Developments in the South China Sea during the first quarter of 2009 reinforced several trends that have been apparent over the past two years. First, the Spratly Islands dispute has once again come to dominate Sino-Philippine relations, despite attempts by Beijing and Manila to move beyond it. Second, China has adopted a more assertive posture toward its territorial and maritime boundary claims in the South China Sea than at any time since the late 1990s. Third, the 2002 breakthrough agreement between the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China to manage tensions in the South China Sea is in danger of becoming irrelevant. Fourth, the USNS Impeccable incident on March 8 highlighted the growing strategic importance of the South China Sea for the United States and China, and reawakened concerns in ASEAN capitals that the region may one day become the principal theater wherein Sino-U.S. maritime rivalry is played out.

TOKYO - With the world economy's center of gravity shifting from the West to the East, led by China's rising economic and corresponding political power, the year 2010 may witness a series of epoch-making events in Asia.

For several years, informed observers independent of the national security bureaucracy have called for terminating current specific American policies and tactics in Afghanistan– many reminiscent of the US in Vietnam.

Informed observers decry the use of air strikes to decapitate the Taliban and al Qaeda, an approach that has repeatedly resulted in the death of civilians. Many counsel against the insertion of more and more US and other foreign troops, as pursued first by the Bush administration and then, even more vigorously, in the early days of the Obama administration, in an effort to secure the safety and allegiance of the population. And they regret the on-going interference in the fragile Afghan and Pakistan political processes, in order to secure outcomes desired in Washington. A New York Times headline, “In Pakistan, US Courts Leader of Opposition,” was barely noticed in the U.S. mainstream media.

In what Pyongyang's state media billed as a “military drill,” North Korea on January 28, 2010 fired artillery shells near its disputed border with South Korea. South Korea responded by firing its Vulcan cannons into the air – a sign, according to the South Korean press, that Seoul would not give in to intimidation. The incident made global headlines, even though these skirmishes near the Northern Limit Line dividing the countries in the Yellow Sea, which North Korea does not recognize as a legitimate border, have been ongoing for years. If U.S. President Barack Obama wants to resolve once and for all the situation on the Korean Peninsula, he's going to have to take an innovative approach to solving the underlying problem: pushing at last for a formal end to the Korean War.

At a time when the Iraq war continues to be a defining issue on the American scene, it is ironic that the most powerful and uncompromising documentary on the subject remains almost entirely unknown and unseen in this country. It took Japanese filmmaker Watai Takeharu a year and a half to film more than 123 hours of footage in Iraq, which he managed to edit down to two unforgettable hours. The result is the stunning Little Birds, which plunges the viewer into the middle of the war, in all its sorrow and horror, and never lets up.

[Introduction: In late October, the Japanese government presented its nuclear plans for the next decade. As was widely expected, the strongly pro-nuclear Atomic Energy Commission declared that Japan should plow ahead with a nuclear fuel recycling program at Rokkasho in Aomori Prefecture.

The decision comes at a time when international concern over Rokkasho is intensifying. It ignores International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei's call for a five-year moratorium on new nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities worldwide. Shunsuke Kondo, the head of the AEC, has said that it is “general knowledge” that the Rokkasho plant, which has not yet come into operation, is an existing facility, and therefore not included in the calls for a moratorium.

In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra Hearings grilling of Oliver North, the American public got a glimpse of “highly sensitive” emergency planning North had been involved in. Ostensibly North had been handling plans for an emergency response to a nuclear attack (a legitimate concern). But press accounts alleged that the planning was for a more generalized suspension of the constitution at the president's determination.

This essay examines the role that nuclear weapons have played in Northeast Asia in creating a system of inter-state relations based in part on nuclear threat and the impact of North Korea on that system. The US-led alliances that rest on extended nuclear deterrence have been characterized as hegemonic in the forty years of Cold War in the Gramscian sense of hegemonic, that is, allied elites accepted US leadership based on its legitimating ideology of extended nuclear deterrence, institutional integration, and unique American nuclear forces that underpinned the alliances. A crucial aspect of American nuclear hegemony in Asia was the guarantee that the hegemon would ensure that no adversary could break out of the system after China's 1964 successful nuclear test, as expressed by the Non Proliferation Treaty and IAEA safeguard system. The failure of the United States to stop and now reverse the DPRK nuclear over the previous two decades threatens its hegemonic leadership in Northeast Asia, and is linked to the decreasing ability of American power to shape events in other proliferation-prone regions such as South and West Asia.

This essay introduces and compares works and lives of two war painters, Ogawara Shū (1911-2002) and Fujita Tsuguharu (1886-1998). It also provides a critical perspective on the museological discourse about Fujita and reassesses Ogawara by examining recent exhibits of their works in Hokkaido, Japan. Ogawara, a prewar surrealist painter, collaborated with the military and produced war propaganda paintings in the early 1940s. Fujita was an internationally renowned Japanese artist who resided in Paris since 1913, but came back to Japan and produced propaganda paintings in the 1930s and 40s. After the ear, they were criticized harshly by the public for their war responsibility, and largely forgotten in the Japanese art scene since then: Ogawara isolated himself in Kuchan, Hokkaido while Fujita left Japan permanently and lived in France until he died.

