This article can be read together with “Indigenous at Last! Ainu Grassroots Organizing and the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir.” The Indigenous Peoples Summit (IPS) was not the only NGO conference that took place in connection with the G8 Summit in Hokkaido in July 2008. This article discusses another conference, “Peace, Reconciliation and Civil Society: Toward a Sustainable Peace in East Asia and Europe,” which Oda Hiroshi, an anthropologist at Hokkaido University, organized.

The conference focused on achieving reconciliation between different parties in East Asia, especially between Japanese victimizers and non-Japanese victims. Japanese colonization of the Ainu and their land was only one such occurrence of victimization discussed there. How can reconciliation between the Japanese and their victims be achieved? The conference participants debated what to do given that an official apology that includes compensation by the Japanese government is nowhere in sight. They hope that reconciliation attempts by civil society will provide models for the government in the future. This article is authored by Lucasz Zablonski and Philip A. Seaton.

In the spring of 2004, five Japanese civilians doing volunteer aid and media work in Iraq were kidnapped, threatened and released unharmed by Iraqi militant groups in two separate, overlapping incidents lasting just over one week. On their return to Japan (16 April 2004), the hostages appeared defensively solemn, having been harshly criticized and shamed for their effrontery to travel to a government-declared danger zone and undertake anti-war actions perceived as critical of both the Japanese and U.S. presence in Iraq. More than the abductions themselves, the inhospitable homecoming seized headlines around the world and marked one of the most searing images in Japan's controversial involvement in the American-led war.

“If you look at the history of the use of that technique used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the inquisition, used by the Japanese and prosecuted by us as war crimes, we prosecuted our own soldiers in Vietnam, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.”

It is very difficult to say anything useful about Kobayashi Yoshinori today. Not least, because it was very hard to say anything about him in the first place. The lashings of masochistic self-irony in his work have been more than well commented upon. The more the manga artist and one contemporary face of cultural fascism in Japanese popular culture is criticized, the more it seems he feeds upon that controversy; the more he is pronounced “dead” as a significant cultural force, the more he seems to bounce back into necroperformative life.

Reading this beautifully written appeal from the Afghan Peace Volunteers is like hearing, amid the drums and trumpets of war, the delicate sound of a flute. What is heartbreaking about the Afghan struggle is that none of the main contenders we hear about - the Karzai government, the U.S. military, NATO, the Taliban, al Qaeda - seems capable of hearing that sound. An eye for an eye, said Gandhi, and the whole world goes blind. A bomb for a bomb, it could be added, and the world goes deaf as well - in particular, deaf to the sound of peace. It is heartening, and a source of hope, to hear that sound coming from Afghanistan, despite everything.

[Editors’ note: The final version of this article was received just prior to the announcement of Fukuda Yasuo's resignation as Prime Minister. Tanter comments: Fukuda's resignation will change nothing in the underlying domestic and alliance strains that lead to his decision to resign. The next Liberal Democratic Party leader, whether Aso Taro, Koike Yuriko, or someone else, will face the same limitations, and the same demands on military policy, but with even more diminished political resources and room for maneuvre. If the LDP moves to a general election following the selection of a new Prime Minister, the Democratic Party of Japan would be under severe pressure, on the one hand, from domestic sources to make good on its criticism of the Indian Ocean deployment, and on the other, from the United States, to recognize US understandings of Japan's global responsibilities - and maintain the deployment - possibly as the price of power.]

We have recently crossed the five-year mark since the American invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush used the occasion to triumphantly declare that, due to his decision to invade, ‘the world is better, and the United States of America is safer.’

In Japan, the Asahi Shinbun appears virtually alone in using this occasion to reflect upon the Iraq War. For all its pro-war cheerleading, the Yomiuri Shinbun did not even see fit to produce an English-language editorial on the subject. The Foreign Ministry offered no statement either. Iraq shattered and dying? Hmm, that's too bad – just so long as it doesn't die on the streets of Tokyo.

