Reacting to the publication of the US Nuclear Posture Review, Pyongyang in mid-April 2010 officially confirmed its own position on nuclear weapons: “As long as the U.S. nuclear threat persists, the DPRK will increase and update various type nuclear weapons as its deterrent in such a manner as it deems necessary in the days ahead”. Along with other countries, Russia, has to seriously question the viability of the two decades-old efforts for denuclearization of the neighboring country, with special accent on the relevance to the existing diplomatic framework. What is the purpose of the Six-Party talks and what are Russian goals in this exercise? The need to determine real options on the Korean peninsula is obvious. I believe the Russian strategy, coordinated through the Six-Party talks, of making the early denuclearization of North Korea a priority goal should be analyzed from the point of view of broader Russian interests vis-à-vis both the Korean Peninsula and global interaction with major partners, including the US, China, Japan and South Korea.

This is part two of a two part series.

For several days, the winds from the destroyed nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi crashed head on into the myth of the radioactive plume.

There are many other ways of spending time, but I find wandering around inside Fukushima Prefecture's supposedly sealed 20-kilometer “exclusion zone” has a special, although at times macabre, fascination.

Ostensibly for peaceful, non-military purposes, Japan has successfully launched its third intelligencegathering satellite as part of recently revved-up efforts to boost its defense capabilities, either on its own or with its closest ally, the United States.

Monday's launch of the new satellite from Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, came amid growing concern about the missile and nuclear programs of neighboring North Korea, which sparked an international uproar and heightened regional tensions about two months ago by test-firing a volley of ballistic missiles.

On September 21, 2006, a Tokyo District Court panel issued a sharp rebuke to nationalist politicians who seek to use the nation's public schools as tools to promote their romantic vision of Japan. The suit was filed on behalf of 401 Tokyo public school teachers in order to challenge an October 2003 order requiring them to stand before the Hinomaru flag and sing “Kimi ga Yo” at entrance and graduation ceremonies. The court not only found this order to be an unlawful violation of Japan's Fundamental Law of Education and the constitutional guarantee of “freedom of thought and conscience,” it also ordered the Tokyo Metropolitan government to pay each plaintiff 30,000 yen in compensation for emotional suffering.

This article examines US bombing of civilians—the logic, the technology, the consequences—from World War II through the Korean War, the Indochinese Wars.

Airpower embodies American technology at its most dashing. At regular intervals, the air force and allied technocrats claim that innovations in air technology herald an entirely new age of warfare. Korea and Vietnam were, so to speak, living laboratories for the development of new weapons: the 1,200-pound radio-guided Tarzon bomb (featured in Korean-era Movietone newsreels); white-phosphorous-enhanced napalm; cluster bombs (CBUs) carrying up to 700 bomblets, each bomblet containing 200 to 300 tiny steel balls or fiberglass fléchettes; delayed-fuse cluster bombs; airburst cluster bombs; toxic defoliants; varieties of nerve gas; sets of six B 52s, operating at altitudes too high to be heard on the ground, capable of delivering up to thirty tons of explosives each.

So much has happened to the Okinawan protest against the Futenma base relocation in the past 10 years: the formal and informal local resistance has been such that the new U.S. military sea base that was to replace Futenma Air Station has not been built. However, the election results in Okinawa continue to produce mayors and governors ready to accept relocation, largely for economic reasons. What explains this contradiction? How democratic have the local political processes regarding the base issue been? Miyagi Yasuhiro addresses these questions in a report, originally written for the research group Okinawa jizokuteki hatten kenkyukai (Sustainable Development in Okinawa Research Group, headed by Miyamoto Ken'ichi), which reflects on the ten years since the Nago referendum of 1997 on relocation of the US Marine Air Station from Futenma. The relocation proposal was rejected by a majority.

In late October 2007 an odd story appeared in the press. A Japanese-owned chemical tanker called the Golden Nori was hijacked off the coast of Somalia. There were no Japanese nationals on board, but the East Asian nation had become entangled, quite unusually, in an East African affair. Unforeseen at that time was that this curious incident would eventually become one of the top foreign policy issues in Tokyo: Somali piracy has emerged as a potential turning point for Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, and is significant for other reasons as well. The following essay reviews the record of Japanese encounters with Somali pirates and explores the motives and political pressures driving the Maritime Self-Defense Forces (MSDF) toward a proactive role in suppressing East African piracy.