The author analyzes some of the most representative works produced by each artist including war paintings, and compares their different responses to their wartime activities: Ogawara expressed his war responsibility publicly since the 1970s whereas Fujita never commented on it. Apart from presenting each artist's attitude towards his past, the author problematizes the way Fujita and his war paintings were interpreted at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in 2008: he was represented as a “Renaissance humanist” who produced “anti-war” paintings. The author argues that the nationalistic impulse of the contemporary Japanese art community was behind the misrepresentation of Fujita as a “tragic hero” and raises critical questions that need to be investigated further such as the way modernism and nationalism was intertwined in Japan during the war years.

The Sept. 11 Lower House election resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Liberal Democratic Party. Now the prospect that two great parties will alternate administrations in the manner of the prewar Seiyukai (Friends of Constitutional Government Party) and Minseito (Constitutional Democratic Party) is more distant than ever. How has this come about?

Of course, the single-seat constituencies systematically favor the large parties. Even if the LDP loses some votes, the party does not lose Diet seats. Even if the Social Democratic Party gains some votes, it does not gain Diet seats.

Defense News describes itself as “the authoritative, independent, professional news source for the world's defense decision-makers.” Reaching a “highly selective VIP list of top leaders and decision-makers in North America and in Europe, Asia and the Middle East,” it “provides the global defense community with the latest insight and news analysis on defense programs, policy, business and technology.

After two years in which international attention focused on Fukushima as an emblem of disaster, Fukushima's plans for immense floating wind farm projects have begun to attract international attention. This April 15 article “Fukushima Moves Forward With World's Largest Wind Farm” reminds us that the prefecture's projects are bold initiatives which could pioneer a new model of offshore and large-scale deployment. The article also lauds Fukushima's aim of getting 40% of its power from renewables by 2020, and then fully 100% by 2040.

Many observers have recently argued that the newly forged Indo-U.S. alliance will work against its “intended aims of Chinese encirclement.” Although India denies its part in any attempt at “Chinese containment” to the publicly acknowledged satisfaction of China, the theory nevertheless persists. China's response to the Indo-U.S. alliance is, however, quite creative. Instead of reacting with alarm, Beijing has gone on a charm offensive to draw New Delhi into a triangular entente among China, India and Russia. India, which has languished under foreign subjugation for centuries, has a visceral aversion to strategic alliances with world powers. Since its independence in 1947, it has followed what could be described as the “Third Way” in world diplomacy, which manifested itself in the birth of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) in the 1950s. China is now building bridges to India based in part on the latter's instinctive wariness of foreign influences, which is evident in India's homegrown opposition to its nuclear deal with the U.S.

Dozens of green military tents dot the vast campground and jamboree site at Cibubur, a suburb just half an hour's drive from the center of Jakarta. Hundreds of girls, some as young as 15, have called this camp home for almost 6 months. This is where they eat, wash, sleep and study, separated from the rain and mud by the thin fabric of the tents.

Although a U.S. fact-finding mission sent to Iraq concluded in October 2004 that the country possessed no weapons of mass destruction, why did the United States continue to insist that such weapons existed?

An independent nonpartisan commission established by U.S. President George W. Bush to examine that issue reported last Thursday, after a year-long probe, that the country's intelligence agencies did a terrible job. In fact, they passed on unfounded data to the top levels of the U.S. government.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo announced in April 2007 that the government was planning to establish a “panel of experts” to examine the question of whether to “revise the current interpretation of the Constitution” in order to permit Japan to engage in certain specified collective self-defense operations. The Americans have long pressed for greater Japanese involvement in collective security, and the announcement came shortly before Mr. Abe's first trip to meet with President George W. Bush. Yet Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, among other things, renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes”. This has been understood by the courts and all past governments of Japan to prohibit Japan's participation in collective self-defense operations, or engagement in any use of force, for any reason other than the direct defense of Japan.

This essay explores representations of Japanese imperialism and war in museums of the People's Republic of China. With the post-Mao reforms, there has been a general trend in such representations toward an emphasis on atrocity and victimization and away from the narratives of heroic resistance that dominated in the Mao era. Yet, the museum curators in these museums must negotiate between these two representations in trying to make the war relevant to a young audience generally more attracted to the pleasures of popular culture than history museums.

Liu Xiaobo, the primary drafter of Charter 08, has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. The award signals international recognition of the Chinese people's quest for justice, universal human rights and democracy in a rational way through peaceful means.

In 1895, the Chinese scholar Kang Youwei was on his way to Beijing on a Chinese steamer when his ship was abruptly boarded and searched by a party of Japanese soldiers on the North China Sea. “I was enraged when the Japanese came and searched our ship,” he later wrote. “If the court had listened to my advice earlier, we would not have to endure such humiliations.” But following China's defeat by Japan in the 1894-5 Sino-Japanese War, this was just the sort of humiliation that China was now forced to endure. That war had been fought over influence in Korea and it marked the end of Korea's tributary relationship with China. It was the beginning of China's decline and Japan's ascendancy in East Asian affairs. For the first time since the founding of the Chos⊖n dynasty in 1392, China would have little influence over the Korean peninsula.

In recent years, the mayors of cities hosting American bases in Japan, and particularly in Okinawa, propelled by powerful citizen movements, have resisted American plans for base reorganization that would expand the US military presence in their communities. In many cases, powerful pressure from Tokyo, in the form of threats to cut off development aid to local communities, and offers to buy off local opposition, have succeeded in dividing local communities and forcing local officials to yield to the power of the center. The Hiroshima-based Chugoku Shinbun here examines realignments involving Atsugi Air Base, Iwakuni Marine Base and Yokosuka Naval Base, three locales experiencing major upgrading of U.S. military power and changes in the structuring of U.S. forces in Japan. ms