WikiLeaks has done it again – made available important documents that governments and corporate interests have tried to keep secret from the general public. Until this new release, we had almost no idea what was going on within the secret Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations involving an extraordinarily diverse group of 12 large and small as well as rich and poor nations of East and Southeast Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. The twelve are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United State and Vietnam, with the US driving the agenda. South Korea and Taiwan have also indicated that they may want to join. This time, we get a glimpse of the status of the Environment Chapter with important implications for the people and nature of the region. [WikiLeaks Press Release]

In the upcoming Tokyo gubernatorial elections, Hosokawa Morihiro could make an astonishing comeback more than a quarter of a century after retiring as Prime Minister. Mainstream and independent media have generally stressed his opposition to nuclear power and his support for green energy alternatives, in contrast to the national government of Abe Shinzō. However, Abe and Hosokawa also represent different poles in another controversial field of politics – the politics of memory including the fraught question of apologies for war and the regional and global implications of their respective stances.

Through the first year of his second term as Prime Minister (December 2012-December 2013) Abe Shinzo's government stirred concern on the part of neighbour countries, Japan's key “ally” the United States, and global opinion generally. Despite some suggestion of economic recovery under “Abenomics,” there was something inexplicable about Japan. Abe's revisionist historical views, his commitment to Yasukuni, and his hard-line stance on territorial disputes, had plunged relations with China and South Korea to new depths, while raising the level of tension with the United States. When Abe spoke of “liquidating the post-war” regime so as to replace it with a “new” or “beautiful” Japan, he meant one whose citizens would be expected, indeed required, to love it, with a drastically revised new constitution that would widen state prerogatives and narrow citizen rights, a “national defense army” replacing the existing Self Defense Forces and national security reinforced by a tightened, draconian “secrets protection” law and a Prime Ministerial National Security Council (both now in place). The door also opened to the export of Japanese weapons and nuclear power plants as well as the dispatch of Japanese soldiers to global theatres under a doctrine of “collective self-defense.” His is a vision more radical than that of any previous post-war Prime Minister, including his grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, Prime Minster 1957-1960, who in 1960 pushed through the US-Japan Security Treaty agreement against massive opposition.