The phrase ‘sixty years of the post-war’ is often used to mean ‘60 years since the end of the war’ or ‘these past sixty years’. However, the term ‘post-war’ itself is premised on a ‘pre-war’ and a ‘wartime’. In other words, prior to the sixty years of post-war, there is the disjuncture between ‘post-war’, on the one hand, and ‘pre-war’ and ‘wartime’ on the other. For me, it is this experience of disjuncture that is the starting point of ‘post-war’.

Nakazawa Keiji, atomic bomb survivor, peace activist, and creator of the famed Hiroshimathemed manga Barefoot Gen passed away on December 19, 2012 after a long struggle with cancer. He was 73. Asia-Pacific Journal Coordinators Yuki Tanaka and Satoko Norimatsu offer their memories of Nakazawa and thoughts on his life and work.

QUESTION: Choose the correct statement about Korea under Japanese rule.

1. 1) A government-general was established and Ito Hirobumi was the first governor-general.

2. 2) Korea was the first foreign territory acquired by Japan after the Meiji Restoration.

3. 3) The system of giving Koreans Japanese names was implemented at the time of annexation.

4. 4) Koreans were forcibly transported to Japan during World War II.

Over the last two decades, Japanese popular culture products have been massively exported, marketed, and consumed throughout East and Southeast Asia. A wide variety of these products are prominently displayed in the region's big cities. Many Hong Kong fashion journals, for example, can be found in either the original Japanese or Cantonese versions. Japanese manga are routinely translated into the local languages of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, and China, and they dominate East Asia's comic book market. The Japanese animated characters Hello Kitty, Ampan Man, and Poke'mon are ubiquitous, depicted on licensed and unlicensed toys and stationary items in the markets of every Asian city. Japanese animation, usually dubbed, is the most popular in its field, particularly in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Astro Boy, Sailor Moon, and Lupin are animated characters seen in almost every shop that sells anime in Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. In China's big cities, too, Japanese popular culture products fill local stores, opening doors into the country's expanding cultural market, though in some markets they also face stiff competition from Korean and Chinese products. The success of Japanese popular culture in East and Southeast Asia has occasioned a flood of academic writing, notably in the fields of cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnography. The majority of works have focused on particular examples, emphasizing the reaction of audiences to cultural exposure in relation to the global-local discourse (Allison 2006; Craig 2000; Ishii 2001; Iwabuchi 2004; Martinez 1998; Mori 2004; Otake and Hosokawa 1998; Treat 1996). These studies consist of specific case studies with a strong tendency to privilege the text and its representational practices. No single study has yet comprehensively assessed the newly created Japanese cultural markets in East and Southeast Asia, nor framed these issues within a regional paradigm.

On June 29, 2014 a man set himself on fire in Tokyo to protest PM Abe Shinzo's bid to lift constitutional constraints on Japan's military forces and in subsequent days tens of thousands of citizens gathered outside the prime minister's residence to loudly protest this initiative. Opinion polls, even those conducted by reliably rightwing news organizations, indicate widespread opposition to his renunciation of pacifism and very little support for collective self-defense (CSD).

What Japan can teach Americans and the world about financial crises is a question that has been cropping up for some time. References to Japan in fact appear to be increasing, with a recent turn to worries of “becoming Japanese” through a decade or so lost to malaise and marginal growth, perhaps interspersed with bouts of financial panic. Heralding this Japanization is America's seeming onset of deflation and a liquidity trap in tandem with a virtually zero interest rate policy. These developments have largely eroded American policy options on the financial side. In Japan, this impotent, “pushing on a string” stage of the post-bubble shakeout left the state sector largely moribund, especially after it vainly tried to spend its way out of the crisis. It remains to be seen whether the US, under Obama, will pursue an effective fiscal policy or repeat this year's tax rebates, the equivalent of simply throwing money in a hole. This commentary reviews the highlights of our current crisis as well as what we can learn from Japan and whether we are, in fact, learning from Japan.

On October 2007 I peered from a window of a Boeing 737 approaching Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), pulled out my professional camera and began snapping photos of the enormous bay which serves as a missile range for the US star wars program. Kwaj island is rimmed by rotting metal pieces (whatever they are), dotted with huge radar installations, missile interceptors and who the hell knows what else?

After landing, I was taken to the military checkpoint. My hand luggage had to be left on the floor; a dog sniffed at it; a policewoman explained security regulations; outrageous military propaganda posters decorated the walls. The small and humble immigration checkpoint of the Marshall Islands was humbly stuck in a corner of the room. I had a hard time explaining that I was actually traveling to Ebeye, a small island 4 miles away, a place that provides cheap labor to the US military base, a place of misery - an over-populated and desperate byway of the Marshall Islands.

Prime Minister Aso Taro's admission that his family company employed prisoner-of-war labor during the final months of World War II may one day be seen as a milestone in Japan's struggle to contend with its own national history. In response to persistent questioning by an opposition lawmaker on the floor of the national parliament on January 6, Aso acknowledged the truth of recent disclosures of POW work at the Aso Mining Company in 1945.

[The Tokyo war crimes trial (International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946-1948) was the Pacific counterpart to the first Nuremberg Tribunal. Controversial at the time, it is more controversial today. This essay reminds American readers of differences in assessing the trial in the victorious and in the defeated countries, as well as within a single country such as Japan.

