In December 2015, Urasoe City pledged to conduct a survey of former base employees to ascertain the extent of contamination at Camp Kinser, a 2.7 square kilometer US Marine Corps supply base located in the city. Urasoe's director of planning, Shimoji Setsuo, announced that the municipality would work with prefectural authorities to carry out the investigation and he would also request funding from the national government. This is believed to be the first time that such a large-scale survey of former base workers has been launched in Japan.

Fifteen years ago, Akio Mikuni and I were working on a book that we ended up calling Japan's Policy Trap. At the time, a chorus of prominent foreigners was berating Japan's policy elite for its refusal to take their advice on lifting Japan out of deflation. But we believed that Japan faced more than just a stubborn unwillingness by politicians and bureaucrats to do what needed to be done. That's why we labelled Japan's dilemma a trap; after all, if you can escape from it easily, then it really isn't a trap.

The Abe administration's aim to further weaken the parameters of Article 9 by seeking legal grounds to engage Japan's military in collective self-defense activities sent Tokyo-based Japanese of all ages to the streets in protest this past summer. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered repeatedly in front of the National Diet Building and prime minister's residence to voice their opposition to this to demand, as emphasized by Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALDs), a politics based on Japan's postwar Constitution. With media focus on events that took place in the nation's capital and at the level of the state, local interests and opinion is sometimes overlooked. This article introduces translations of two opinion pieces published in two local Japanese newspapers, the Okinawa Taimusu (Okinawa Times), out of Naha, Okinawa, and the Kahoku Shinpō published in Sendai.

Having written recently of the prospect for the three upcoming elections (Ginowan mayor on January 24, Okinawan Prefectural Assembly in June, and Upper House of National Diet in July), what follows is a comment on the outcome of the first of these, on which some misconceptions circulate widely.

On January 28, 2016, US Army base Fort Hood, in Texas, broke ground on the Army's largest-ever hybrid solar and wind-power project. The USD 100 million project's 63,000 solar panels and 20 massive wind turbines will supply half the base's electricity needs “at a lower price than the power generated by fossil fuels,” saving USD 168 million. A week before, the US Navy, well along in its goal of 50% renewable energy by 2020, first used biofuels in its Great Green Fleet. These milestones came in the same month that the Pentagon, on January 14, released a new directive on “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.”