[The chief of the Asahi shimbun's editorial board here draws attention to the cycle of reconciliation/repudiation, apology/assertion in Japan's attitudes towards Asia. He dubs this the “Law of Next Year,” meaning that the one is inevitably followed by the other.

Ishimure Michiko has often been referred to as the “Rachel Carson of Japan”. Her bestselling book Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease (Kugai jodo; waga minamata byo, 1972) alerted many Japanese to the dangers of industrial pollution and shaped the conscience of a generation of politically and environmentally aware writers and activists. Ishimure has gone on to develop the Minamata story into a trilogy. She has also written a wide range of poetry, essays, novels, and noh drama and is the recipient of several international literary prizes as well as Japan's Asahi Prize and the Philippines’ Magsaysay Prize. She continues to be involved with the struggle for the rights of Minamata victims, and for the rights of other victims of prejudice and modernization. At the core of her writing and life work is the attempt to bring about a rebirth of the endangered “kotodama”—the spirit of language—that has been at the heart of traditional arts and culture in Japan and throughout the world. This article introduces her work and presents an excerpt from her novel Lake of Heaven.

The late January visit to Tokyo by Indonesian Vice President Muhammad Jusuf Kalla was full of surprises, just as the two nations announced their expectations that a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) would be signed before the end of 2006.

The last few years have witnessed a wave of bilateral Free Trade Agreements linking, respectively, the US and trade partners across the Pacific, and Japan and trade partners in the Asia-Pacific region. Countries as disparate in economic profile as Australia, Thailand and Indonesia are currently striving to reach agreement with Japan, in part driven by the free market logic symbolized by the World Trade Organization, as much as by neo-liberal economics. But there is also a sense of scramble not to be left behind by their neighbors.

Just when Japan's Imperial House was on the verge of an historic reform that would have marked an enormous step towards making it a more gender equal institution, the legislation permitting an Empress to reign was suddenly shelved. The immediate cause of the abrupt turnaround was the surprise announcement that 39-year-old Princess Kiko, the Emperor's daughter-in-law, was pregnant. The announcement led Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro to promptly abandon his reform plans, handing victory to ultra-conservatives who bitterly opposed the proposals.

The big three, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, have divided the Pacific island territories. New Zealand now controls Polynesia, Australia is “in charge of” Melanesia (including the plundering of natural resources by its multinationals in Papua New Guinea), and the U.S. has a firm grip on Micronesia. Andre Vltchek considers the consequences for the people of the island nations.

[Japan has steadily lost its leading edge in computer memory chip production over the last decade. Its responses include its first attempts at tariff protection, bringing multiple cases before the WTO charging discrimination, and a series of new joint ventures seeking to regain the cutting edge. The consequences include rising tensions between Japan and other nations, including Korea, China and the US. In this comprehensive assessment, Masaki Hisane surveys recent trends and future prospects for Japan's high tech industries. Japan Focus.]

ULSAN, South Korea — Led by fast-growing China and India, Asia is going nuclear in a big way to feed its ravenous appetite for energy.

The strains of economic growth are already showing. Energy shortages have forced Chinese factories to scale back production, and farmers in India often have power for only half the day. Both countries say their future growth is at risk unless they diversify their energy mix.

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, “Look at that structure!” I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. “It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan,” he says, “the newest carrier in the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country's seventh largest city.”

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's ruling coalition has cleared one hurdle in its drive for realignment of US military forces in Japan, as a moderate candidate who is open to the idea won a mayoral vote in Nago city on the southern island-state of Okinawa.

So wide-ranging are 71-year-old Inoue Hisashi ‘s talents and activities - including playwright, director, novelist, public intellectual and activist, that it is difficult to know which to focus on at the expense of others.

Inoue not only writes plays regularly for numerous theaters in Japan, but his own Komatsu-za company that he founded in 1983, and which only stages his plays, is constantly touring the country. He is also a prolific best selling novelist and has been president of the prestigious Nihon Pen Club since 2003 – as well as being director of Nihon Gekisakka Kyokai (Japan Playwrights Association), director of Sendai Literature Museum and the director of a library of his own collection of books in his small hometown of Higashi Okitama-gun in rural Yamagata Prefecture.

According to the official North Korean version, the Americans were the culprits. In October 1950, the first year of the Korean War, American soldiers massacred tens of thousands of innocent people in the North Korean city of Sinchon. In perhaps the most horrifying incident, US soldiers led 900 residents, including 300 women and children, into an airraid shelter. After the victims passed three days in thirst and fear, the GIs poured gasoline into the dark, confined space and threw in a match.

Keith Bradsher's article rightly emphasizes the rapid progress that the Vietnamese economy has made since the adoption of reform policies (doi moi) twenty years ago, and its bright future prospects. Of course, positioning Vietnam's growth rate between those of China and India does sacrifice a sense of proportion. While it is ranked fifteenth in world population, just ahead of Germany, Vietnam's GDP adjusted for purchasing power is the equivalent of Algeria or Hong Kong. China's Guangdong Province, with a similar population, has a provincial product four times the size of Vietnam's GNP, and Thailand's economy is twice the size. In 2005, moreover, the IMF ranked Vietnam 123rd in the world, with GNP per capita estimated at $3,025 (adjusted for purchasing power), just below India.