From the centre of empire, the map of the rest of the world is largely blank, assumed either to be “just like us” and hence boring, or alternatively “not like us” and hence of marginal interest. Either way, the rest of the world is of little concern to those at the centre, at least until ugly blotches of “trouble spots” crack the surface glaze of imperial narcissism.

Officially received by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta at a ceremony on the Indonesian island of Bali on 15 July, the long awaited report of the joint Timor Leste-Indonesian Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF), set up in 2005, has received mixed reviews.

Attention in Japan and elsewhere has focused recently on the seaside village of Henoko (Ryukyuan: Hinuku) in northern Okinawa where a powerful protest movement has stymied the Japanese and U.S. governments from building an offshore air base. Attempting to ameliorate outrage in Okinawa after three U.S. servicemen raped a twelve-year-old schoolgirl in 1995, the governments in Tokyo and Washington announced an agreement in 1996 to close Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, located in the middle of Ginowan City. However, the agreement stipulated that a “replacement facility” be built in Okinawa “within five to seven years.” Yet, after more than fifteen years and numerous bi-lateral declarations reiterating the two governments’ determination to build the base, construction has yet to begin. In 2006 they announced a related agreement to transfer 8,600 of the 18,000 Marines in Okinawa and their 9,000 dependents to Guam, but this is conditioned on relocation of Futenma MCAS to Henoko and remains on hold.

The Fox-ification of the US media proceeds apace. In Italy, the country's media mogul doubles as Prime Minister. In Britain public broadcasting is under pressure from Blairite forces. Japan, the world's No 2 capitalist power, is left out of most discussion on global media trends, but is undergoing the same pressures. Allegations of political intervention to tailor the way the issue of “comfort women” in 1930s and 1940s Asia should be addressed in a 2001 documentary stirred a full scale media war in 2005.

The air turned chilly as the sun sighed into the nearby hills. It picked up the smells of dust mixed with metallic and dung flavours. Miss Phaeng watched, holding her breath as the last sliver of red fell out of sight. Casting a quick mantra to the spirits of nature, she swallowed a glass of lao lao to start the evening.

Three national newspapers and Nihon Keizai Shimbun headlined the death of playwright and preeminent Shakespeare translator Kinoshita Junji on December 1, 2006. This article considers the fate of his classic play Yuzuru (Twilight Crane), once condemned as “one-sided” (or “ideologically biased”) and inappropriate as teaching material, only to be resurrected a generation later. The article was published in Shukan Kinyobi on December 15, 2006, the same day that the Education Reform Bill passed the Upper House of the Diet.

Chinese fans subjected the Japanese team to intense booing at the Asia Cup Games held in China in August. They also made their disgust evident when Kimigayo, the Japanese anthem, was sung. Chinese fans vandalized Japanese Embassy cars in Beijing after the final match. These events sent shockwaves through Japan and the incidents were taken up by the foreign media.

The impact was not limited to the attention given to the radical actions of the Chinese fans by the Japanese media. Japan's China experts also categorized the violent behavior of the Chinese fans as a product of the nationalistic anti-Japanese education that young Chinese receive. Some like Professor Kojima Tomoyuki of Keio University harshly criticized China. “The anti-Japanese bias in their education has gone too far,” he wrote in The Asahi Shimbun of August 31, 2004. Television news and variety “Wideshow” Programs went as far as to assert that if China continues to drag politics into sports, it is not qualified to host the 2008 Olympics. An August 8 editorial of the Asahi Shimbun states, “[The actions of Chinese fans] at the final match between China and Japan gave us an opportunity to see the mindset of the Chinese who will be welcoming us at the Olympics in four years.”

The rebuilding of both a nuclear nonproliferation system and a framework for multilateral consultations in Asia toes the line of postwar Japanese foreign policy.

There is no denying that Japanese diplomacy is being tested by the threat of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. However, the problems of Japanese foreign policy lie not only outside Japan but also within.

One of the tragic ironies of the recent earthquake in China is that it has created numerous new, extremely dangerous dams in a country that already is the most dam-populated country on earth. At more than 85,000 dams and counting, Chinese leaders already boast of having the tallest dams, the largest by reservoir capacity, the dam with the highest ship lift, and the most powerful electricity producer. From arch dams, earthen dams, and gravity dams to cascade and concrete-faced rockfill dams, China has it all.