At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans and Filipinos fought bitterly for control of the Philippine Islands. The United States viewed the Pacific islands as a stepping-stone to the markets and natural resources of Asia. The Philippines, which had belonged to Spain for three hundred years, wanted independence, not another imperial ruler. For the Americans, the acquisition of a colony thousands of miles from its shores required a break with their antiimperial traditions. To justify such a break, the administration of William McKinley proclaimed that its policies benefited both Americans and Filipinos by advancing freedom, Christian benevolence, and prosperity. Most of the Congress, the press, and the public rallied to the flag, embracing the war as a patriotic adventure and civilizing mission. Dissent, however, flourished among a minority called anti-imperialists. Setting precedents for all wartime presidents who would follow, McKinley enhanced the power of the chief executive to build a public consensus in support of an expansionist foreign policy.

Japan's neonationalists have launched three major attacks on school textbooks over the past half century. Centered on the treatment of colonialism and war, the attacks surfaced in 1955, the late 1970s, and the mid-1990s. The present study examines three moments in light of Japanese domestic as well as regional and global political contexts to gain insight into the persistent contention over colonialism and the Pacific War in historical memory and its refraction in textbook treatments.

On 26 December 26, 2012 Abe Shinzo is to resume the position of Prime Minister of Japan, following the resounding victory of the Liberal- Democratic Party (LDP) under his presidency in the elections two weeks earlier. He came to power with an explicit agenda: seeing the US alliance as central to Japan and therefore attaching priority to carrying out Japan's obligations under it, revising the constitution so as to convert the current Self Defense Forces into a Kokubogun or National Army and adopting a stance of authorizing participation of Japan's forces in “collective security” operations (i.e., fighting wars shoulder-to- shoulder with American forces), establishing a national “Takeshima Day,” (to reinforce the Japanese claim to the island that South Korea knows as Tokdo and refuses to consider yielding), and adopting a hardline stance towards China, insisting there was “no room for negotiation” on the matter of conflicting claims to the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. “What is called for in and around the Senkaku Islands,” he wrote, “is not negotiation but physical force incapable of being misunderstood.”

Just over one hundred years ago, in 1902, Americans participated in a brief, intense and mostly forgotten debate on the practice of torture in a context of imperial warfare and counter-insurgency. The setting was the U. S. invasion of the Philippines, a war of conquest waged against the forces of the Philippine Republic begun in 1899. Within a year, it had developed into a guerrilla conflict, one that aroused considerable anti-war opposition in the United States.

Fifty years ago, the mass repatriation of ethnic Koreans from Japan to North Korea was reaching its peak. In towns and cities all over Japan farewell gatherings were being held, as “returnees” to North Korea packed their bags and boarded trains that would take them to the port of Niigata where, after various formalities including a “confirmation of free will” by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), they would board Russian ships for the voyage to Cheongjin in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Over 49,000 people embarked on this journey in 1960 alone, and 93,340 over the full span of the “repatriation project”[帰国事業, 북성사업) from December 1959 to July 1984.

Sonia Ryang possesses “double vision” in that she is a U.S.-based anthropologist as well as a cultural insider who grew up as a Zainichi Korean. Her family supported Chongryun (the North Korea-affiliated Zainichi Korean organization), which stood in contrast to the twentieth century's other Zainichi Korean organization Mindan that was affiliated with South Korea., Zainichi Koreans during the last century was largely divided in their identification either with Chongryun or Mindan. She reached adulthood after attending Chongryun-run ethnic schools including the Korea University in Tokyo and worked as a journalist for a Chongryun newspaper before starting her graduate studies in the United Kingdom. This background endows her Zainichi Korean studies with depths, insights, and a distinctive ethos. In this article, she describes the contours of Zainichi Korean history after 1945 and why “Zainichi Korean” as an ethnicity separate from Koreans in Korea remains relevant today.

From Rarotonga, the Cook Islands. The sea is blue, beaches with golden sand boast palm trees bending almost to the water surface. Beneath barely detectable waves, marine life is fascinating and diverse. On hotel terraces, coconut juices cool the refined throats of jet setters. Traditional huts rub shoulders with some of the most expensive resorts in the world. 500 US dollars would hardly sustain a couple for more than a day here in one of the most expensive parts of the world. Together with neighboring French Polynesia, this has become one of the most expensive parts of the world.

