Three US administrations have failed to avoid North Korean breakout from the NonProliferation Treaty and a gaping hole in the IAEA safeguards system. Nuclear war is once again conceivable in Korea after a brief interlude in the early 1990s when this prospect all but disappeared. The North's announcement on October 4, 2006 that it intends to test a nuclear weapon underscores this failure.

During the late 1930s, as Japan escalated war preparations with China, and after GovernorGeneral Minami formalized the assimilationist ideology of “Japan and Korea as One Body”, cinema in Korea experienced a fundamental transformation. Korean filmmakers had little choice but to make co-productions that aimed to draw Koreans toward Japanese ways of thinking and living, while promoting a sense of loyalty to the Japanese Empire. Within this colonial context, and especially after the 1940 Korean Film Law facilitated the absorption of the Korean film industry into the Japanese film industry, a particular type of masculine hegemony was encouraged by a comprehensive censorship process. To show how this fluid and dynamic process worked, this article draws on some key theoretical concepts of hegemony to analyze the construction of masculinity in three of the most notable of these wartime co-productions: Angels on the Streets (1941), Spring in the Korean Peninsula (1941), and Suicide Squad at the Watchtower (1943). It analyzes how the colonial authorities sought to reorient Korean audiences toward a particular worldview by means of a process that we call a “cinema of assimilation” - a cultural hegemonic exercise designed to draw Koreans closer to the social, political and economic habits and priorities of their occupiers.

Japanese Devils, a documentary of personal confessions of war crimes by Japanese Imperial soldiers in China during World War II, was invited to the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2002. Accompanying the film and its director to Sarajevo, the author, an American, sensitive to the postwar Japanese experience, discovered a people and city still deeply traumatized by war. The visit prompted a series of questions about the origins of genocide, the consequences of targeting civilians in war, and our collective responsibility to question and listen to the stories of perpetrators, as civilians increasingly become explicit targets in hostilities.

BEIJING - With floods of cash and a new policy of patience and friendly support, China has quietly penetrated the thick wall surrounding North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's regime - gaining significant leverage for the first time in one of the world's most closed societies. Chinese leaders have gained Mr. Kim's ear, sources say, with a message that the North can revitalize its economy while still holding tight political control.

In the past year, with Washington preoccupied, Beijing has bypassed US hopes that it would squeeze Kim and force him to drop his nuclear ambitions. Indeed, the once-heady “six-party process,” started in 2003 to denuclearize Korea, appears defunct. Instead, Beijing pumped up investment to some $2 billion last year, and is helping to rebuild ports, create factories, and modernize energy sectors in what one US diplomat calls a “massive carrotgiving operation.” Yet Beijing is not using such aid as a means to end the North's nuclear program.

What are the causes and consequences of North Korea's extended famine of recent years? Though it is not blessed with plentiful arable land or a consistently temperate climate, North Korea has long tried to feed itself and avoid dependence on the outside world. Food security represents, for the government in Pyongyang, a very concrete expression of juche, or self-reliance. Though such a policy has meant that one-third of the population remains rural—a very high percentage for a modern, industrialized country—North Korea continues to push hard to guarantee sufficiency in basic grains.

The Okinawa Friday Assembly is an informal group several score strong of Americans, Okinawans, and other Japanese that has held a weekly anti-war rally in front of the U.S. Consul General in Naha, Okinawa since the fall of 2001. When the first peace delegation from Okinawa visited Iraq in early 2003, members of the group held a hunger strike and vigil there for the entire ten days of the trip. This leaflet was finalized and approved by the Assembly on February 21, 2003. The reference to the UN Security Council vote in the last paragraph refers to the statements made to the Council on Feb. 14.

According to a survey conducted by the Asahi Shimbun in mid-June, nearly three-quarters of Japanese voters favor an immediate or gradual phase-out of nuclear power.

In mid-April, the Japan Research Center and Gallup released poll results indicating that Japanese support for nuclear energy had declined from 62% before the earthquake – one of the highest support levels internationally – to 39% in the aftermath of 3/11 and the Fukushima crisis. Rates of opposition increased from 28% to 47%. The more recent Asahi poll shows an even more dramatic shift to antinuclear positions.

That weapon of human extinction, the atomic bomb, was dropped on the people of Hiroshima sixty-four years ago. Yet the hibakusha's suffering, a hell no words can convey, continues. Radiation absorbed 64 years earlier continues to eat at their bodies, and memories of 64 years ago flash back as if they had happened yesterday.

These are some of the quotes on the signs carried by some 110 demonstrators in Tokyo on September 25, 2011. The colorfully clad marchers chanted them cheerfully, insisting that “genpatsu are absolutely necessary for Japan's economic growth” and that building one in Tokyo, the largest consumer of electricity, would be most efficient.

