For centuries a backwater of Portuguese colonialism at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, East Timor should have won its independence on 28 November 1975 when the majority FRETILIN party declared independence. Days later, ahead of a Portuguese withdrawal, Indonesian forces advancing from Indonesian West Timor invaded and occupied the half-island nation. Declassified documents reveal that, fearful of the emergence of a “Southeast Asian Cuba,” the US Ford Administration abetted the invasion, just as the US emerged as the largest arms supplier to the pro-Western government of General Suharto. Nevertheless, the United Nations never recognized the illegal Indonesian invasion and FRETILIN and supporters, including East Timor's former colonial overlord, Portugal, waged a successful diplomatic struggle to re-engage the decolonization/independence question.

Gavan McCormack is a research professor of East Asian history at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, co-author of Korea Since 1850 and author of The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence.

Almost immediately after 9/11, cultural tropes that had long been associated with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relocated to new roles as descriptors of the attack on New York City. Where once terms like “ground zero” referred to the detonation points of the nuclear weapons that were dropped in Japan, Ground Zero now refers to the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood in lower Manhattan. This appropriation of framing mechanisms from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to New York City was nothing new: it held true to an American tradition that began in August of 1945. When Americans felt that bifurcated sense of victory and vulnerability upon the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, it was a short journey for the word Hiroshima to take on a second, shadow meaning in American culture–it became shorthand for fears of an inevitable nuclear attack on America itself–and almost always the target of this imagined attack was New York City. While Lifton and Mitchell claim that, “Hidden from the beginning, Hiroshima quickly disappeared into the depths of American awareness,” we have found instead that it became ubiquitous in American culture and remained so throughout the Cold War and beyond, particularly as shorthand for America as nuclear victim, not nuclear perpetrator. This same inclination can be seen in early press coverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan last year. A great deal of press coverage in the United States was focused on the dangers of radioactive contamination on the American West coast, on America as vulnerable and a victim. This inversion of the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took a firm hold on the American imagination once the former Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons of their own in late 1949. However, even with the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks reinvented notions of an American Hiroshima as the inevitable follow-up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

After a decade of combat, casualties, massive displacement, persisting violence, enhanced sectarian tension and violence between Shi’ias and Sunnis, periodic suicide bombings, and autocratic governance, a negative assessment of the Iraq War as a strategic move by the United States, United Kingdom, and a few of their secondary allies, including Japan, seems unavoidable. Not only the regionally destabilizing outcome, including the blowback effect of perversely adding weight to Iran's overall diplomatic influence, but the reputational costs in the Middle East associated with an imprudent, destructive, and failed military intervention make the Iraq War the worst American foreign policy disaster since its defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s. Such geopolitical accounting does not even consider the damage to the United Nations and international law arising from an aggressive use of force in flagrant violation of the UN Charter, embarked upon without any legitimating authorization as to the use of force by the Security Council. The UN hurt its image when it failed to reinforce its refusal to grant authorization to the United States and its coalition. This was compounded by the fact that the UN lent support to the unlawful American-led occupation that followed. In other words, not only was the Iraq War a disaster from the perspective of American and British foreign policy and the peace and stability of the Middle East region, but it was also a serious setback for international law, the UN, and world order.

It all seemed deadly familiar: an adult, 38-year-old US Marine sergeant, Tyrone Hadnott, accused by the Okinawan police of sexually violating a 14-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl. He claims he did not actually rape her but only forcibly kissed her, as if knocking down an innocent child and slobbering all over her face is OK if you're a representative of the American military forces. The accused marine has now been released because the girl has refused to press charges - perhaps because he is innocent as he claimed or perhaps because she can't face the ignominy of appearing in court.

If you visit the Alice Pavillion at the Shika nuclear power plant in the town of Shika, Ishikawa Prefecture, you will be happily entertained by Prof. Aomushi (Blue Caterpillar), who, water pipe in mouth, sits in the sun and, together with Alice, “teaches you about radiation.”

Mention “The Insular Empire” to the average American, and they'd likely have no idea what you were talking about. They probably still wouldn't get it if you gave them another clue: “America in the Mariana Islands.” These are the title and subtitle of a new film by Vanessa Warheit, which began screening on PBS earlier this year.

The financial crisis sweeping the world has led many to reconsider the neoliberal premises of the U.S. government. Jae-Jung Suh sits down with sociologist and world systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein to consider the paradigm shift in global thinking on economic policy and the future of capitalism. This interview originally appeared at Hankyoreh on January 8, 2009.

In this article Mark J. Valencia, a maritime policy analyst based in Hawaii writes, “such interdictions, without the permission of the flag state, on or over the high seas, could be considered an act of war. Some thought North Korea was bluffing when it said it would launch ballistic missiles. They thought it was bluffing when it said it had a nuclear weapon. They also thought it was bluffing when it said it would test a nuclear weapon. Now it has threatened war if its vessels or aircraft are interdicted. Given this history of miscalculation on both sides, the United States and its friends in the region need to carefully consider if they want to contribute to the cause of a possible Second Korean War.”

