In January, U.S. service members and their families stationed on Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, rallied together to demand an investigation into a dioxin dumpsite located near two Department of Defense schools.

For decades, Kadena Air Base has been the largest US Air Force (USAF) installation in the Pacific region - and this dioxin usage has taken its toll on the health of the land, nearby residents and on-base service members.

The Pentagon is notoriously secretive as far as military pollution on Okinawa is concerned - it allows neither the Japanese government nor Okinawa officials to conduct environmental checks on its installations - but now two U.S. government documents offer a glimpse behind the wire.

TOKYO - In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Aoyama Michio's initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government's Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident.

This article extends the reader's gaze beyond the Metropolitan Core (Tokyo-Osaka) that dominates the English language literature on Japan. It is important to understand rural, small town and smaller city Japan because most Japanese do not live in the Core and most of the land area of the Japanese archipelago lies outside the boundaries of Japan's urbanized confines. There is a very different dynamic in rural and small town Japan where there has been a dramatic level of depopulation and aging and economic stagnation. In contrast, the metropolitan core is still growing, and looks prosperous and modern even after two decades of economic stagnation. To bring out distinctive features of the “other” Japan, the one hidden behind the metropolitan core, consider changes in land use, demography, the rural and small town economy, transportation, communications and architecture. The relative neglect of this topic is striking because regional Japan is both idealized as a repository of “traditions” and values while also denigrated as backward. The declining “other” has been subjected to extensive government policy interventions, but as I argue here, these frequently have been misguided. Significantly, the “other” Japan remains an important arena of identity politics in a nation that has experienced massive socio-economic convulsions in the post-World War Two era.

China's renewable energy revolution is powering ahead, with the year 2013 marking an important inflection point where the scales tipped more towards electric power generated from water, wind and solar than from fossil fuels and nuclear. This means that its energy security is being enhanced, while carbon emissions from the power sector can be expected to soon start to fall, we argue.