First, it is wrong to translate “globalism” as world-ization (sekaika) or internationalization (kokusaika). They say 300 trillion dollars are currently linked to the IT industry. Globalization means creating a sanctioned hunting preserve so that big money, made when profit produces profit, can circle the world. Under the Koizumi administration, this system has been thoroughly accommodated.

Now, Koizumi's “structural reform” is generating the next set of “structural reform problems.”

The October release of the Bush administration's new National Space Policy marked an important step forward in a long-fought campaign by right-wing hawks to extend their agenda toward the stars. The advance of the space hawks was also evident in the annual report of the U.S.-China Commission, which in its recently released annual report warned that measures were need to halt the alleged effort by the Chinese to challenge U.S. space supremacy.

[Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State under the Bush administration until 2005, recently pronounced the US-Japan relationship to be in excellent condition - on a par with the US relationship with Britain. He should know, since he has been a central figure in shaping it. Yet the process of Global Reorganization of US forces has been completed with Europe and South Korea, but not Japan. True, an “Interim Agreement” was reached at the end of October 2005, but the end of March 2006, the deadline set for the final document, has now passed and, instead of agreement, wrangling continues.

By now it has surely dawned on Japan's political establishment, eager for issues of Japanese war accountability to fade away, that appointing Aso Taro to the post of foreign minister last fall was a major mistake. While Aso's provocative comments about Japanese imperialism and war conduct predated his tenure as the nation's top diplomat, the historical record of forced labor in Japan by Asians and Allied POWs is being newly thrust into the media spotlight.

Thousands of Korean labor conscripts were exploited for dangerous work in the northern Kyushu coalfields owned by Aso Mining Company between 1939 and 1945. Most Korean forced laborers never received the wages they earned; the money was deposited in the national treasury after the war and remains there today. The Aso family's coal profits helped bankroll the rise of the dominant political figure in early postwar Japan, Yoshida Shigeru, who was prime minister when Aso Mining and scores of other Japanese corporations quietly deposited the unpaid wages of some 700,000 Korean labor conscripts. Yoshida was also Aso Taro's grandfather.

Despite Chinese intermediation and South Korean flexibility and generosity in the past three years, prospects for security settlement on the Korean peninsula and normalization of relations between Pyongyang and Washington and Tokyo seem to be farther than ever. The six-party talks are stalled, and early implementation of the principles embodied in the 19 September 2005 Joint Statement on Denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is put in doubt. North Korea continues to publicly build up its semi-opaque nuclear arsenal. In turn, the United States insists that “all options are on the table” and keeps on “kicking the can down the road” in terms of its policy of “regime change,” while intensifying its efforts through “proliferation security initiative,” in various multilateral fora, and via other venues to form an “anti-DPRK coalition” aimed at restraining, if not rolling back, the North Korean arduous march to the nuclear superdome.

Nazery Khalid - Research Fellow, Center for Economic Studies and Ocean Industries. Maritime Institute of Malaysia - reports that 7 of the world's 20 busiest terminals are in China. The port to watch is Shanghai, which is poised to overtake its main rivals (Hong Kong and Singapore). In 2005, Shanghai handled 443 million tons of cargo in total and 18.09 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containers, an increase of 24.2 percent compared with the previous year (Hong Kong handled 23.2 million TEUs and Singapore 22.43 TEUs). The Shanghai region is expected to handle 35 million TEUs of container traffic by 2010. This is because the port of Ningbo will continue its own frenetic expansion of capacity as well as install the world's longest bridge (the US$ 1.4 billion Hangzhou Bay Bridge) to cut the travel time to Shanghai to two hours. In addition, Shanghai is adding a deepwater facility in nearby Yangshan and working out deals with other North China ports to provide international service for them.

Through mid-April and into May, the already tense relations between Seoul and Tokyo moved closer to the breaking point when Japan began to implement its plan to conduct a maritime survey around the islets of Dokdo/Takeshima, which are controlled by South Korea and are claimed as sovereign territory by both states.

In response to the dispatch of Japanese research vessels, Seoul sent twenty gunboats to Dokdo/Takeshima in order to prevent the survey. As the two sides edged toward confrontation, rhetoric escalated and nationalist public opinion was mobilized, particularly in South Korea. A round of diplomacy resulted in a temporary stand-down, but the patchwork agreement was followed by a hardening of positions that does not bode well for a permanent solution to the dispute.

[We present three articles on Iran in the crosshairs, examining the conflict over Iran in light of moves by the US, UN, Japan, EU and Israel. The central issue concerns the US effort to bring Iran before the UN Security Council for its refusal to terminate the development of its civilian nuclear power program. It is a course that many see as the essential step toward US-directed regime change.