This extract from Kang Sangjung's autobiography Zainichi (Kodansha, 2004) describes the experiences of first-generation zainichi Koreans in the city of Kumamoto, as seen from the perspective of a second-generation child growing up in the Japan of the 1950s. Now a professor at the University of Tokyo, in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, where he specialises in politics and the history of political thought, Kang Sangjung looks back at the people and places of his childhood. These personal memories provide a starting point for reflections on identity, ‘homeland‘, and the place of zainichi Koreans in Japanese society and in the wider society of Northeast Asia.

In January of 1906 in the northeastern Japanese city of Sendai, China's most famous modern writer, Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren 1881-1936), claimed to have experienced a life-changing epiphany that led him to abandon his medical studies and “devote himself to the creation of a literature that would minister to the ailing Chinese psyche.” The now famous “magic lantern (slide) incident” allegedly took place at the end of Lu Xun's bacteriology class at the Sendai Medical School. The lesson had ended early and the instructor used the slide projector to show various images to students from the recently concluded Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). Lu Xun later recounted that the Japanese medical students were roused into a patriotic frenzy by scenes of the war, culminating in reverberating chants of “banzai!” One scene showed a Chinese prisoner about to be executed in Manchuria by a Japanese soldier and the caption described this man as a Russian spy (see image 1). Lu Xun reported that rather than the sight of a fellow Chinese facing death, it was the expression on the faces of the Chinese bystanders that troubled him deeply. Although they appeared to be physically sound, he felt that spiritually they were close to death.

A free trade agreement is one form of trading bloc, a preferential economic arrangement amongst a group of countries that reduces barriers to trade. Trading blocs have emerged as the most debated topic in world trade. While countries around the world are making efforts to harmonize interests through trading blocs, these groupings are also emblematic of difficulties associated with the current global trading system under the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Humankind is truly at a crossroads. It may either degenerate into oblivion destroying its abode, the Earth, or it may change course and sustain its civilization for the foreseeable future. The material that is available to humankind and all our co-inhabitants of the Earth is physically limited, and the energy that is usable for long is only that from the Sun. All other energy sources are exhaustible, and will not last long at the current rate of exploitation. Materials naturally available (or at least readily usable) are usually present in a relatively low-entropy state. Once such materials are processed, utilized and discarded/dispersed into the environment, their entropy is enormously increased. Then it is hardly possible to recover it in a low-entropy state. Hence, though they never disappear, such materials are non-renewable in practice. This writer has attempted to estimate the resource availability of major elements on the Earth and the anthropogenic exploitation rate (Ochiai, 2004).

The vast Pacific Islands region, or Oceania, has long been considered an “American lake,” its numerous small island states and territories heavily dependent on the United States and its western allies, particularly Australia, New Zealand, and France, for development assistance, trade, and security. However, economic and political ties with Asian states have become increasingly important in recent decades. Japan has been active in Oceania since the 1980s, motivated by its long-term interests in natural resources, particularly fisheries, as well cognizant of the “burden sharing” obligations of its strategic alliance with the United States. Japan is now the major aid donor to the region as a whole, and since 1997 has hosted regular, high-profile summit meetings with Pacific Island leaders. The substantial increase in aid announced by Prime Minister Koizumi at the most recent of these meetings, held in Okinawa in May 2006, was in part a response to mounting political instability in Oceania. It was also an attempt to counter China's growing interest in the region, signaled by Beijing's summit meeting with island leaders in Fiji the previous month, as well as Taiwan's ongoing and aggressive use of “dollar diplomacy” to win support from island states. This article discusses some key issues shaping the political environment in which this escalating strategic competition is taking place.

Canberra and Tokyo are negotiating a defence and security agreement that will open the way for Japanese troops to train on Australian soil. The co-operation pact will bring a new dimension to Australia's relations with its biggest trading partner, providing for joint military exercises, regular meetings between foreign and defence ministers, exchanges of officials and closer work on regional challenges such as North Korean nuclear proliferation.

More than a decade ago, Joao Masuko seized an opportunity. With the burgeoning Latin American migrant population in Hamamatsu hungering for a taste of home, he opened a small grocery.

Japan's critical intellectuals, whose views on Asia Oguma Eiji analyzes in the context of Japan's postwar history, were quite influential at least through the 1970s. They regularly published not only in books but in monthly magazines read by hundreds of thousands and newspapers with circulations in the millions. As Oguma shows, their perspectives on Asia and modernity have fluctuated in response to a variety of factors, including most prominently Japan's relations with the U.S. but also in response to the changing course of Asian revolutions.

Japan Focus presents two complementary perspectives on the challenges facing China and the world economy in the context of global over-accumulation. In 1997, China emerged unscathed from the economic collapse that set back Japan and then Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and other high-flying Asian economies. The present analyses pose the question of whether China, too, is now vulnerable, with consequences that will be felt throughout the world economy. Posted at Japan Focus on February 9, 2007.

For those inclined to keep their hopes well under control when it comes to the Japanese judiciary's capacity to deliver decisions even mildly critical of the political establishment, news of the Tokyo High Court's finding in favor of the Violence-against-Women-in-War Japan Network (VAWW-Net Japan) against the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) was stunning enough to provoke initial eye-rubbing. At least I can say for myself that I had to read twice, and thrice, the first brief listserv message from Nishino Rumiko, one of VAWW-Net's two co-representatives since the premature death (2002) of founder Matsui Yayori.