This essay explores representations of Japanese imperialism and war in museums of the People's Republic of China. With the post-Mao reforms, there has been a general trend in such representations toward an emphasis on atrocity and victimization and away from the narratives of heroic resistance that dominated in the Mao era. Yet, the museum curators in these museums must negotiate between these two representations in trying to make the war relevant to a young audience generally more attracted to the pleasures of popular culture than history museums.

For some of us in the China-watching business (I have been there for more than 40 years), there has always been a China “threat.” It began with the 1950-53 Korean civil war, which initially had nothing to do with China.

Indeed, if any outside power was involved in North Korea's attack on its rival government in the South, it was the Soviet Union, not China. The Communist regime in Beijing had just come to power after a protracted civil war with the rival Kuomintang (KMT) regime. Its troops were being moved to the south of the country, far from Korea, in preparation for the final attack on the KMT enemy which had fled to Taiwan.

Of the many gifted directors within Japanese animation, arguably the most imaginative and certainly the most prolific is Miyazaki Hayao. Miyazaki's works over the last three decades have consistently dealt with catastrophe on both a personal and a universal level, often focusing on young people and their reactions to a devastated world. This paper examines the treatment of disaster in the films, concentrating particularly on his most recent film Gake no ue no Ponyo, (Ponyo). Ponyo is discussed in the context both of Miyazaki's general treatment of disaster and in relation to the tsunami of March 11.

By some accounts, the location of America's capital was decided at a secret dinner party that Thomas Jefferson held in 1790 at his New York City residence. There, through the age-old practice of logrolling, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton hatched a plan to build the nation's capital in Virginia. “Madison agreed to permit the core provision of Hamilton's fiscal program to pass; and in return, Hamilton agreed to use his influence to assure that the permanent residence of the national capital would be on the Potomac River” (Ellis 2001, 49).

This chapter by Ito Peng and Joseph Wong on East Asian Asian welfare regimes is very welcome, particularly as a guide for what to watch in our increasingly fluid era of financial, energy and other shocks to the developed and developing economies. The authors review the literature on East Asian welfare states and show how much of it has been concerned with highlighting essential differences between the region and a generalized model of what we see in North America, Europe, and Scandinavia. (We might add that generalizing among those latter cases also seems unwise). One of the critically distinctive features of the East Asian welfare state typology was and remains the rather restricted fiscal role of the state. As the authors point out, in 2005 Japan led East Asia with 18.6% of GDP devoted to social spending. But the average in the OECD and EU countries was, respectively, 20.5 and 27%. Taiwan and Hong Kong are even further removed from the OECD pattern. During the mid-2000s they were only spending about 10% of GDP on social outlays. And then there is Korea, China, and Singapore weighing in with less than 7% of GDP spent on social outlays. The issues are particularly fascinating in light of the literature on the developmental state, pioneered by the late Chalmers Johnson, which highlights each of these countries as examples of state intervention in charting economic development.

Upon my inauguration in February 2003, I laid out three major national policy goals: Establishment of participatory democracy, balanced development of society, and the opening of a new era for a peaceful and prosperous Northeast Asia. This third objective has served as the backbone of my government's foreign policy – an attempt to build a Northeast Asian community through a new regional order of cooperation and integration that transcends old antagonisms and conflicts among countries in this region. I believe this policy is vital in ensuring our survival and enhancing our prosperity.

Six decades have passed since the end of the Pacific and East Asian War and the collapse of the Japanese colonial empire, but responsibility for colonialism, war, and their accompanying atrocities, continues to agitate Japan and East Asia. It is widely believed that Japan refuses to apologize or face the truth of history, much less compensate victims. Such a belief is, however mistaken, although it is true that it took five decades before any such steps were taken and the adequacy of the steps taken has been debated and continues to be debated.

Former Defense Ministry analyst Maeda Hisao warns of the emergence of a national warfare state and the further decimation of the provisions of Japan's peace constitution. He targets for criticism two Koizumi administration documents: The Defense White Paper of summer 2002 and the War Contingency Bills currently tabled for debate in the legislature. Maeda critiques the transformation of Japan's “self-defense” policy into one of aggressive “pre-emptive defense” as its defense perimeter is extended far beyond the Japanese islands. In contrast to the careful legislative analysis of Maeda Tetsuo (also available at Japan Focus), this manifesto by a former military establishment insider offers a blunt criticism of Japanese leaders. While warning of the consequences of an aggressive Japanese defense posture, the author, like a number of other SDF insiders, is equally critical of the consequences of the usurpation of the autonomy of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, that is, its subordination to American global military designs. From Gunshuku (Disarmament) in November, 2002.

At the centenary of Japan's Annexation of the Korean Empire in August 2010, speculation centered on whether Japan could achieve a radical departure from its traditional foreign policy of ‘Datsu-A Nyu-Ou’, namely leaving Asia to become a Western style country. This policy, resulted in Japan's colonization of Korea in August 1910 and led further to the invasion of China and other Asian nations, ending in Japan's utter defeat in August 1945.

It is a troubled Time for NATO's campaign against Libya. President Obama has seen a near-revolt in Congress against the costly war, while Defense Secretary Gates in Brussels has warned his European allies that their tepid response “is putting the Libya mission and the alliance's very future at risk.” Back home, according to the London Daily Mail, “Mr Gates has requested extra funds for Libya operations, but has been rebuffed by the White House.”