Ever since rapid adoption of the mobile Internet in the late nineties, Japanese mobile phone use has been the object of international attention. Although other countries have led in terms of wireless technology development, mobile phone adoption rates, and certain usage patterns (such as political mobilization), Japan is considered by many to define the future of mobile phone use. In addition to high rates of adoption of Internet-enabled mobile phones, 3G infrastructures and camera phones, Japan has also been considered an incubator of popular consumer trends that integrate portable technologies with urban ecologies and fashions. In Smart Mobs, the book that catapulted mobile cultures into heightened visibility in Western public culture, Howard Rheingold (2002: xi) opens with a scene of texters eyeing their mobile phones as they navigate Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, allegedly the site of the highest mobile phone density in the world. A BBC reporter writes in a piece titled “Japan signals mobile future”: “If you want to gaze into the crystal ball for mobile technology, Tokyo is most definitely the place to come to” (Taylor 2003).

Super-storm Haiyan made a devastating landfall in the east-central Philippines on November 8, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction that has draped the whole country in a pall of grief. The Philippines has since been reeling from this disaster. The typhoon buffeted the most vulnerable of Filipinos, 40% of whom live below the poverty line (i.e., $1.25 a day). Many of them fished for living. Their livelihood compelled them to live dangerously close to the shoreline of western Pacific. The highest ground on which some of them found their perch was just one meter above sea level. When the storm swelled, with waves as high as six meters, its poor victims were defenseless. The crashing walls of water swept away all that they possessed. The cumulative losses in lives and livelihoods, homes and hearths, businesses and infrastructure have no parallel in Philippines history, just as Haiyan has no precedent in the annals of meteorology. As of now, 13million Filipinos, of whom 5 million are children, have been scarred by the destructive fury of Haiyan, while 600,000 have been rendered homeless. The number of deaths may climb past 10,000.

Somewhat lost in the current heightened military tensions on the Korean Peninsula, following a quick succession of events that started with a South Korean live-fire drill on an island held by South Korea in the contested sea area near North Korea's coast. This prompted an artillery response by the North that killed four South Koreans (two soldiers and two civilians), and now a major 4-day US-South Korean maritime exercise (including maneuvers by a US aircraft carrier) in waters west of the Korean peninsula that has drawn strong complaints from China and North Korea.

In 2008, 8,140 women working in Japan brought sexual harassment or sekuhara claims to prefectural equal employment opportunity (EEO) offices. This represents 64% of the 12,782 EEO related reports that women made to regional governments – a large increase since 2005. Sekuhara in fact is the largest discrimination concern reported to EEO offices among employed women in Japan today. These numbers do not simply reflect difficult employment conditions women face, but also provide evidence of growing legal consciousness among working women in response to broader legal and social change. How does such sekuhara consciousness emerge?

It is over forty years since the Shinkansen (‘bullet train‘) began operating between Tokyo and Osaka. Since then the network has expanded, but other countries, most notably France and Germany, have been developing their own high speed railways, too. As other countries, mainly in Asia, look to develop high speed railways, the battle over which country will win the lucrative contracts for them is on. It is not only a matter of railway technology. Political, economic & cultural influences are also at stake. This paper will look at these various aspects in relation to the export of the Shinkansen to China in light of previous Japanese attempts to export the Shinkansen and the situation in Taiwan.

This article describes the impressive, resilience-targeted greening of Japan, evident in nationwide deployments of renewable energy, radical efficiency, and other core aspects of sustainability. These developments are already underway, and include public- and private-sector actors as well as community groups. The greening also has promising stamina due to being increasingly deeply inscribed in the fiscal, regulatory and other mechanisms of a rapidly emergent industrial policy.

With the Bush administration in deep trouble on many fronts, the government of Japan is striving to carry out a reorganization that will integrate Japanese forces in American strategic actions throughout the Arc of Instability. For ten years, from 1996, Japan's longest unfulfilled promise has been to build a new base for the US marines in Okinawa to replace the inconvenient, obsolescent and politically charged Futenma. All efforts at construction have been blocked by a coalition of local Okinawan residents and citizens.

Kawakami Kenji's weird inventions have brought him notoriety in his native Japan and in Europe, where some call him a surrealist genius and even a neo-dadaist. But there is method in his madness.

Let's be frank. Kawakami Kenji looks a bit barmy: hooded eyes staring unnervingly beneath what appears to be shaved eyebrows, topped by an unruly mop of spindly hair. And this is before he happily poses for photographs with a toilet-roll dispenser on his head. “It's for sufferers of hay fever,” he explains. “They blow their noses a lot.”

While well aware of strong local opposition, Washington and Tokyo as early as 1996 agreed to relocate the U.S. Marine air base at Futenma to Henoko, Nago, in northern Okinawa. Eventually, in 2009, in the final days of the Aso Taro cabinet, with the Democratic Party on the eve of power, a hastily concluded bilateral agreement of Februry 9, 2009 committed Tokyo to carry out the 2006 relocation plan.

At midnight on April 22, 2011, the Japanese government designated the zone within a 20-kilometer radius of the Fukushima nuclear power plant a controlled area under the Basic Law for Disaster Countermeasures. As a result, all entry into the zone was prohibited without special government permission. Some 78,000 people were separated from their homes, without knowing when they might return.