There is nothing wrong or unusual about the food at Ang's Chinese restaurant. In fact, the roast duck served there is excellent, and the Lonely Planet's guidebook assures you that its hot-and-sour soup is special. It's just the way the place looks. The yard is surrounded by high walls with razor wire and surveillance cameras. Two security guards watch the entrance and open the sliding gate only if customers, in their vehicle, appear to be genuinely wanting to have just a meal. Having satisfied the guards and parked the car inside the gate, lunch or dinner guests are met by another steel door guarded by more watchmen. They will not only shut the door but lock it once the guests are in the actual restaurant building. They guests may enjoy Ang's oriental fare in peace.

Military alliances are always sold as things that produce security. In practice they tend to do the opposite.

Thus, Germany formed the Triple Alliance with Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to counter the enmity of France following the Franco-Prussian War. In response, France, England and Russia formed the Triple Entente. The outcome was World War I.

In the study of China's rural development, economists and political scientists have frequently examined land policy, while demographers, sociologists and anthropologists look at family planning. Yet in real life the two domains are closely related as households attempt to match and manage their land and labor resources. This article brings together questions about land, gender and family planning in relation to both policy and practice. It draws on fieldwork in rural north China and comparative data to examine and assess local and regional variations in the critical gender imbalance in contemporary rural China.

In April 2008, Ma Wanli, a professor of American history at Nanchang Hangkong University in Nanchang, China, emailed me to introduce himself as the translator of the Chinese version of my U.S. best seller, Lies My Teacher Told Me. He also invited me to write a preface for this new edition. I agreed.

Lies exposes seamy aspects of the U.S. past. The preface I wrote for the Chinese edition suggests that a similar exposé might be useful in China. As I wrote, I realized that saying this in China might be problematic, but on behalf of the publisher, Central Chinese Compilation & Translation Press, one of the largest publishers in China, Ma Wanli assured me that my preface would not be censored. I finished the preface in late fall, and the Chinese translation reached me in December of 2008. My U.S. publisher had it translated back into English and assured me that my meaning had not been changed. All seemed well.

While China was at the center of Japan's war, by 1942 Japan had occupied much of Southeast Asia, home of many ethnic Chinese. Often Chinese nationalists in those places were potential leaders of resistance to Japan. On the other hand, Japanese authorities knew that educated Chinese could be useful in subordinating other Southeast Asians to the Japanese empire, since they had played this role for European imperialists. Hayashi Hirofumi's “The Battle of Singapore, the Massacre of Chinese and Understanding of the Issue in Postwar Japan” and Vivian Blaxell's “New Syonan and Asianism in Japanese-era Singapore” both discuss the complexities of Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia. Hayashi shows that killing ethnic Chinese was explicit Japanese military policy because Chinese were assumed to be innately opposed to Japanese empire, showing the military's skepticism about Pan-Asianism. Nonetheless, as Blaxell shows, other Japanese simultaneously worked to win the support of two groups, Chinese and Eurasian Christians (usually part Chinese) through construction of two model villages, New Syonan and Fuji Village. In both cases, the actual ways that Japanese Singapore functioned was far more chaotic and contingent than high-level policy would suggest. The ironic contrast between Japanese war crimes happening side-by-side with Japanese attempts to find Chinese allies to build a new Asia was common everywhere.

In his personal narrative Atomic Quest, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, who directed atomic research at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory during the Second World War, tells of receiving an urgent visit from J. Robert Oppenheimer while vacationing in Michigan during the summer of 1942. Oppenheimer and the brain trust he assembled had just calculated the possibility that an atomic explosion could ignite all the hydrogen in the oceans or the nitrogen in the atmosphere. If such a possibility existed, Compton concluded, “these bombs must never be made.” As Compton said, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.” Certainly, any reasonable human being could be expected to respond similarly.

The most urgent political challenge to the world today is how to prevent the so-called “pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like the 19th-century so-called “pax Britannica” before it, into major global warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” in its final stages, became less and less peaceful, less and less orderly, more and more a naked imposition of belligerent competitive power based on inequality.

