On April 25, UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon published an opinion piece in the New York Times marking the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy. In it, Ban highlighted the parallels between Chernobyl and the ongoing crisis in Fukushima. While the Chernobyl crisis saw a much larger initial radiation release, reports now indicate a series of meltdowns at Fukushima. Reactor No. 1 is now known to have melted down just hours after the initial earthquake hit. In addition, reactors No. 2 and No. 3 are also thought to be in a state of meltdown. In this context, Ban calls on the world to rethink the place of nuclear power in global energy strategies.

Chong Hyang Gyun has just written herself into the history books, but not for the reason she wanted.

The 54-year-old spent a decade fighting the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for the right to take a promotion exam, from which she was barred because of her South Korean nationality. If she had won, nationality would have ceased to be a factor in determining senior civil service jobs in Japan.

In late 2009 Indonesia revived a proposal to build a nuclear power facility on the seismically active Muria Peninsula of north central Java over sustained civil society opposition including the voice of moderate Islam. The following assessment by Richard Tanter, Arabella Imhoff and David Von Hippel poses a range of issues about siting decisions in light of state-society relations and nuclear power feasibility. The issues are as relevant to mature democracies as to “emerging democracies,” as Indonesia is now sometimes styled. Muria poses formidable challenges to Indonesian democracy while posing equally important questions about the nation's developmental trajectory.

The Republic of Korea has turned 60. Birthdays are a time for looking back over the past as well as for planning the future. The sad truth, however, is that the Republic that was born in 1948 was only the first of six, and that its record contains little to celebrate and much to lament. It is unlikely that many Koreans today remember it with pride or pleasure.

No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world would be in such tumult over so little that is understood. Unimaginable violence, most of it for triumphs that are obscure. Politics buried so deep in their actions, that the motives disappear in the flames, and the suffering itself becomes the end. Aerial bombardment of entire countries, cold-blooded massacre of citizenries. Armies set in place to hold people down, and themselves held down by their inexperience and bewilderment. Populations motivated for revenge rather than for revolution, harmed beyond belief and then diverted from their oppressors to take their justice where it comes. A cheapened world, where values are given over to pieties, and tears quickly dry into the very rage that created them in the first place. Time is circular: this is the myth of eternal return, with the avenging angel appearing once as Demon, then Angel, then Demon again. This is our cauldron.

Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.

Nowadays, when we think of feature-length animation, our thoughts turn immediately to “Shrek” and Pixar (or less fondly, to “Robots” and “Madagascar”). The animated world, we've learned, is round - created in three dimensions by teams of computer wizards and enlivened by noisy, knowing references to American pop culture, past and present. It may seem somewhat paradoxical, then, that the world's greatest living animated-filmmaker - a designation that his fans at Disney and Pixar would be unlikely to challenge - is Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese writer and director whose world is flat, handmade and often surpassingly quiet. Not that Mr. Miyazaki, 64, is entirely indifferent to technological advances. Starting with his 1997 epic, “Princess Mononoke,” he has used computer generated imagery in his movies, though he recently instituted a rule that CGI should account for no more than 10 percent of the images in any of his pictures.

This paper examines US, Japanese and European political economy approaches to China and their effect on US-Japan and US-European Union (EU) relationships. Great powers with a greater security concern in dealing with another major country care more about power while those with less concern are preoccupied with calculations of wealth. China's rise and its actions have posed a far greater security challenge to the United States and Japan than to the EU and are driving the two countries closer together. The political economy game involving China reveals a dominant welfare motive among the advanced market economies. The ambition to transform China politically has diminished. China's integration into the global market makes a relative gains approach difficult to implement. Globalization simply limits the ability of a state to follow a politics-in-command approach in the absence of actual military conflict, which explains why the political economy approaches of the United States, Europe and Japan are not that different. China's own grand strategy to reach out to the world and outflank the US-Japan alliance has also contributed to a divergent European policy toward China, although there are severe limitations to Beijing's ability to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe.

The watchdog role of journalists in Japan is on trial in several cases with enormous implications for freedom of the press here

In a summer laden with portentous anniversaries, several important skirmishes between journalists and the people they keep tabs on passed by almost unnoticed.

