It is January 15 1998. Standing grim-faced and with arms folded, Michel Camdessus, the International Monetary Fund managing director, peers down as President Suharto of Indonesia signs his acceptance of the latest list of 50 IMF demands. Mr Suharto has no choice, even though many of the intended reforms are politically unpalatable. Such has been the outflow of money from Indonesia over the past six months that the economy would implode if a second international bail-out were refused.

Ten years after the Asian financial cataclysm of 1997, the economies of the Western Pacific Rim are growing, though not at the rates they enjoyed before the crisis. The region has been indelibly scarred by the crisis. There is greater poverty, inequality, and social destabilization than before the crisis. South Korea's painful labor market reforms, for instance, have produced the quiet desperation behind one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries.

One of the lesser-known casualties of the deadly July 16 quake that struck Niigata Prefecture was a headstone that toppled in a village a few miles from the epicenter off Kashiwazaki. The grave bore the name of legendary former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, Japan's postwar master of pork-barrel politics and the man who helped bring the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant to this deprived area on the Sea of Japan coast.

The following text appears as chapter 8 in the just published book Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (New York and London, Verso), and is reproduced here by kind permission of the publishers.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927) is known primarily for his stories set in other times and places, but even at their most exotic or fantastic, his works deal with urgent modern themes. His Edo-period samurai stories emphasize the horror of violence and the emptiness of vengeance. “Shogun” (The General, 1924), a well-known portrait of a victorious general resembling Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912), the “hero” of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, is a bitter satire of a man responsible for the death of thousands. “The Story of a Head That Fell Off,” set against the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, is an intense cry against the absurdity of war that unfortunately remains as relevant in our barbaric twenty-first century as it was in Akutagawa's day.

So much has happened to the Okinawan protest against the Futenma base relocation in the past 10 years: the formal and informal local resistance has been such that the new U.S. military sea base that was to replace Futenma Air Station has not been built. However, the election results in Okinawa continue to produce mayors and governors ready to accept relocation, largely for economic reasons. What explains this contradiction? How democratic have the local political processes regarding the base issue been? Miyagi Yasuhiro addresses these questions in a report, originally written for the research group Okinawa jizokuteki hatten kenkyukai (Sustainable Development in Okinawa Research Group, headed by Miyamoto Ken'ichi), which reflects on the ten years since the Nago referendum of 1997 on relocation of the US Marine Air Station from Futenma. The relocation proposal was rejected by a majority.

“If we do not hear from you within one week, we will take it that you have consented without objection.”

This is the single cover page sent from the company to a labor union formed by employees of an elder care service company in Tokyo last November, together with employment rules totaling about 50 pages. It was a request for opinions as the company was revising its work rules.

The 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurs today, August 6, 2007, bringing with it thousands of commemoration ceremonies in cities and towns around the world. Such events have become part and parcel of the nuclear era, and include the lighting and floating of lanterns in memory of the dead, silent vigils, religious observances, the chalking of human “shadows” on the ground, readings of John Hersey's Hiroshima, and leafletting.

The post-war Asia-Pacific witnessed many conflicts involving major regional players. These include the divided Korean Peninsula, the Cross-Taiwan Strait problem, and the sovereignty disputes over the Southern Kuriles/“Northern Territories”, and the Tokdo/Takeshima, Diaoyu/Senkaku, and Spratly/Nansha islands. These and others, such as the ongoing Okinawa problem, emblematic of the large US military presence in the region, and the US-imposed outcomes in Micronesia, all share an important common foundation in the post-war disposition of Japan, notably the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. Prepared and signed by multiple countries under US initiative, this treaty largely framed the postwar political and security order in the region, and with its associated security arrangements, laid the foundation for the regional Cold War structure, namely the “San Francisco System”.

It may seem improbable that a regional cooperation organization commences its annual summit against the backdrop of military exercises. The European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the Organization of Latin American States - none of them has ever done that.

I had warned that a major earthquake would strike the Chuetsu region around Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, and about the fundamental vulnerability of nuclear power plants.

The 6.8 magnitude temblor of July 16 caused considerable damage to the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), proving me right.

