The haiku has been a universal poetic form for more than half a century now. The second UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjōld expressed his private thoughts in it; the founding executive director of the UN Population Fund Rafael Salas recorded his daily observations through it; so does the current President of the European Council Herman Achille Van Rompuy.

Last year the Belgrade-born physician- filmmaker Dimitar Anakiev compiled a large anthology of haiku by writers from 48 countries on war and other forms of violence.

When Shin Jin Tae's first daughter died, her mother was still breast-feeding her.

“She became thinner and thinner until she passed away,” the 62-year-old farmer says. When more mysterious diseases and inexplicable deaths occurred in Hapcheon county where he lives, Shin started to think that all this might be related to the past.

This article is a contribution to a symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath, which addresses some of the most fraught issues in historiography, historical remembrance, and contemporary politics. It also reflects on occupation states in Europe and postwar East Asia, while casting important light on contemporary issues of collaboration globally. How are we to assess occupation regimes that emerged in each East and Southeast Asian nation during the Pacific War, as well as in postwar nations including those occuped by the United States or other occupiers. Issues of collaboration in a post-colonial world may be equally salient in reflecting on the experiences of newly independent nations? The issues are closely intertwined with dominant nationalist ideologies that have characteristically obfuscated and dismissed collaborationist politics while establishing their own legitimacy, or what Timothy Brook calls their “untouchability”. In the post Cold War milieu, and at a time when politicians on both sides of the Taiwan straits, and across the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, are redefining their relationships, it becomes possible to revisit the history of war, revolution, occupation and collaboration.

Seeking a “21st-century way of working” that promotes increased labor productivity and “diverse work styles,” Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) has issued a report recommending major changes to work hour regulations. The centerpiece of the proposal is an exemption from overtime pay for white-collar workers.

This paper studies the effects of the U.S. railroad expansion during the 19th century on exports of wine at the customs district level. I digitize previously unexploited data on wine trade flows for customs districts from 1870 to 1900 and combine these data with GIS-based measures of access to wine-producing regions for each district. I find that improved access to wine producers, driven by the ongoing construction of more railways, led to districts exporting more wine. My results suggest that the rollout of the U.S. railroad network had important effects on the spatial distribution of the wine trade across ports.

This “Evaluation of China's Energy Options” (ECEO) is a very important and informative analysis of China's energy-supply challenges. The ECEO was prepared for and with the support of the China Sustainable Energy Program. The Program links American and Chinese experts and is aimed at assisting “in China's transition to a sustainable energy future by promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy.” The ECEO was itself written by an international group of experts on energy issues. They seek to augment the Chinese Development Research Centre's 2004 “National Energy Strategy and Policy 2020” (NESP), an assessment of China's current and future energy needs and how to satisfy them. The ECEO is thus a treasure trove of data and concise analyses of the structure of China's energy demand and supply as well as the relevant institutions and organizations.

What is the role of apologies in international reconciliation? Jennifer Lind finds that while denying or glorifying past violence is indeed inimical to reconciliation, apologies that prove to be domestically polarizing may be diplomatically counterproductive. Moreover, apologies were not necessary in many cases of successful reconciliation. What then is the relationship between historical memory and international reconciliation?

The building that houses the Ghibli Museum would be unusual anywhere, but in greater Tokyo, where architectural exuberance usually takes an angular, modernist form-black glass cubes, busy geometries of neon-it is particularly so. From the outside, the museum resembles an oversized adobe house, with slightly melted edges; its exterior walls are painted in saltwater-taffy shades of pink, green, and yellow. Inside, the museum looks like a child's fantasy of Old Europe submitted to a rigorous Arts and Crafts sensibility. The floors are dark polished wood; stained-glass windows cast candy-colored light on whitewashed walls; a spiral stairway climbs-inside what looks like a giant Victorian birdcage-to a rooftop garden of world grasses, over which a hammered-metal robot soldier stands guard. In the central hall, beneath a high ceiling, a web of balconies and bridges suggests a dream vision of a nineteenth-century factory. Wrought-iron railings contain balls of colored glass, and leaded-glass lanterns are attached to the walls by wrought-iron vines. In the entryway, a fresco on the ceiling depicts a sky of Fra Angelico blue and a smiling sun wreathed in fruits and vegetables.

Seoul – Patients in hospital gowns crowded in with their IV poles. Visitors pressed against glass doors to watch. The crew hovered with lights, camera and microphone.

“Ready … cue,” the director barked, then filmed the scene of a young widow undergoing tests to give a kidney to her mother, who had abandoned her as a child.

For many years Umebayashi Hiromichi from Peace Depot in Yokohama has been prominent in both the use of the US Freedom of Information Act as a research tool and the analysis of United States and Japanese missile defence policy and operations in East Asia. In 2006 Umebayashi published a major study of US naval operations testing capacity to detect and track North Korean missile launches in the Sea of Japan. That research was based on a careful scrutiny of US Navy ship decklogs and command histories, available at the US Naval History Center in Washington.

The article takes a close look at the claim that the Japanese Foreign Ministry's policy of “inseparability of politics and economics” (seikei fukabun) hampered Soviet-Japanese economic relations in the 1980s. Taking three case-studies (South Yakut coal, Sakhalin oil and gas, and the Siberian pipeline), the author shows that the loss of interest on the part of Japanese business circles in investing in the Soviet economy had little to do with the political priorities of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and much to do with the changing energy needs and structure of the Japanese economy and its shift towards greater resource-efficiency. The article concludes, therefore, that the solution of the “territorial problem” would have hardly contributed to increasing Japanese investment in the Soviet Union; hence seikei fukabun was based on a false premise. The findings may be relevant to the ongoing territorial dispute between Japan and Russia and, in a broader sense, between Japan and its other neighbors, notably China.