If acknowledged at all, Japan's indigenous population the Ainu are usually represented as a rural, exotic group, bound to ancestral homes in Hokkaido and the Northern territories. Yet, large numbers of Ainu, perhaps even the majority of their population, now live in urban centres outside Hokkaido. The recent documentary TOKYO Ainu challenges traditional, detrimental representations of Ainu culture as solely rural and sedentary, and records the complex contemporaneous reality of urban indigeneity lived by those Ainu within Greater Tokyo. This article firstly reports the main themes of the film. It then compares the relative success of TOKYO Ainu in broadening discourse and understanding of Ainu identity to the Japanese government's recent living conditions survey released this year. Japan's indigenous population the Ainu are usually represented as a rural, exotic group, bound to ancestral homes in Hokkaido and the Northern territories. Yet, this narrow discursive frame ignores the 5000 to 10000 Ainu who live in Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto region (Greater Tokyo), as well as those who live elsewhere on the mainland. While a government survey found 23,782 Ainu inside Hokkaido in 2006, some commentators, including the late Umesao Tadao, founding president of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, now estimate their population outside Hokkaido to exceed that number. Modern depictions of the Ainu as a rural “(post-) hunter-gatherer people” and of their identity as absolutely conflated with Hokkaido have been described by Watson as a “detriment to the large number of Ainu who live in urban centres on the mainland.” A new documentary, TOKYO Ainu, challenges these engrained representations and emphasises the existence of Japan's indigenous people within its capital city. The film charts the urban migration of Ainu elders from Hokkaido to Greater Tokyo; and, while preserving their voices for future Ainu generations, it also documents the contemporaneous reality of urban indigeneity lived by them, their children and grandchildren in the Kanto region today. After briefly outlining the context of “Ainu-Japanese” relations in which TOKYO Ainu has been made and providing a short background history of the Ainu in the Kanto region, this article introduces the main themes of the documentary. TOKYO Ainu successfully records the myriad experiences of urban Ainu within a compact and cohesive narrative. Its success contrasts sharply with a Japanese government survey also published this year. This survey, the Hokkaidogai Ainu no seikatsu jittai chousa, attempts to report on the living conditions of Ainu outside Hokkaido; however, its methodology has been criticised by Ainu within the Kanto region and its poor response rate reveals enduring problems with the state's approach to the Ainu.

We have recently crossed the five-year mark since the American invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush used the occasion to triumphantly declare that, due to his decision to invade, ‘the world is better, and the United States of America is safer.’

In Japan, the Asahi Shinbun appears virtually alone in using this occasion to reflect upon the Iraq War. For all its pro-war cheerleading, the Yomiuri Shinbun did not even see fit to produce an English-language editorial on the subject. The Foreign Ministry offered no statement either. Iraq shattered and dying? Hmm, that's too bad – just so long as it doesn't die on the streets of Tokyo.

Five years ago Thursday (Japan time), U.S. bombers started pounding Iraq as part of an invasion force intended to topple Saddam Hussein, an action that would eventually embroil Japan. Yet, key questions remain unanswered over Tokyo's decision to dispatch Self-Defense Forces to the war-torn nation. Why did Japan feel so strongly that it had to support the U.S.-led invasion by sending SDF troops? What was its significance, justification and repercussions?

Five years have elapsed since the start of the Iraq war, but there are people who are still trying to justify this historic blunder.

President George W. Bush asserted in his State of the Union address in late January that ‘high-profile terrorist attacks are down.’ He went on: ‘The Iraqis still have a distance to travel. But after decades of dictatorship and the pain of sectarian violence, reconciliation is taking place – and the Iraqi people are taking control of their future.’

Kyodo News on March 29 produced a follow-up piece on GSDF reconstruction projects in Samawa. For the entire period that the GSDF was stationed in its base near Samawa, the Koizumi Administration and its camp followers repeatedly insisted that their presence was needed there in order to carry out ‘humanitarian and reconstruction support activities.’

It is not easy to evaluate clearly the degree to which the local community in Samawa benefited from the GSDF activities. During the GSDF deployment itself, most news reports suggested that a majority of the local people were pleased to have the Japanese among them as they imagined that their presence would signal major improvements in the local economy and because the Japanese troops didn't shoot anybody. On the other hand, there was a minority – apparently affiliated with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr – who did not welcome the GSDF on the Iraqi nationalist grounds that they were allies of the American occupiers. These people fired mortars at the GSDF base and created a sense of threat, but never actually wounded any Japanese soldiers. The fact that the GSDF was able to complete their 2 1/2 years in Iraq without taking any casualties can be regarded as a success for the political supporters of the mission. They seem to have benefited from a combination of careful planning, risk-avoiding local strategies, and simple good luck.

Japan marked the 50th anniversary of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty on January 19 amid calls for an inquiry into the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defence Forces to Iraq, which critics say was illegal and in violation of Japan's no-war Constitution. But in contrast to the fierce debates over the origins and legitimacy of the 2003 Iraq invasion in both the United States and the United Kingdom, public discussion in Japan is muted and there will be no official investigation.

American and British foreign policy and the peace and stability of the Middle East region, but it was also a serious setback for international law, the UN, and world order.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the United States was supposedly burdened by what policymakers came to call ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’ This was a Washington shorthand for the psychological inhibitions to engage in military interventions in the non-Western world due to the negative attitudes towards such imperial undertakings that were supposed to exist among the American public and in the government, especially among the military who were widely blamed for the outcome in Vietnam. Many American militarists at the time complained that the Vietnam Syndrome was a combined result of an anti-war plot engineered by the liberal media and a response to an unpopular conscription that required many middle class Americans to fight in a war that lacked popular support or a convincing strategic or legal rationale. The flag-draped coffins of dead young Americans were shown on TV, leading defense hawks to contend somewhat ridiculously that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms.’