In the last few weeks, Kim Jong Il has inspected a pig farm, a mine, a solar thermal energy research unit, a restaurant, an orchestra, and even gave field guidance to the Tudan Duck Farm on how to raise these pesky birds, where he reportedly enjoyed an art performance given by the members of the art group of the Pyongyang Poultry Guidance Bureau at the newly built house of culture of the farm, and congratulated them on their successful performance. He also travelled to the industrial east coast city of Hamhung, a crosscountry trip that one of the authors, having done it, can attest requires a bit of effort. Accompanied by his son, Kim Jong Il even managed to visit a terrapin farm. Given all these visits, how one might ask, does the peripatetic Kim Jong Il find time for his commander-in-chief military and foreign policy duties?

Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was an inheritor and preserver of Ainu culture. As collector of Ainu folk utensils, teacher of the prominent Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke, and recorder and transcriber of epics, songs, and tales from the last of the bards. He was also a fierce fighter against the construction of a dam in his village that meant destruction of a sacred ritual site as well as of nature. In addition, Kayano was the compiler of an authoritative Ainu-Japanese dictionary, a chanter of old epics, the founder of a museum of Ainu material culture as well as of an Ainu language school and a radio station. He was the first (and so far the only) National Diet member to address the assembly in Ainu. Kayano was also an inspiration behind today's appreciation of Ainu culture in which young people, Ainu and non-Ainu of various nationalities, join to celebrate aboriginal cultures and their contemporary development. That includes recent youthful attempts to create new forms that combine traditional Ainu oral performances with contemporary music and dance. “Ainu Rebels” which formed in 2006, for example, is constituted mostly of Ainu youth but also includes Japanese and foreigners. They are a creative song and dance troupe that draws on Ainu oral tradition adapted to hip hop and other forms, as well as engaging in artistic activities that combine traditional Ainu art with contemporary artistic elements.

While well aware of strong local opposition, Washington and Tokyo as early as 1996 agreed to relocate the U.S. Marine air base at Futenma to Henoko, Nago, in northern Okinawa. Eventually, in 2009, in the final days of the Aso Taro cabinet, with the Democratic Party on the eve of power, a hastily concluded bilateral agreement of Februry 9, 2009 committed Tokyo to carry out the 2006 relocation plan.

Just before 8:16 am on August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb named Little Boy dropped from the Enola Gay B-29 bomber and exploded 580 meters above Shima Hospital near the Aioi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima City. After the bomb was detonated, powerful heat rays were released for approximately 0.2 to 0.3 seconds, heating the ground to temperatures ranging from 3,000 to 4,000°C. These heat rays instantly burnt people to ashes and melted bricks and rocks within a 1.5 kilometer radius of the hypocenter. In addition, heat rays burnt buildings, triggered large-scale fires and ignited an enormous firestorm. The blast and fire from the atomic bomb destroyed all 75,000 wooden houses within a 2.5 kilometer radius, leaving only the skeletal remains of a few concrete buildings. In the areas surrounding the hypocenter, people were slammed into walls and crushed to death by collapsing houses. Injuries were sustained from flying glass and other debris even in areas far from the hypocenter. People who survived the blast, many of them severely injured, ran through the flames trying to escape, but many burnt to death.