versions of Norimitsu Onishi's article.) The Consulate General of New York, reportedly at Foreign Minister Aso's direction, published an online rebuttal (reproduced below with a Japanese translation) insisting that the news article was not grounded in historical evidence. A 1946 report produced by Aso Mining, detailing living and working conditions for the POWs, was mailed to Foreign Minister Aso's office in June 2007. (See English and Japanese articles about the report and the English version of the document itself.) Aso's policy secretary was subsequently interviewed about the POW records at length (see English and Japanese accounts), but the prime minister stated in parliament earlier this month that the records were never brought to his attention.