This is a revised, updated and abbreviated version of the introduction to the two volume collection by the authors of Pan-Asianism. A Documentary History Vol. 1 covers the years 1850-1920; Vol. 2 covers the years 1850-present, link.

The economic and political power of Asia, the world's largest continent, is increasing rapidly. According to the latest projections, the gross domestic products of China and India, the world's most populous nations, will each surpass that of the United States in the not-too-distant future. China's economy, like Japan's, is already larger than that of any single European country. With this new economic might comes growing diplomatic influence. The twenty-first century, many pundits agree, will be an Asian century. This undisputed Asian success story, together with its accompanying tensions and discontents, has attracted much media and scholarly attention. Yet for all this talk of Asia, there is no consensus on what Asia actually stands for as a whole. Is the vast Asian landmass a single entity? There has never been—and perhaps never will be—universal agreement on this question.

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s prodded open the archival doors of once closed regimes releasing interesting information on Soviet-North Korean-Chinese relations during the Cold War. Documents released from these archives contributed new evidence to enrich our understanding of old questions. One such question concerns the origins of the Korean War. Documents from these archives demonstrate an active correspondence between the three communist leaders in Northeast Asia—Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il Sung—regarding the planning and orchestration of this war fought primarily among the two Korean states, the United States, and China. This new evidence has encouraged scholars to reformulate fundamental views of this war, particularly its place in Cold War history.

In 1995, when Chinese victims of forced labor in wartime Japan began filing compensation lawsuits in Japanese courts, the elderly plaintiffs and their supporters were well aware that the legal path to justice would be neither fast nor smooth. Eleven years on, Chinese forced labor lawsuits against the Japanese state and private corporations have resulted in four court-ordered compensation awards. All are now under appeal, and there have been two court-mediated financial settlements. Even in decisions rejecting the Chinese claims due to statutes of limitations and state immunity, moreover, Japanese judges routinely rule that brutal forced labor in fact occurred. And some suggest that the government could pass legislation establishing a national compensation fund.

Japan seems on the verge of a second defeat. The March 11 magnitude 9.0 East Japan earthquake shoved the entire country 2 metres and brought even more mayhem in a tsunami that wrecked whole communities and snatched away the lives of thousands. Now we see 100,000 troops from the Self-Defense forces dispatched to rescue operations amidst the pall rising from massively damaged nuclear reactors. Radioactivity is drifting out to sea and over the surrounding prefectures, poisoning farm produce and forcing restrictions on their shipment and sale. The crisis has extended even to drinking water in the capital of Tokyo. The scale of disasters evokes embedded memories of the cusp of postwar reconstruction, the moment when rebuilding economy and society was about to harness prodigious resources and time.

Many Japanese and long-time Japan observers have expressed dismay about the recrudescence of self-righteous nationalism under PM Abe Shinzo who has emboldened rightwing extremists now threatening democratic institutions, civil liberties and Japan's relations with its neighbors.

In March and April 1948 Koreans across Japan rose up in protest after the Japanese government began to enforce an order handed down to them by the American Occupation administration to close Korean ethnic schools. One such protest took place in Kobe on April 24 when Koreans stormed the Hyogo Prefecture offices in an attempt to get the governor to rescind the order to close the four Korean ethnic schools in the prefecture. American and Japanese administrations reacted harshly to the Korean actions. Police arrested thousands of Koreans and inflicted stiff penalties on the incident's leaders. As was often the case, the Occupation administration misinterpreted Korean intention to keep the schools open as a leftist attempt to disrupt U.S. occupations in Korea and Japan. Here the incident is examined through the eyes of one Occupation employee, Elizabeth Ryan, a 31-year old court reporter who included detailed information on the incident and its participants in personal letters that she sent to her family in the United States.

When I heard the sudden news of the death of North Koreans leader Kim Jong-il,I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. Since his miracle recovery from the 2008 stroke, he had been busy travelling in and outside North Korea. Both he and others around him would have been concerned about his health, and also prepared for this moment. His death must have been such a huge regret for Kim himself, who was single-mindedly focusing on keeping his public promise to open a ‘big gate’ for a ‘powerful and prosperous Korea’ by the 100th anniversary of the birth of his father, Kim Il- song in 2012. As one Japanese who has been hoping for normalization of Japan-North Korea relations for the last 10 years, I could not but grieve over the death of the leader of our neighbouring country, who, more than anyone else, hoped to realise this goal. The Japanese government and people have lost their best chance to achieve normalization. The last decade has now become a lost decade.

Governments come and go in Japan, Noda Yoshihiko's the most recent, being the third since the general elections of 30 August 2009 brought the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to power, following those of Hatoyama Yukio and Kan Naoto. In the weeks following his assumption of office, Noda has stated his core vision for the office on many occasions, including his inaugural Diet speech as Prime Minister on 13 September. He promises to confirm, deepen, and strengthen the alliance with the US, “the axis of Japan foreign policy and security.” That means, above all else, he will construct the base for the Marine Corps in northern Okinawa designed to substitute for the Futenma base that squats dangerously in the middle of the township of Ginowan.