The deaths stemming from the great famine of 1944-45, which reached its zenith in March-April 1945 in Japanese-occupied northern Vietnam, eclipsed in scale all human tragedies of the modern period in that country up until that time. The demographics vary from French estimates of 600,000-700,000 dead, to official Vietnamese numbers of 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 victims. Food security is an age-old problem, and dearth, famine, and disease have long been a scourge of mankind across the broad Eurasian landmass and beyond. While more recent understandings recognize that famines are mostly man-made, it is also true that in ecologically vulnerable zones, alongside natural disasters, war and conflict often tilts the balance between sustainability and human disaster. Allowing the contingency of natural cause as a predisposing factor for mass famine, this article revisits the Vietnam famine of 1944-45 in light of flaws in human agency (alongside willful or even deliberate neglect) as well as destabilization stemming from war and conflict. While I avoid the issue of impacts of the famine in favor of seeking cause - the human suffering of the famine has not been effaced by time. It was recorded in Hanoi newspapers at the time. It survives in local memory and in fiction by Vietnamese writers.

It is said that the number of demonstrations against government mismanagement and corruption in China is rising. Since late last year, the media in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe, Japan, and the United States has frequently reported protests erupting at city offices and other public sites across the country.

The Japan Ground Self-Defense Force public relations channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/JGSDFchannel; for the English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tT63npch UM) recently announced in an illustrated video showing the GSDF in action that, according to the new National Defense Program Guidelines for FY 2014 and Beyond, Japan is building a “Dynamic Joint Defense Force.” As such the SDF will emphasize “readiness, sustainability, resilience and connectivity in its software and hardware, supported by advanced technology and C3I (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence) capabilities, also laying a wide range of foundations for JSDF's operations.” The grand and stylish 15-minute film is perhaps the most combative piece of public relations issued by the SDF thus far. There is talk of a “tough & resilient Japan Ground Self-Defense Force” and “effective deterrence and response” capabilities. The SDF do not just appear perfectly aligned with the USFJ. The USFJ look as if they were but one branch of the Japanese armed forces.

Sushi, not long ago a quintessentially Japanese product, has gone global. Japanese food, and sushi in particular, has experienced a surge in international popularity in recent decades. Japanese government estimates that outside of Japan there are over 20,000 Japanese restaurants, most of which either specialize in sushi or serve sushi (MAFF 2006; Council of Advisors 2007). Some estimate the number of overseas sushi bars and restaurants to be between 14,000 and 18,000 (in comparison, the number of sushi restaurants in Japan is estimated to be around 45,000) (Matsumoto 2002: 2). Sushi stores today can be found across Asia, the Americas, Europe, Russia, Africa, Oceania and the Pacific. The phenomenon has accelerated rapidly since the turn of the millennium.

Reading the 25 February inauguration speech of South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun, I felt my spirits lift. Heading the list of his political principles, President Roh spoke of steps towards the launch of “a Northeast Asian era”:

“The Korean peninsula is located at the centre of Northeast Asia. The Korean peninsula is a bridge linking China and Japan, continent and ocean. In the past, this geopolitical location was a cause for suffering, but today it constitutes opportunity. The 21st century demands a central role for Northeast Asia.

It has long been my dream for an order of peace and prosperity of the kind that now exists in the European Union to be built in Northeast Asia By such an accomplishment the era of Northeast Asia would be brought to fruition. I give my firm promise to devote all my effort for that day to be brought closer.”

On 11 September 2012, in a conference room in a hotel in Fukushima city, Professor Yamashita Shunichi presented the latest results of the Fukushima Prefectural People's Health Management Survey, launched in June 2011. Twenty-seven people were in the audience, mainly journalists. The CRMS (Citizen's Radiation Measuring Station network) was one of two citizen groups present on that day.

How many directors make great movies after turning 70? John Huston did it with “The Dead,” likewise Kurosawa Akira with “Ran” and Clint Eastwood with “Letters from Iwo Jima,” but the numbers are few.

[Leuren Moret is an internationally recognized geoscientist and critic of nuclear power who has maintained a long interest in Japan's nuclear power program. As she points out in this article, Japan is the world's 3rd largest nuclear producer, with 52 reactors (versus 72 in France and 118 in the United States). Japan's reactors produce about 30 percent of the country's electricity. Japan is also one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, with a multiplicity of active fault zones. In persuasive detail spelled out in a map, Moret shows that Japan's nuclear industry has generally neglected the earthquake threat and built its reactors close to fault zones. She shows that Japanese government and industry has no serious emergency planning in the event of a disaster. For example, Japan's most seismically dangerous nuclear plant - the Hamaoka reactor in Shizuoka Prefecture - has Emergency Response Centres (ERCs) equipped with tiny decontamination showers that would be of little avail in the event of a serious emergency. In fact, planning for a very serious nuclear emergency is in many respects not possible. According to Moret, the scale of the disaster would be of such magnitude as to render any conceivable emergency response totally inadequate and ineffective. She shows why the only adequate response ultimately is to prevent accidents by turning away from nuclear energy.