It is a question that puzzles much of the world: Why does Japan thumb its nose at one of the environmental movement's few lasting achievements—the ban on commercial whaling? As Japan's whaling fleet ploughs the Antarctic in search of minke and endangered fin, David McNeill talks to politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and environmentalists and finds that far from weakening in the face of worldwide condemnation, the campaign to overturn the ban is gathering strength. February 2007, indeed, sees an important attempt by Japan to bypass what it perceives as the paralysis of the International Whaling Conference (IWC), when Tokyo plays host to a gathering dubbed the Conference for the Normalization of the International Whaling Commission. Despite being boycotted by New Zealand, Britain, the United States and around 20 other countries, many fear that this conference could seal the fate of the IWC.

On 13 February 2007, a historic deal was struck in Beijing commencing the process of the denuclearization of Korea, comprehensive regional reconciliation, ending the Korean War, and normalizing relations between North Korea and its two historic enemies, Japan and the United States. The agreement is complex, and its implications are enormous, not just for the peninsula. The following paper offers a preliminary analysis.

On September 21, 2006, a Tokyo District Court panel issued a sharp rebuke to nationalist politicians who seek to use the nation's public schools as tools to promote their romantic vision of Japan. The suit was filed on behalf of 401 Tokyo public school teachers in order to challenge an October 2003 order requiring them to stand before the Hinomaru flag and sing “Kimi ga Yo” at entrance and graduation ceremonies. The court not only found this order to be an unlawful violation of Japan's Fundamental Law of Education and the constitutional guarantee of “freedom of thought and conscience,” it also ordered the Tokyo Metropolitan government to pay each plaintiff 30,000 yen in compensation for emotional suffering.

North Korea's nuclear blast last October signaled the end of a cycle that started in October 2002 when the United States accused Pyongyang of running a clandestine uranium program. (The preceding cycle - 1994-2002 - was a period of a more-or-less stable “crisis freeze”). The 2006 nuclear test - regardless of the measure of its success - ended the longstanding argument about whether the North Korean nuclear program was the real McCoy or a bluff aimed at extorting benefits from the West. Assuming the latter, it was concluded that the answer to the bluff should be toughness and the refusal of concessions. Only by such toughness could North Korea be forced to drop its brinkmanship and stop its nuclear program (This was the application of negative motivation - “the stick”).

On January 27, at a gathering of Liberal Democratic Party supporters in Matsue City, Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare Yanagisawa Hakuo made his now-famous remark that “women are child-bearing machines,” and immediate plunged himself into water considerably hotter than any of the local onsen.

With more than 2,500,000 U.S. personnel serving across the planet and military bases spread across each continent, it's time to face up to the fact that our American democracy has spawned a global empire.

The following is excerpted from Chalmers Johnson's new book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” (Metropolitan Books).

A common factor in conventional war movies, whether they are made by Americans, Europeans, or Asians, is the lack of visible enemies. They are there, in the way Indians were there in old westerns, as fodder for the guns on our side, screaming Banzai! or Achtung! or Come on! before falling to the ground in heaps. What is missing, with rare exceptions, is any sense of individual difference, of character, of humanity in the enemy. And even the exceptions tend to fall into familiar types: the bumbling or sinister German, hissing about ways to make you talk, the loud, crass American, the snarling Japanese.

[Japan's payments towards the UN budget, at more than 19 per cent, are second only to the US. Although all its efforts thus far to secure a permanent seat on the Security Council have been in vain, many Japanese citizens serve, some at high levels, on UN bodies. None has been more prominent than Sadako Ogata, Head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees through the decade of the 1990s.

An American researcher examines how the requirements of political assimilation have threatened the unique culture of China's Tai minority, and the Tai response.

In 1997 I arrived on China's southwest borders planning to spend a year researching ethnic minority folklore. The only problem, as I discovered when I arrived, was that there didn't appear to be any.

One of the few Americans to see action during the Bug Wars of the nineteen-nineties was Robert J. Lang, a lanky Californian who was on the front lines throughout, from the battle of the Kabutomushi Beetle to the battle of the Menacing Mantis and the battle of the Long-Legged Wasp. Most combatants in the Bug Wars—which were, in fact, origami contests—were members of the Origami Detectives, a group of artists in Japan who liked to try outdoing one another with extreme designs of assigned subjects. They engaged in the Bug Wars after one of the Detectives displayed what the group's Web site calls “an incredible secret weapon”—a horned beetle with outspread wings, which he had folded from a single sheet of paper. “Then the origami insect war got full-scale,” the English translation of the Web site continues. “They compared their confident models with others at their monthly meetings, and losers left with chagrin.” During the Bug Wars, Lang was not yet a professional origami artist; he was a research scientist at Spectra Diode Labs, in San Jose, who did some paper folding on the side. He was busy at work—in 1993, the year of the Menacing Mantis, for instance, he patented a self-collimated resonator laser and worked on fibre-optic networks for space satellites—so he usually wasn't able to travel to Japan to hand-deliver his bug of the month. Instead, he would e-mail his design to an ally in Tokyo, who would fold it and present it to the Detectives on Lang's behalf.