On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, it dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These nuclear weapons killed over 200,000 people, almost all civilians, and injured many more.

On Tuesday morning, June 20, 2006, a Roman Catholic priest and two veterans were arrested at a nuclear missile silo in North Dakota. Fr. Carl Kabat, 72, Greg Boertje-Obed, 51, and Michael Walli, 57, sit in jail in North Dakota awaiting a federal criminal trial because of weapons of mass destruction and because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The always contentious, sometimes highly emotional, debate over D.T. Suzuki's relationship to Japanese fascism continues unabated. Among other things this is shown by reader reactions to a recent article in Japan Focus entitled “Zen as a Cult of Death in the Wartime Writings of D.T. Suzuki”. This debate can only intensify by the further assertion of a wartime relationship between D.T. Suzuki and the Nazis or, more precisely, a positive or sympathetic relationship between Suzuki and the Nazis. This article, in two parts, will explore that possibility though conclusive proof of such a relationship will not be included until the second part.

In this three part series, we introduce historical museums in Japan and their role in public education. Following this introduction to peace museums, Ms. Nishino Rumiko, a founder of the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), introduces WAM's activities and the 2000 Citizens Tribunal on the ‘comfort women’. The final article is by Mr. Kim Yeonghwan, the former associate director of Grassroots House Peace Museum who describes the peace and reconciliation programs that the Museum sponsors.

The increasingly fierce competition between Japan and China over energy and political influence is spilling over into Africa.

Following in the footsteps of Beijing, Tokyo has recently begun to turn to the continent as a new source of oil. Meanwhile, the leaders of the two Asian neighbors have recently made whirlwind tours of Africa.

Buried beneath the heaps of hot words on North Korea's nuclear test, the announcement in Moscow on Monday about the Shtokman natural-gas deposit off Russia's Arctic coast almost escaped attention, despite its comparable lethal fallout in world politics.

More than six months after dozens of rusty chemical barrels were unearthed from former U.S. military land in Okinawa City, their contents have been identified - and they appear to offer conclusive proof that the toxic Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange was buried on the island.

Announced in early July, the results of two separate studies - one conducted by Okinawa City and one by the Okinawa Defense Bureau - both detected the three signature components of Agent Orange: the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D as well as highly-toxic TCDD dioxin.

On 6 June 2008, the Ainu were recognized as an indigenous people. A new set of policies was promised for Autumn 2009 in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This article offers a major review of this policy-making process. It contends that because of the nature of the UN Declaration, the structure of contemporary Japanese politics, and the recommendations of concerned bodies of “experts”, the result has merely been an incorporation of the Ainu within the remit of contemporary neoliberal politics. Taking its inspiration from the writings of the 1970s Ainu poet and thinker, Sasaki Masao, it argues that the time has surely come to ask just why Ainu are repeatedly construed as being somehow in need of “protection”, “aid” and “respect.” and whether or not alternative ways of thinking about Ainu history and politics are possible.

I’m staring at a blank white screen that awaits my text, but to type feels like a violation. What can be added to the sheer luminous emptiness in light (in the impossible violence of light) of the cataclysm of Hiroshima 1945? By taking on the incomprehensible destruction wrought by the atomic bomb in her book After Hiroshima, artist elin o’Hara slavick faces a void of annihilation that transcends expression, and yet, with meticulous care and consciousness, she produces photographic exposures that illuminate the unspeakable. Through works of troubling beauty, slavick enacts a temporal rupture, unearthing a moment that has been relegated to the historical past by saying, with stark but quiet clarity, that Hiroshima 1945 is not over.

When Miyazawa Kenji was writing his stories and poems nearly a century ago, Japan was a country with a two-pronged mission: to become the first non-white, non-Christian nation to create a modern prosperous state — and to be the leader of an Asian revival.

The Japanese people were obsessed with their cultural identity and their place, as an imperial power, among the first rank of nations in the world. It was an obsession that would lead them to prosecute an aggressive and brutal war in Asia and the Pacific.

President Xi Jinping's call for a “new type of great-power relationship” in meetings in 2013 with President Obama raises important questions about the future of US-China relations. On the surface, it appeared that the two leaders were on the same page. At the June summit, Obama agreed with Xi that “working together cooperatively” and bringing US-China relations “to a new level” were sound ideas. When the G-20 countries convened at St. Petersburg in September, Obama said of Xi's proposed new model: “we agreed to continue to build a new model of great power relations based on practical cooperation and constructively managing our differences.” But he added that “significant differences and sources of tension” remain with China, implying that China's “playing a stable and prosperous and peaceful role” in world affairs remained a matter of US concern.