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism London: Verso, 2006, second revised edition (first published 1983, revised edition, 1991). xv + 240 pp. ISBN 9781844670864

The poet WAGŌ Ryōichi 和合亮一 was living in Fukushima on March 11, 2011, when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, sending the entire northeastern Tōhoku region into chaos. After spending a few days in a camp for evacuees, he began documenting his experiences in a powerful and poetic Twitter feed, which seemed to touch a nerve as the nation listened in horror to the stories of the survivors. Wagō's Twitter feed quickly earned over 14,000 followers, and his poignant, pithy statements were frequently retweeted by many others. In this feed, he writes about the sights with the earthquake zone, his horror at the devastation in Minami Sōma (a town where he had worked as a high school teacher), and the need for a new kind of direct and powerful writing to capture the realities of the destruction.

[China and East Asia are experiencing a harbour construction boom as the region gains a position of ascendance in global trade. Nazery Khalid - Research Fellow, Center for Economic Studies and Ocean Industries. Maritime Institute of Malaysia - reports that 7 of the world's 20 busiest terminals are in China. The port to watch is Shanghai, which is poised to overtake its main rivals (Hong Kong and Singapore). In 2005, Shanghai handled 443 million tons of cargo in total and 18.09 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containers, an increase of 24.2 percent compared with the previous year (Hong Kong handled 23.2 million TEUs and Singapore 22.43 TEUs). The Shanghai region is expected to handle 35 million TEUs of container traffic by 2010. This is because the port of Ningbo will continue its own frenetic expansion of capacity as well as install the world's longest bridge (the US$ 1.4 billion Hangzhou Bay Bridge) to cut the travel time to Shanghai to two hours. In addition, Shanghai is adding a deepwater facility in nearby Yangshan and working out deals with other North China ports to provide international service for them.

To fly from Samoa (formerly Western Samoa) to American Samoa — two utterly remote split-nation island territories in the South Pacific — used to be extremely easy and cheap. One only had to drive 5 kilometers from the capital – Apia – to the small village of Fagalii, to buy the ticket, chat for a while with fellow travelers sitting on plastic bags and outdated suitcases, go through some sort of improvised security and passport control, then board a little propeller-driven aircraft to Pago Pago, capital of American Samoa, a 20 minute hop, favorable winds provided.

Inoue Daisuke taught the world to sing with the karaoke machine but never bothered to patent it, losing his chance to become one of Japan's richest men. Is he bitter?

For a man who lost out on one of music's biggest paychecks, Inoue Daisuke is in fine form: toothy smile spreading over the big, rough-hewn face of a natural comedian.

Stuart Levey, who helped put the US Treasury at the center of US national security strategy and policy-making during a career that spanned the Bush and Obama administrations, has announced his retirement.

The policy-making legacy he leaves behind, central to the enhanced unilateral use of financial and economic sanctions against “rogue” states by the Bush and Obama administrations, underscores the need for a broader understanding of the ways in which US global policy functions. Specifically, at a time when the US faces costly failures on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, and growing social unrest across the Middle East and Africa, its hidden financial weapons retain their near mystical power to coerce recalcitrant nations.

A new TV documentary reveals the toxic legacy of military defoliants on America's “Keystone of the Pacific”

On May 15 2012, Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting aired a primetime TV documentary to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Okinawa's reversion to Japanese control. Titled “Defoliated Island - Agent Orange, Okinawa and the Vietnam War,” the program featured 7 U.S. service members who were exposed to military defoliants on the island during the 1960s and early ‘70s. As well as these accounts, it showed interviews with Okinawan civilians worried that they, too, have been affected by these dioxin-tainted herbicides which continue to sicken millions of people in Vietnam today.

The past is haunting Northeast Asia. The China-Japan-Korea triad has been on a repeated collision course over how each perceives the shared past. Bound by dense memory webs, cultural affinity and geographical proximity, each of the three nations has made conflicting historical claims against the other, giving rise to conflict throughout the region and beyond.

War is tragedy. Bigtime.

Destruction of lives, livelihoods, families, homes, hopes, dreams.

All the things that peace nurtures.

War is so extreme — so irrevocable, so unthinkable — that the very seriousness of militarism invites its exaggeration into pure farce. Satirists and cartoonists are our public disbelievers, anarchic enough to wrestle war's horror into absurdity, allowing us to confront our worst fears with a dash of wry disbelief, an edgy insistence that another reality is possible, that we have a choice.

The 2006 stalemate at the six-party talks, coming after North Korea's missile tests and its first nuclear detonation, was a sign that U.S. policy was failing. Hamstrung by bureaucratic bickering, unable to build a cohesive multilateral coalition in support of its efforts, and unwilling to engage in serious negotiations with Pyongyang, Washington faced the real prospect of a North Korea armed with a small but growing nuclear deterrent. The Bush administration said that it would never accept a nuclear North Korea, but because of its policies, it seemed to have no choice.

Two decades ago, as Japan's economic engine hurtled along at full throttle, the Justice Ministry announced a policy that seemed to signal an end to its attempt to keep the world at bay. After years of restricting new immigrants to a trickle of white-collar professionals, the country would start accepting mostly unskilled workers to feed a labor shortage in its hungry factories.