A June 2 article in Bloomberg by the deservedly respected University of California at San Diego Professor of Japanese Business, Ulrike Schaede, makes the argument that Abenomics requires nuclear restarts in order to work. Professor Schaede presents an overview of Japan's present circumstances on energy, and concludes that “Japan has only one viable course of action: It cannot afford not to turn its nuclear-power plants back on.” In the present article, I suggest that Japan cannot restart its nuclear capacity in the time-frame suggested by Professor Schaede. And drawing on recent research by Japanese and American experts, I shall argue that Japan's best bet is in accelerating its efficiency and conservation programmes.

This paper examines the social meanings embedded in Japanese melodramas produced since the 1990s and their use by the public for comfort and healing in an attempt to deal with declining confidence, both personal and national, in the wake of the burst of the bubble economy. It notes, further, how the Japanese media has used similar tropes in an effort to rebuild morale in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake.

Hollywood superstar Clint Eastwood wants to tell both sides of one of the Second World Wads most infamous battles. Is he walking into a minefield?

Early in 2005, as Japan was gearing up for a summer of painful World War II anniversaries, Shindo Yoshitaka received an unusual phone call. Hollywood superstar Clint Eastwood was planning to visit Tokyo in April and would very much like to meet the Japanese Diet member to discuss a project he was working on. Was he available?

All states have dark secrets, and none finds it easy to confront them. Yet the best assurance that past mistakes and misdeeds will not be repeated is that they be faced, responsibility recognized, and apology and compensation attempted.

In Northeast Asia the record on this score is mixed. It was 1995, a half century after the end of the Japanese colonial empire, before Japanese Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi expressed Japan's regret and apology for the pain and harm done by the four decades of colonialism. A few years later, a similar apology was extended to cover the Comfort Women and in 1998 that apology was explicitly directed to South Korea (by Prime Minister Obuchi).

[The fiery explosion and crash of a U.S. helicopter into a building at Okinawa International University on August 13 has touched off the most intense anti-base movement since the 1995 rape of a 12- year old Okinawan girl by three U.S. servicemen.

The U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Air Station, located in densely populated Ginowan adjacent to the campus, has been scheduled for relocation for nearly a decade. But with a powerful opposition movement in Henoko, the prospective new site, and mounting Okinawawide opposition to any new base on the island, the plan remains in limbo.

Relations between China and India have long been marked by an ambivalence that has led some observers to describe them as “neither friends nor foes.” In the late 1940s, when China and India won freedom from imperial powers and established new governments, their relations were warm. From the late 1950s, however, relations deteriorated, notably from the Dalai Lama's 1959 flight from Tibet and his refuge in India. This was followed by a succession of events - the1962 border war, Beijing's nuclear tests in 1964, Indian nuclear tests in 1974, Sino-Pakistan defense cooperation from the 1970s, Indian nuclear tests in 1998 again - that further strained their ties. Since the 1980s and 1990s, when China and India respectively embarked upon economic reforms, their strategic competition was intensified by a scramble for economic and energy resources.

Of Japan's prefectures, Okinawa lies farthest from Fukushima Daiichi. At over 1000 miles from the plant, even Seoul is closer. Okinawa also has no nuclear plant and seems to be distanced from the consequences of Japan's nuclear policies, but is this really the case?

Even in today's theater world in Japan, which tends to venerate age, at just 52 Noda Hideki is already a towering, legendary figure.

Wherever you go and talk to dramatists or stage performers, you will find his name and achievements almost invariably come up. This is especially the case among young dramatists in Japan, who, even though their theater styles might differ from his, almost all acknowledge a huge artistic debt to Noda in their own theatrical creations.

“Slaughter and plunder are inseparable from armies and wars. Whenever war is waged, looting, robbery, and murder are invariably committed. Depending on their merits, such events are either reported with exaggeration or, conversely, passed over in silence.” In 1930, Japanese writer Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943) published an antiwar novel that “remains startlingly and tragically timely in a world of nationalist-driven military intervention.” Zeljko Cipris introduces Kuroshima and presents excerpts from his novel, Militarized Streets, which Cipris translated for the University of Hawai'i Press.

The U.S., overstretched already, should treat Kim Jong Il as a regional crisis and let China take the lead.

The United States is bogged down in what appears to be an unwinnable war in Iraq; it is facing very unpleasant options in regard to neighboring Iran's nuclear program; senior NATO officers say that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating fast; in the former Soviet Union, Georgia and Russia are moving toward military confrontation, with the U.S. seemingly unable to restrain either; in large swaths of Latin America, new nationalist and populist movements are challenging U.S. interests.

