Three aging veterans of Japan's Imperial Army discuss their postwar commitment to peace activism in Japan and their current efforts to find young people willing to carry on their work as they confront their gradual decline and inevitable deaths. One veteran was incarcerated in a Chinese “re-education” camp for his war crimes against Chinese civilians, much like the veterans featured in the documentary film, Japanese Devils. Although neither of the other two veterans committed war crimes, each put himself through a soul-searching reevaluation of his loyalty to the Emperor and conviction that he had fought for a righteous cause. The three veterans share a deep commitment to speaking about the actual horrors of war and to preserving the testimony of other veterans who are slowly dying.

The August 15, 1945 announcement by the Japanese Emperor declaring Japan's intention to accept the Allied forces' terms of unconditional surrender sent Koreans throughout the empire into the streets in celebration. For the first time in decades they could freely associate with their fellow countrymen, communicate in their native language, and wave their national flag (taegeukgi) as Koreans without fear of punishment.[1]

It is a commonplace of recent writing on Japan that the Abe Shinzo government is in trouble. Yet comment on Abe's disastrous Upper House election of July and on his subsequent cabinet reorganization of August, with few exceptions, ignores Okinawa, the prefecture where the burden of the reorganized US-Japan alliance is heaviest, the veneer of Abe “reformism” thinnest, popular discontent deepest, and the consequences of failure potentially most serious.

For more than three decades, historical memory controversies have been fought over Japanese school textbook content in both the domestic and international arenas. In these controversies, Japanese textbook contents, which are subject to Ministry of Education examination and revision of content and language prior to approval for use in the public schools, repeatedly sparked denunciations by Chinese and Korean authorities and citizens with respect to such issues as the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, and coerced labor. In 2007, the most intense controversy has pitted the Ministry of Education against the residents and government of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. The issue exploded in March 2007 with the announcement that all references to military coercion in the compulsory mass suicides (shudan jiketsu) of Okinawan residents during the Battle of Okinawa were to be eliminated. The announcement triggered a wave of anger across Okinawan society leading to the mass demonstration in Ginowan City of 110,000 Okinawans addressed by the top leadership of the Prefecture. It was the largest demonstration since the 1972 reversion of Okinawa, exceeding even the response to the 1995 rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl by three US GIs.

TOKYO - It's not the fictional Super X project, designed to defend Tokyo, in the Godzilla movie series. It's a real project designed to shield Japan - the capital first and other parts of the country later - from a real threat.

Conspicuous of late, in light of this historical moment that marks forty years since the ‘restitution’ of the rights to administrative control over Okinawa from the United States to Japan, have been media special reports which, be they designed for publication in print or for broadcast over the airwaves, have featured in their titles the phrase ‘Fukki 40 Nen [40 Years Since Reversion]’. There are, however, no few individuals in Okinawa who harbor a certain hostility to the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, this word ‘reversion’ is deployed without being bracketed in quotation marks, as if it represented a simple matter of fact.

It was once a family house in this northeastern corner of Miyagi Prefecture. Mum would have cooked dinner on the kitchen stove. Children may have played video games in the front room, facing the Pacific Ocean. Now all that's left of the house is its bare concrete base and a few scattered belongings: the shreds of a kimono and a child's schoolbag.

In the wake of the DPJ landslide victory and the first decisive defeat of a reigning Japanese government in more than half a century, attention has focused on two signature issues of the Hatoyama administration:

• The U.S-Japan and China-Japan Relations and the possibility of a more independent Japanese foreign policy.

• The critique of neoliberalism and the possibility of economic and social policies more effectively addressing Japan's troubled economy and growing intra-societal divisions.

Less attention has been paid to environmental issues and their intersect with policies associated with the construction state pioneered by the Liberal Democratic Party over half a century. Yet these policies also have profound implications for Japan's economic future.

While much of Japan was enjoying the extended holiday of Golden Week this year, supporters of Article 9, the war-renouncing clause of Japan's constitution, were hard at work. The first Global Article 9 Conference to Abolish War drew 15,000 people to its plenary session and concert outside of Tokyo on May 4th, while 7,000 gathered on May 5th to participate in a day of symposiums and workshops. The crowds far surpassed the expectations of the organizers, who hastily staged an ad hoc rally in a nearby park for several thousand people who were unable to get into the main arena on the first day.

We are now facing a critical situation. Not just Japan, but the world as a whole is in crisis. With America at the center, globalization is racing ahead, but there are also strong countercurrents with nationalism becoming stronger in various places. In the midst of war and terror, the threat of global warming is becoming clear to all. In this world, I believe that we should advance toward regionalism. In 2003 I hoisted this flag in a book entitled The Common House of Northeast Asia — Declaration of a New Regionalism published by Heibonsha.

One of Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's first public acts, in September, was to propose a 25% cut in the country's carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, relative to 1990 levels. This forthright declaration from Japan, long a laggard in dealing with climate change, captured world attention in the fraught lead-up to the December 7 to 12 Copenhagen meeting. The Obama people may yet fail to deliver, but unlike the Bushies they won't have a slavish Japan backing them up. Hatoyama's policy announcement has also earned the wrath of Japan's emissions-intensive industries, hitherto largely left to design their own voluntary agreements. They and their allies in the media and academe insist there is no hope for achieving such a cut without ruining the economy.

The spectacular advancement in the peace process during 2007 (the six-party talks and the U.S.-DPRK talks as well as increasing North-South cooperation), progress in solving the nuclear issue (at least partly) and in normalization of the DPRK's relations with the West bring to the fore the question of the DPRK's future course. Provided hostility diminishes and its external security is guaranteed, will the country seize the chance to modernize and prosper, integrating into today's world?