Arjun Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research www.ieer.org/, an organization dedicated to increasing public involvement in and control over environmental problems through the democratization of science. A specialist on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, waste and testing, and energy conservation, he holds a Ph.D. in engineering (specialization: nuclear fusion) from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the principal author of the first study ever done (completed in 1971) on energy efficiency potential in the U.S. economy, the principal editor of Nuclear Wastelands, and the principal author of Mending the Ozone Hole. His forthcoming book, Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, is a joint project of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

The defeat of the ruling Liberal Democratic party-led coalition by the Democratic Party of Japan in Japan's Upper House elections on July 29 has already sent shock waves through the US-Japan security alliance. Surprising many who saw only his bullying style and right wing policies, DPJ leader Ozawa Ichiro moved quickly to set the DPJ on a course deeply antagonistic to US hopes for Japan as a global military partner.

The shutdown of the DPRK plutonium reactor, the New York Times noted angrily recently, shows that ‘real nonproliferation diplomacy can produce real results’ as long as it is stripped of ‘empty, ideological posturing’. The target of the Times' fulminations was not, as is usually the case, and as it will probably be again tomorrow, the government in Pyongyang, but that in Washington. Tearing up the agreement it had inherited from the Clinton administration had only produced an ‘embarrassing outcome for the hard-line tactics favored by Vice-President Dick Cheney’. The Bush administration, recalled the Times, had ‘walked away from Mr. Clinton's deal in 2002, with sensational charges, from which it has since retreated, that North Korea was pursuing a second, secret bomb-making program based on uranium enrichment.’ We might recall that the newspaper had itself published an embarrassed mea culpa that the administration's ‘sensational charges’ about Iraq, subsequently proven fraudulent, had misled it into enthusiastically supported the disastrous invasion. Were the charges against the DPRK equally fraudulent? Probably, but since they cannot be disproved – and there's the rub – the Times is left with nagging doubt, and anger about ‘the six bombs’ worth of nuclear fuel Pyongyang produced – and the nuclear test - while Washington strutted and postured.'

The French mass media call President Nicolas Sarkozy's political style “new.” It is true that he won the presidential election under the slogan of “severing ties” with the past, “advancing innovation” and “taking action” toward the creation of “a new France.” But actually, one look into the contents of Sarkozy's professed reform tells us that it is no more than “conservative revolution” that combines new liberalism and new conservatism. The truth is that there is nothing new about it.

The United States needs to keep the focus on al-Qaida while targeting Iran. It isn't easy.

There's no escaping Iraq. Two incidents in recent days bear heavily on the unending conflict in that country. More broadly, they reveal how the United States administration's definition of its "war on terror" (or “long war”) reflects entrapment in a way of thinking that requires it constantly to press the real world into the service of a partisan, dangerous, and self-defeating ideology.

Almost immediately following the end of World War II, Americans began to question the use of the atomic bomb and the circumstances surrounding the end of the Pacific War. More than half a century later, books and articles on the atomic bomb still provoke storms of debate among readers and the use of atomic weapons remains a sharply contested subject. As the 1995 controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum revealed, the issues connected with the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to touch a sensitive nerve in Americans. Among scholars, disagreement remains no less heated. But, on the whole, this debate has been strangely parochial, centering almost exclusively on how the U.S. leadership made the decision to drop the bombs.

This article examines the place of Sino-Japanese relations in Japan's domestic struggles over war memory in the early 1950s, when the door to an official reconciliation with China had just closed following the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. It focuses on the Japan-China Friendship Association as a lens through which to understand the role of civic organization in carving out a public space for memories of Japanese wartime aggression as part of special interest politics.

If optimism is a force multiplier, as former US secretary of state Colin Powell once said, it has worked well so far for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). There were times in the past seven years when it seemed doubtful that the SCO would pull through, beating back the all-out US assault on its credibility.

SAMOA — Espen Ronneberg is Climate Change Adviser for the Secretariat of the Pacific Program on the Environment (SPREP), a regional organization established by the governments of the Pacific region and including all 22 Pacific island countries and territories as well as Australia, France, New Zealand and the United States. Ronneberg was Vice-President of the Kyoto Conference of 1997 that adopted the Kyoto Protocol on the environment.