To top it off last week, the Japanese Defense Minister threatened to fire live (albeit tracer) rounds on Chinese aircraft which continue to buzz the disputed Senkaku islands - 400 km west of Naha, the Okinawan capital.

It was against this drumbeat of resurgent Japanese militarism that more than 140 Okinawan civic representatives made a historic trip to Tokyo on Sunday. This was the first time since Okinawa reverted to Japanese control in 1972 that leaders from each of Okinawa's 41 municipalities have visited the nation's capital - and despite the bitter cold, they were met with a warm reception by 4000 Tokyoites at a rally in Hibiya Park.

The big media-related news story on April 1 was the ongoing controversy over the documentary feature “Yasukuni,” screenings of which had been canceled by a number of movie theaters in Tokyo and Osaka out of fear of rightwing protests. That night, NHK's regular 7 p.m. news bulletin did not mention the film, but it did feature a report on the public broadcaster's reply to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications that it would “accept” the government's request for NHK to promote Japan's “national interests” in its overseas broadcasts.

Japanese lawyers and activists supporting compensation lawsuits for Chinese forced labor in wartime Japan once called Chinese attorney Kang Jian the “window.” The term acknowledged Kang's pivotal role in coordinating between plaintiffs typically located in the Chinese countryside and Japanese legal teams pressing claims on their behalf in a dozen courtrooms across Japan over the past decade.

However, the close cooperation between Kang and the Japanese Lawyers Group for Chinese War Victims’ Compensation Claims broke down in April 2010, at least temporarily, following the out-of-court compensation agreement by Nishimatsu Construction Co. with forced laborers from its Shinanogawa worksite in Niigata. Late in the process of hammering out the settlement fund worth 128 million yen (about $1.28 million), the five plaintiffs’ Japanese lawyers began negotiating with Nishimatsu on behalf of the larger group of Shinanogawa victims who had not participated in litigation. Flanked by Kang, these five plaintiffs rejected the Nishimatsu pact at a press conference in Beijing the day after it was finalized in Tokyo.

Fresh Currents: Japan's flow from a nuclear past to a renewable future is an e-book edited by Eric Johnston in cooperation with The Kyoto Journal that considers the possibility of replacing the Faustian bargain of a nuclear- and-fossil-fuel powered Japan with a renewable energy future.

In Okinawa, as perhaps anywhere else, the past exists uneasily alongside the present. It can pass unnoticed, occasionally rising for a moment of recognition, slipping away again under the weight of the routine tasks of daily life. And like the unexploded bombs that still lie close to the surface of the Okinawan landscape, it can erupt into the present, casting its shadow over a future not yet experienced. Memories, wrenching and traumatic, can tear the fabric of the everyday, plunging those who experience them into despair and even madness. They haunt the present with their melancholy demands for repression, making their presence known in the prohibitions that they have engendered.

[This article discusses the Japanese political landscape in the wake of the important House of Councillors election held on 11 July 2004, and the prospects for the emergence of a new political formation.

In the July election, half the seats in Japan's Upper House were contested. The absolute number of seats was less than last time, however, because of the completion of a two-phase program that cut 10 seats from the House. This reduced the total to 242. Of these, 96 were decided by a system of proportional representation, while 146 were elected from 47 prefectural constituencies.

It comes as no surprise that the recent resurgence of neo-nationalist thought in Japan would find expression in cinema.[1] With the issue of the nation and its ability to fight war, currently prohibited by Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, being vigorously challenged by the ruling party and the right, in part through actual deployment of Self-Defense Forces in Iraq and other danger zones, it is significant that the year 2005 saw the release of four big budget spectaculars offering particular visions of Japanese fighting wars. Two, Lorelei (“Rorerai,” director: Higuchi Shinji) and Samurai Commando: Mission 1549 (“Sengoku Jieitai 1549,” director: Tezuka Masaaki), are outright fantasies, albeit ones that offer alternative narratives of historical wars (World War II in the former, the sixteenth century civil wars in the latter).

The media claim that North Korea is trying to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States, which opposes this strategy, has used or threatened to use such weapons in northeast Asia since the 1940s, when it did drop atomic bombs on Japan.

THE forgotten war – the Korean war of 1950-53 – might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States' air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons (1), and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem.

The June 7-8 meeting between U.S. President Obama and Chinese President Xi must have disappointed Prime Minister Abe, who is intent on using the Senkaku issue to induce the United States to create a new cold war regime against China, as well as many politicians who champion a hard-line anti-Chinese stance.

The two leaders discussed at great length North Korea and cyber issues/cybersecurity and also economic issues and military-to- military relationships. Over dinner on the first night, the talk focused on North Korea, but the Senkaku issue was also brought up. In the discussion, the United States did not change its previous stance that, although the Senkaku Islands are covered by the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, the U.S. does not take a position on the sovereignty issue, calling for a solution through dialogue. The Japanese media reported that “Japanese and U.S. diplomatic sources” later revealed that Obama had warned China not to engage in threatening actions. However, the very fact that the United States invited the Chinese leader to the United States to hold a two-day summit is evidence that the U.S. is not contemplating a “new cold war” or “war over the Senkaku Islands.”