Since the mid 1990s, Japan's neonationalist forces have made important gains: in education, culture and politics, as manifested notably in the activation of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and the popularity of the best-selling comic book Sensoron (On War) by cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori.

Japanese historical revisionists have contrasted their approach with what they term the ‘Tokyo Trial view of history’ and the ‘masochistic view of history’. These revisionists regard as ‘masochistic’ any characterisation of Japan's military advances in Asia during the pre-World War II period as an ‘invasion’. And they claim a ‘spell’ lingering from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (‘Tokyo Tribunal’) underlies this ‘masochistic view of history’. Arguing that the Tokyo Tribunal created and disseminated a false perception of the Greater East Asia War as ‘the war in which the liberal Allies defeated a fascist Japan’, the revisionists hold that denouncing and rejecting the Tribunal is the key to shaking off this ‘masochistic view of history’.

Tadao Ando, one of Japan's greatest living
architects, likes to tell the
story of the stray dog, a stately akita, that
wandered into his studio in
Osaka some 20 years ago, and decided to stay.
“First, I thought I would
call her Kenzo Tange; but then I realised I
couldn't kick Kenzo Tange
around. So I called her Le Corbusier instead.”

July 9 was the final day of Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's historic and surreal 3-day visit to Australia. He and Australia's climate-denialist Prime Minister Tony Abbott jetted together to Rio Tinto's West Angelas iron ore mine in the western Pilbara region, five hours away from the Australian capital of Canberra and home to earth's oldest rocks and evidence of life. Rio Tinto had arranged a “money shot,” putting the two leaders atop an enormous, and automated, Komatsu 930E dump truck.

Debilitated by nearly 20 years of rising debt levels, stagnation, mismanagement and lack of direction, Japan faces an economic crisis of almost unprecedented severity. Considerably worse than the US (and worst in the post-war period, according to Economic and Fiscal Policy Minister Yosano Kaoru), it is matched by a no less severe political crisis. Even before Finance Minister, Nakagawa Shoichi, gave the incoherent, alcohol-driven performance at the Rome G7 Finance Ministers' meeting that cost him his job, the Aso government's support level in the polls was down to 14 per cent [1]. Since then it has obviously fallen further, by some accounts already to around the nine percent record low of Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro in 2001.

Japan's Yasukuni problem is inseparable from the fact that nationalism is the dominant ideology of our era. This is abundantly clear in media representations, memorials, museums and popular consciousness during and after wars and other international conflicts. [*] This is true not only of Japan but also of South Korea, China and the US, among many others. And it is surely nationalism—stimulated and emboldened throughout Asia following the end of the era of US-Soviet confrontation, the rise of China as a regional and world power, and aggressive US actions associated with the “war on terror”—that constitutes the most powerful obstacle to resolution of the issues that divide nations and inflame passions in the Asia Pacific and beyond. Throughout the twentieth century, nationalism has everywhere been the handmaiden of war: war has provided a powerful stimulus to nationalism; nationalism has repeatedly led nations to war; and war memory is central to framing and fueling nationalist historical legacies. This article considers Yasukuni Shrine and Japanese war memory and representation in relationship to contemporary nationalism and its implications for the future of East Asia.

In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military,” whom New York Times' columnist William Safire soon branded “creeps”–a line that few in the press had reason to challenge.

Tokyo Shimbun, which many regard as one of the few Japanese newspapers that honestly report what is going on at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, ran an important article yesterday, drawing on their own investigative interview with NISA, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, a division of METI, Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Here is a translation of the report. This is a critical article that calls for further investigation, particularly in the wake of PM Noda's “Cold Shutdown” declaration concerning which questions have been raised by experts and international media (See New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN, Xinhua). According to Geoff Brumfiel at Nature: “the reactors are leaking, and TEPCO must continue to inject water at the rate of around half-a-million litres a day, according to its latest press release. Moreover, the plant continues to pose an environmental risk, as evidenced by a recent leak from a system designed to decontaminate water flowing out from the core.” Bloomberg quotes reactor safety expert Narabayashi Tadashi: “Achieving cold shutdown does not change the condition of the reactors. It does mean the government will start reviewing evacuation zones and perhaps lifting restrictions depending on extent of contamination.” He also emphasises that “Work on decommissioning is a long way off. For now, they have to focus on making robots to remove melted fuel and developing new technologies to demolish facilities.” With work on bringing Fukushima Daiichi under control far from over, despite the Japanese government's self-congratulatory tone in the “Cold Shutdown” announcement, Tokyo Shimbun's exposé on the lack of official concern for radiocative water leaks seems particularly important. Even if the situation at the plant itself is improving, honest reporting is absolutely necessary as Japan moves from control to clean-up. Here again, Japanese regulators and politicians seem to be falling short.

By now it has surely dawned on Japan's political establishment, eager for issues of Japanese war accountability to fade away, that appointing Aso Taro to the post of foreign minister last fall was a major mistake. While Aso's provocative comments about Japanese imperialism and war conduct predated his tenure as the nation's top diplomat, the historical record of forced labor in Japan by Asians and Allied POWs is being newly thrust into the media spotlight.

Thousands of Korean labor conscripts were exploited for dangerous work in the northern Kyushu coalfields owned by Aso Mining Company between 1939 and 1945. Most Korean forced laborers never received the wages they earned; the money was deposited in the national treasury after the war and remains there today. The Aso family's coal profits helped bankroll the rise of the dominant political figure in early postwar Japan, Yoshida Shigeru, who was prime minister when Aso Mining and scores of other Japanese corporations quietly deposited the unpaid wages of some 700,000 Korean labor conscripts. Yoshida was also Aso Taro's grandfather.