To define this prevention of war as an achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are above all achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic reassessment and progressive scaling back of two discredited policies that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive.

Lhamo Thondup was born on July 6, 1935 in Taktster, a small village in the Amdo region of northeast Tibet. But neither his parents — farmers who grew barley, buckwheat and potatoes — nor his three elder brothers and one elder sister (a younger sister and brother came later) were to discover his true identity until a few years later.

Then, when the little boy was 4, a party of senior Buddhist monks and officials from the distant capital of Lhasa arrived in the village searching for the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama – the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, whose title means “ocean of wisdom.” The party was led by Kewtsang Rinpoche, a respected monk who had chosen to head northeast as that was the direction in which the face of the embalmed 13th Dalai Lama (known as “the Great 13th”), who died on Dec. 17, 1933 was said to have mysteriously pointed.

[Korean and Japanese claims to sovereignty over the tiny islets known respectively as Dokdo and Takeshima renewed in intensity this past winter and spring. This is an argument with at least a century's history of conflict and vituperation. Korea's claim is straightforward and meshes with a broader, global post-colonial discourse: “These have long been our islands. You colonized us illegally, and part of that illegal act was the seizure of territory that is demonstrably ours on old maps and in ancient records.” As a sizeable advertisement sponsored in part by the Korean government in the July 27 The New York Times makes clear: “DOKDO IS KOREAN TERRITORY.” Japan counters with a complex, legalistic explanation involving the validity of the 1910 takeover and the terms of the post-colonial emancipation. On top of this, Japan knowingly holds the diplomatic wildcard, meaning that it was the United States’ unwillingness to resolve this issue in 1951 in its peace treaty with Japan that has sustained the mess. In the absence of Japanese renunciation of claims to the islets, any conclusive judgment would, therefore, require the United States to take a stand. In the midst of this, of course, the United States maintains separate — and in the case of these islands competing — national interests in its discrete, bilateral security treaties with Korea and Japan. The following article by Professor Lee Sang-tae presents the numerous historical documents supporting Korea's historical claims to the islets, as well as introducing the issue of American involvement. Japan Focus.]

TOKYO - Japan rolled out the red carpet for Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar when, at Tokyo's invitation, he arrived on Monday for a five-day visit for talks with Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and a luncheon hosted by Emperor Akihito in his honor at the Imperial Palace.

As someone who cares deeply about many Japanese people and learns from them, I am most concerned by Japanese voters' decision to return Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to office because of his lengthy record of denigrating the histories of those who suffered under Japan's attempts to conquer and control much of Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. Abe has an equally vibrant record of denigrating those who give voice to these histories today. In response to the prime minister's first few weeks in office, Australia's former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans pointedly noted that it was “the responsibility of statesmen, if they are to deserve the name… to take the politically uncomfortable high ground and then bring their publics along.” With Abe we have it the other way around; he drags Japan down.

A Japanese translation of this article is available here

Two leading Agent Orange specialists have weighed in on the recent discovery of 22 barrels buried on former military land in Okinawa City. Richard Clapp, professor emeritus at Boston University School of Public Health, and Wayne Dwernychuk, the scientist previously in charge of identifying defoliant contamination in southeast Asia, likened the levels of dioxin contamination in Okinawa City to dangerous hot-spots in Vietnam where the U.S. military had stored toxic defoliants during the 1960s and ‘70s.

Mark Selden: In discussing the US-China relationship or Chimerica, you note the 200-strong US delegation that visited Beijing at the very moment that the US was toppling the DPJ administration of Hatoyama Yukio as evidence that the US will not back Japan in the current dispute with China over Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands.

However, the US has made a number of contradictory statements, including some suggesting that it would view the issue within the framework of its obligation to defend Japan under the Japan-US Security Treaty. Moreover, the US has moved aggressively to insert itself into other territorial issues, notably those involving the clash between China and Vietnam/Philippines in the South China Sea. The situation is in fact volatile. How are we to understand the Diaoyutai clash in the context of wider territorial conflicts in the region?