Japan is stuck between lots of rocks and several hard places. It confronts the escalating costs of the world's most rapid pace of ageing with a low and declining birthrate and virtually no support for mass immigration. Moreover, the country faces these costs while severely handicapped by a public debt 1.5 times its GDP plus dramatic declines in the high rate of savings that has hitherto financed it. In addition to all this, the poorly performing economy is in its fourth year of deflation with little hope of producing a recovery in tax revenues. Indeed, deflation and minimal economic growth have eroded national income- tax revenues to their lowest level since the collapse of the bubble economy.

China is spending nearly $1 trillion to revive its economy. Will it work? John Garnaut reports from Wenzhou City, Zhejiang.

Wenzhou, the heartland of Chinese capitalism, is once again fighting for its survival. The city was famously forsaken by Maoist China but it stayed alive and later thrived by building one of the most entrepreneurial and dynamic marketplaces on the planet.

Japanese history has become an explosive political issue in the media today, particularly in the journalistic coverage of politicians' statements and of recurring questions of textbook whitewashing. But as scholars of Japan and Asia are aware, these perspectives constitute only a portion a much wider public debate surrounding historical reconciliation in Japan. As an anthropologist who studies youth culture and media, I have been disturbed by the narrow range of examples that tend to be relied upon in coverage of nationalism in Japan. I offer as a contrast examples from my own research on Japanese rap music and anime.

This revised and updated version of the author's earlier “North Korea's 100th - To Celebrate or To Surrender?” was prepared for the Korean journal Changbi. Given strong interest in the issues, The Asia-Pacific Journal is publishing the updated version.

Spring always brings reminders of the abiding insecurity that stems from the continuing division and confrontation of two states and systems on the Korean peninsula. On the one side, South Korea and the United States conduct large-scale military exercises, involving land, sea and air forces, (Operations Key Resolve and Foal Eagle) designed to rehearse a reopening of war. North Korea inevitably raises its levels of alert and readiness and its tone of belligerence, and in such climate the Cheonan incident occurred in March 2010.

The government of Kyrgyzstan has embarked on an ambitious hydropower development programme on the transboundary Syr Darya River, which has provoked strong opposition from downstream Uzbekistan. The programme is driven by the alignment of actual energy concerns with interests of the national hydraulic elites and the global politics of project finance, which provides a logic for dams that may exacerbate existing geopolitical tensions across the region.

This is the third article of a three part series introducing historical museums in Japan and their role in public education on issues of war, peace, war crimes and reconciliation. The first article is Takashi Yoshida's “Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern Japanese History.” The second article is Rumiko Nishino's “The Women's Active Museum on War and Peace.”

The town of Suifenhe, a former Russian imperial outpost on the Trans-Siberian Railway, has belonged to China since the nineteen-forties, and occupies a broad valley in northern Manchuria. From a distance, its homes and factories appear to cling to a rail yard, with tracks fanning out into a vast latticework of iron as they emerge from the Russian border. Suifenhe is a place of singular purpose. Nearly every train from Russia brings in just one commodity: wood—oak, ash, linden, and other high-value species. There is also poplar, aspen, and larch, and occasionally great trunks of Korean pine, a species that was logged by the Soviets until there was almost none left to cut down. In a year, more than five billion pounds of wood cross over from Primorski Krai, the neighboring province in the Russian Far East. Hundreds of railcars enter Suifenhe every day, many loaded beyond capacity with logs. The wood is shuttled between mills by hand, often six men to a log. Other workers, many of whom are migrants from elsewhere in China, operate cranes to empty the rail carriages, and at sundown they bring the machinery to rest, with beams pointing upward, like arms outstretched, waiting for the rush of timber that will arrive the following day.

A former director of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, Sakanaka Hidenori ended his 35 year career as a Justice Ministry official in 2005. Shortly after retiring, he published Immigration Battle Diary probably the most detailed discussion yet on the future of Japanese immigration policy and the role of immigrants in the world's second largest economy. The abridged translation presented here is based mainly on the book's final chapter, which summarizes Sakanaka's views on the immigration options facing Japan.

Toyota is the most profitable company in Japan. Its net profit for fiscal 2004 was reported at 1.16 trillion yen ($10.5 billion). This is after-tax, clear profit, the first time in the history of Japanese capitalism that a company has passed one trillion yen in profits.

It's not often you hear or read this combination of words in the same sentence but surely this year's summit meeting of the Group of 8 (G8) leaders will be etched on people's memories for generations to come. Nobody could have predicted the cataclysmic events that unfolded on the northernmost island of Japan in the summer of 2008: the city of Sapporo attacked by the vengeful space monster Guilala; the leaders of the G8 countries united in their efforts to destroy the creature; former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro ended recent speculation and returned to take over the reigns of power in a time of crises; and the G8 leaders taken hostage by Kim Jong-Il. For an annual diplomatic event that is often portrayed as little more than a meaningless ceremony, this has to have been one of the most unforgettable summits in its thirty-three history. At least that's what happened if you only watched the highly amusing monster movie Girara no Gyakushū: Toyako Samitto Kiki Ippatsu (Guilala Strikes Back: Crisis at the Lake Toya Summit) premiered in Hokkaido the weekend before the G8 summit began.