Through the ANZUS alliance, Australia, like Japan and South Korea, has been a key part of the United States “hub-and-spokes” Asia-Pacific alliance structure for more than sixty years, dating back to the earliest years of the Cold War and the conclusion of post-war peace with Japan. An historical chameleon, the shape of the alliance has continually shifted - from its original purpose for the Menzies government as a US guarantee against post-war Japanese remilitarisation, to an imagined southern bastion of the Free World in the global division of the Cold War, on to a niche commitment in the Global War On Terror, to its current role in the imaginings of a faux containment revenant against rising China. As one hinge in the Obama administration's Pacific pivot, Australia is now more deeply embedded strategically and militarily into US global military planning, especially in Asia, than ever before. As in Japan and Korea, this involves Australia governments identifying Australian national interests with those of its American ally, the integration of Australian military forces organizationally and technologically with US forces, and a rapid and extensive expansion of an American military presence in Australia itself. This alliance pattern of asymmetrical cooperation, especially in the context of US policy towards China, raises the urgent question of what alternative policy an Australian government concerned to maintain an autonomous path towards securing both its genuine national interests and the global human interest should be following.

In Japan at War: An Oral History, Hideo Sato recalls being forced to hoist the hinomaru, the Japanese flag, in tandem with the playing of Kimigayo — “His Majesty's Reign,” the Japanese national anthem — as a schoolchild in the 1940s. If the flag reached the top of the pole too early the teachers would beat him. More than 60 years later, he's “chagrined that they still raise the flag.”

Japan's defeat in World War II transformed East Asia into a Cold War arena of East-West confrontation. With China's involvement, the bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union flared during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. This article explores the impact of these wars on the people of East Asia.

“In the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos.” - George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays.

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.

The southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago has been a source of contention between Japan and China since 2004, when Chinese officials started to refer to it as “rocks” not as an “island.” In international law, rocks cannot be a basis for claiming an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). After the Chinese challenge to its territorial right over Okinotorishima, Japanese officials reacted vigorously, notably Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, within whose jurisdiction Okinotorishima falls. Ishihara ordered installation of a 330 million yen radar system for surveillance and set up an address plate at the “island.” The two countries continue to dispute the issue.

What are the links among Japan, China and the United States that will shape the outcomes of the current economic and financial crisis that appears to have metastasized into a global crisis of the whole postwar international order? Because that order rests heavily on Asian export-led export growth strategies and the transfer of massive Chinese and Japanese trade surpluses that support the dollar's role as the universal currency, any solution for the US and the international order will require the cooperation of the two Asian economic powers. John Judis looks far beyond the US treasury bailouts to offer thoughtful perspectives on the crisis and its resolution. MS

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”).

Four times now since August 2003, the government of China has been host to what have become known as the “Six-Sided Talks.” The key protagonists, the United States and North Korea, are as asymmetrical as any two countries could be, on one side the greatest military and industrial power in history and on the other one of the world's poorest and most isolated small states.

TOKYO - Japan is revving up its drive toward free-trade agreements (FTAs), a move largely fueled by an intensifying rivalry with China over leadership in regional economic integration and increasingly tough global competition for oil, gas and other resources.

The shell-shocked look on Takato Nahoko's face said it all. Just over a fortnight ago the shy volunteer aid worker became one of the most famous people in the world when harrowing footage of her and two other Japanese hostages with swords at their throats was broadcast by Arabic news channel al-Jazeera.

It is now the second year in the fight against radiation. What should be done in a situation where we can’t see what lies ahead of us at all, and what is the situation inside the Fukushima atomic power plant meltdown? We asked Koide Hideaki.

As far as radioactivity is concerned, the fundamental rule is to make it compact and seal it off, not dilute and spread it. Scattering rubble all over the country violates the rule. National policy at present consists of two pillars. One is for local governments throughout the country to burn contaminated rubble in incinerators. The other is for each local government to dispose of the ashes as it wishes. Both are wrong.

For a number of years, The Asia-Pacific Journal has paid attention to Okinawa as the point where major contradictions within the national, regional, and global system are sharpest, and to Okinawan civil society as the seed-bed of some of the most advanced democratic thinking in contemporary Asia, with great significance for the future of Japan, the region and the US-Japan relationship.

Tokyo is crawling unsteadily back on its feet. Its buildings are intact, its vast transport network is creaking back to life, cellphones work again, patchily. Planes land in the main international airports but traffic crawls through the streets.

At 4 o'clock in the morning on 2 June 2007, a man out fishing near the port of Fukaura in Japan's Aomori Prefecture came upon a small boat with four people in it. The boat had left the North Korean port of Cheongjin one week earlier, and the people on board – a couple and their two adult sons – were North Korean refugees. They were the first to appear on Japan's shores by boat since 1987, when eleven refugees from North Korea had arrived in Fukui on a boat called the Zu Dan 9082. The events in the sleepy little town of Fukaura briefly became headline news in Japan, igniting media debate about a possible impending influx of displaced people from the Korean Peninsula, and about the appropriate Japanese response to the North Korean refugee problem.

From the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45 to the Communist Revolution of 1949, the onrushing narrative of modern China can drown out the stories of the people who lived it. Yet a remarkable cache of letters from one of China's most prominent and influential families, the Lius of Shanghai, sheds new light on this tumultuous era. These letters take us inside the Lius’ world to explore how the family laid the foundation for a business dynasty before the war and then confronted the challenges of war, civil unrest, and social upheaval.

Angry protests in Busan, South Korea during an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference there in November have alarmed Hong Kong police preparing for a mid-December World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Hong Kong police fear that the some of the groups who showed up to protest APEC may also bring strident street protests to Hong Kong. This article examines some of the trajectories of protest apparent at the APEC events by looking more closely at the national and international dynamics of Korean activism, revealing growing coordination between workers, farmers and anti-war activists, and the implications for the Hong Kong meeting.

In the 1990s East Asian experienced a turn toward nationalism that includes an extremist, xenophobic wing, which expanded further during the 2000s. This is true in all three of the major countries in the region; Japan, China, and South Korea. In Japan, for example, Abe Shinzo, whose platform calls for hawkish foreign policies and the rewriting of the postwar constitution based on cultural nationalism, returned as the prime minister in 2012. The anti-Korean slanders that were limited earlier to cyberspace, as discussed by Rumi Sakamoto in her article earlier in this reader, have since taken to the streets in Japanese cities. How to deal with such a phenomenon, described by Tessa Morris-Suzuki as a kind of “mass retreat to the psychological fortresses of ethno-nationalism and racism” (p. 5), is becoming an ever more pertinent issue for all East Asian countries and their nationals.

A Canadian diplomatic mission led by Rodolphe Lemieux in November 1907 shares an anniversary with the much-maligned Japanese immigration controls, introduced on 20 November 2007. The themes underlying the Lemieux mission - racial profiling, xenophobia, discrimination in immigration, and claims of unassimilability in the host country - resonate deeply with the current political climate in Japan. The anniversary of Lemieux's arrival in Japan 100 years ago serves to remind us how little attitudes have changed in regards to immigration and racialization.

According to a survey by the Ministry of Education and Science, this spring's graduation ceremonies’ enforcement rate of singing “Kimigayo” (the Japanese national anthem) crept ever closer to their target of 100%. Behind these figures, there remain a not insignificant number of students who question, object and oppose it. Students at Hokkaido's Sapporo Minami High School (the island's most academically prestigious high school), persistently challenged the national anthem enforcement, including requesting an Attorneys’ Association to appeal on behalf of their human rights. Why did they resist and how do they reflect on their actions now?