In July, Matsuoka Toshiyasu, president of the Rokusaisha publishing company, was arrested on a deformation charge that has editors across the country nervously consulting their rolodexes for libel lawyers.

On 30 October 1940, six days after meeting with Adolf Hitler in the railway station at Montoire, Philippe Pétain announced on French radio that “a collaboration has been envisioned between our two countries.” Since then, “collaboration” has been the word by which we denigrate political cooperation with an occupying force. Pétain's choice of language to characterize the arrangement he made with Hitler—he claimed he would shield France from the greater threat of military occupation—was not of his own devising. The French army had signed an armistice with Germany four months earlier that committed French officials “to conform to the decisions of the German authorities and collaborate faithfully with them.” This first iteration was vague and innocent; Pétain's was not, and less and less could be. As war and occupation subordinated France's economy and polity to German control, collaboration unravelled into a tangle of compromises that few could anticipate at the outset of the war.

What is the future of the competition to control the market in commercial aircraft between Boeing and the European Airbus? Does Japan have a role to play in the new generation of aircraft? While Boeing dominated commercial aircraft sales through the 1980s, in the 1990s it has fallen behind Airbus. As Tanaka Sakai shows, the stakes for the U.S., Europe and Japan are high, and the outcomes may deeply affect the ability of Japan and Asia to emerge as a major industrial powerhouse in the decades ahead. Tanaka Sakai, an investigative reporter, publishes the Japanese language weblog http://www.tanakanews.com. His report on Boeing and Japan appeared in the December 31, 2003 issue of Tanakanews. Developments since the publication of this article suggest that Boeing, and the Boeing-Japanese connection are central to a new lease on life for the beleagured company and industry. As the April 18 Asahi Shimbun reported,, Boeing announced the sale of 50 7E7s to Japan's ANA, valuing the sale at $6 billion and giving the airline confidence in moving the plane into production. Of particular interest is the fine print: Three Japanese enterprises, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and Fuji Heavy Industries will provide 35% of the production of the new plane, centered on the construction of the wings, as well as providing a heavy share of the financing. Is this the way forward for Japan's lagging aircraft industry, or does it seal anew Japanese dependence on American aircraft production, with the U.S. maintaining monopoly control over the engine production? Tanaka suggests another possible scenario: Japanese-Chinese-Korean cooperation at the center of a future Asian regional design. But such a possibility will require major developments within Asian regionalism.

LOS ANGELES (Kyodo) After the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki passed last August, filmmaker Steven Okazaki began worrying that the attacks and their cautionary lessons are being forgotten.

Why did Japan, the victim of the atomic bomb, early and whole- heartedly opt for nuclear power? From 1945 to 1955, indeed, from the immediate aftermath of Japan's surrender, the Asahi, Mainichi and Yomiuri, the big three newspapers, unanimously and without controversy, endorsed the peaceful uses of nuclear power, distinguishing it from nuclear weapons. This article reconsiders a literature that has focused on the decisive role of the Yomiuri newspaper, and Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace program, which led the Japanese to accept nuclear power in the mid-1950s. Instead, it shows a broad media consensus in support of nuclear power from the 1940s, envisaged as the heart of the next industrial revolution.

Major trends that are gradually changing the fortunes of nations and reshaping world history are not easy to identify. There are three key reasons for this. First, many important trends unfold so insidiously that they are recognized only ex post once the developments reach a breaking point and a long-term trend ends in a stunning discontinuity. Second, we cannot foresee which trends will become so embedded as to be seemingly immune to external forces and which ones will suddenly veer away from predictable lines. Third, what follows afterward is often equally unpredictable: the beginning of a new long-lasting trend or a prolonged oscillation, a further intensification or an irreversible weakening.

Four months after the landslide re-election of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, Fukushima Mizuho, leader of Japan's Social Democrats (SDP), paints a through-the-looking-glass picture of the country Koizumi has helmed since 2001.

Even as much of the world's press hails the return of economic prosperity following the publication of Japan's best economic figures for more than a decade, Fukushima highlights the fallout from the Koizumi reforms: growing income and wealth disparities, social breakdown, declining birthrates and one of the most casualized economies in the developed world, providing a dystopic image of the once vaunted lifetime employment system.

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.