Once upon a time I was a minor diplomat. My office was in the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. To get to my office, depending on who was protesting us, sometimes having to scurry around an unsmiling phalanx or two of tall Japanese policemen with long wooden batons, I would show my badge to the Japanese guards at the outer gate, then cross the courtyard and go up the stone stairs and through the front outer glass doors of the stark wall of concrete and glass that is our embassy. Then I would show my badge and my face to the marine guard behind the bulletproof glass, at which point the door would buzz open and I would be able to go in through the glass inner doors into the Embassy's sanctum itself. Already as I write this I am fearful I am giving away secrets, but if you must know, after entering the elevators are to the left. Just before getting to the elevators are the official portraits of the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State. When it was the pictures of Bush, Cheney and Rice with their crazed grins, I used to cringe internally and pray silently for protection from their vampirism. When the pictures changed to Obama, Biden, and Clinton, at first I felt a great moral relief, until that is it became clear that the previous policies were to continue essentially unabated or in some regards, even worsen.

Hikikomori is a Japanese term that, like sushi and sake, or more to the point, hibakusha, has entered the world lexicon. It refers both to the phenomenon and the individuals who suffer from “acute social withdrawal,” defined by the Japanese government as youths who isolate themselves in a single room of their parents’ home for six months or more. Estimates of the number of hikikomori vary widely, from several hundred thousand to over a million, but there is no denying that it is a major, and growing, problem confronting contemporary Japanese society. Most of the hikikomori are teenagers, eighty percent of them male, who often begin by refusing to go to school and then cut themselves off from social interaction entirely.

[Editors' note: The final version of this article was received just prior to the announcement of Fukuda Yasuo's resignation as Prime Minister. Tanter comments: Fukuda's resignation will change nothing in the underlying domestic and alliance strains that lead to his decision to resign. The next Liberal Democratic Party leader, whether Aso Taro, Koike Yuriko, or someone else, will face the same limitations, and the same demands on military policy, but with even more diminished political resources and room for maneuvre. If the LDP moves to a general election following the selection of a new Prime Minister, the Democratic Party of Japan would be under severe pressure, on the one hand, from domestic sources to make good on its criticism of the Indian Ocean deployment, and on the other, from the United States, to recognize US understandings of Japan's global responsibilities – and maintain the deployment - possibly as the price of power.]

What is the outlook in 2006 for the “North Korea” problem? In September 2005 the parties to the Beijing “Six-Sided” conference reached a historic agreement on principles and objectives: North Korea would scrap “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs,” return to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and allow international inspections. In return, it would be granted diplomatic recognition, normalization, and economic benefits, including, at “an appropriate time,” a light-water reactor.

The risk of war on the Korean peninsula remains high, and the U.S. government is raising it higher by opening an economic front. In September 2005, one day after regional negotiations produced an agreement with the potential to defuse North Korean-U.S. tensions, the U.S. government charged North Korea with counterfeiting $100 bills. Calling this alleged North Korean effort a direct attack on U.S. sovereignty and technically an act of war, Washington imposed an ever-tightening and ever-widening web of financial restrictions on the country.

The 2005-07 spike in petroleum prices topping out at $100 a barrel has prodded economic planners across the globe to reconsider their energy options in an age of growing concern over global warming and carbon emissions. The Southeast Asian economies, themselves beneficiaries of an oil and gas export bonanza through the 1970s-1990s, also find themselves in an energy crunch as once ample reserves run down and the search is on for new and cleaner energy supplies. Notably, regional leaders at the 13th ASEAN Summit meeting held in Singapore in November 2007 issued a statement promoting civilian nuclear power, alongside renewable and alternative energy sources. ASEAN–which in 1971 endorsed a nuclear-free zone concept–also sought to ensure that plutonium did not fall into the wrong hands through the creation of a “regional nuclear safety regime.” In response, environmental activists across the region cited concerns over nuclear power, citing safety and unstable regional geologies concerns. Undoubtedly they were taking a cue from Japan's recent nuclear disaster. Singapore, host of the ASEAN summit meeting, made known its concerns.

Roger Pulvers' novel The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn brings to life the encounter of the Greek-Irish expatriate journalist-writer with Japan and the Japanese. Arriving in Japan in 1890 after twenty years in the United States, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) (小泉八雲)'s fourteen-year immersion in Japanese life provided the basis for a series of books that established him as the most influential interpreter of Japan in the West. But what Japan? The novel brings out the clash between Hearn's idealized vision of a society rooted in ancient lore of the grotesque, the macabre and the quaint, and the thrust of industrialization and war that was transforming a rising imperial power. Drawing on his experience of immersion in Japanese literary, theatrical and filmic life for much of the last forty years, Pulvers limns the extraordinary life and times of Lafcadio Hearn. The following introduces readers to Hearn's biography and an excerpt of the novel. Mark Selden

The sharp rise of oil and gas prices has enabled Moscow to utilise its mammoth energy reserves to achieve domestic and foreign policy goals. The new Russian ‘power politics’ have already been tested on the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, and recently the Czech Republic. Russia's Far Eastern frontier is now turning into the place where energy export becomes a political tool in shaping the country's relations with regional neighbours. China, the two Koreas, and Japan are hungry for energy, natural resources and, at the same time, seek economic and political cooperation. In these circumstances, the opportunities offered by trans-national railroads and pipelines appear to be more powerful than weapons. Given this new leverage and understanding, can Russia exert its soft and hard power upon North Korea to promote the goals set in the Six-Party Talks?