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.”

Japan's former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has repeatedly called for current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to make an explicit decision to get out of nuclear power. Koizumi's full-scale press conference on this matter, held on November 12 in front of 350 journalists, shook up the Abe cabinet. It continues to do so, judging by the tendentious commentary it continues to attract. Koizumi forced the cabinet to address an item they clearly wanted to finesse for the time being. But the substance of Koizumi's over hour-long event has not yet received the attention it merits. This article puts Koizumi's talk in context, showing that his position is shared by all the former Japanese prime ministers, including Nakasone Yasuhiro. Most important, contrary to the claim that Japan's choice is either gas or nuclear, Koizumi highlighted the ongoing deployment of radical efficiency and renewable energy as the proper path forward. And the accelerating rollout of smart cities across Japan suggests that Koizumi and his colleagues are standing on the right side of history.

From virtually the moment the ink dried on Japan's no-war Constitution of 1947, the United States and Japan's ruling party have sought to undermine the principle that the activities of Japan's Self-Defense Forces would be limited strictly to Japan's own defense. Maeda Tetsuo, a specialist on Japanese security, offers a detailed analysis of the threats to the Constitution that have intensified since September 11, 2001 with the intensification of efforts to mobilize the Self-Defense Forces both for regional policing and for direct support of U.S. war aims in the Middle East and Central Asia. The result, he concludes, is a fullscale military alliance with Japan preparing to undertake military actions at the U.S. behest in forthcoming wars. The article also analyzes the behavior of U.S. forces in Japan following 9-11, particularly the loss of Japanese sovereignty in U.S. bases. The article appeared in Gunshuku [Disarmament] 266 (December 2002): 6-11. This is the first of a series of articles on Japanese security and constitutional issues to be made available at Japan Focus.

On 13 August 2004, a U.S. Marine Corps transport helicopter crashed onto the campus of Okinawa International University, Ginowan City, injuring the three service members on board and sparking a large fire. Although the accident occurred on civilian soil, U.S. forces cordoned off the scene and blocked access to Japanese police investigators; according to some reports the only local representatives allowed through the blockade were delivery drivers bringing pizzas to the American MPs. That night, the national Japanese TV news networks either failed to cover the crash or afforded it scant attention.

More than a week after March 11, when northeastern Japan was hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 7-metre tsunami, the death toll remains unknown. It seems certain to exceed 20,000, as whole sections of some communities were washed out to sea. Search and rescue groups are grimly at work finding bodies alongshore and beneath the rubble and debris.

Selig Harrison originally visited North Korea in 1972, when he and Harrison Salisbury were the first independent or non-communist American journalists to visit since the Korean War. Mr. Harrison was also one of the first American experts to understand the strong grip of nationalism in North Korea, which he elucidated in his excellent 1978 book, The Widening Gulf: Asian Nationalism and American Policy. He now has more than 20 visits to Pyongyang under his belt, and his most recent book, Korean Endgame is a provocative call for American disengagement with Korea.

It also contains perhaps the best informed treatment that we have of the issues that have animated the confrontation between Washington and Pyongyang over the latter's nuclear program. With that stymied conflict now in its eighteenth year, it is no wonder that Mr. Harrison returned from his most recent visit with a suggestion that “benign neglect” of the nuclear issue might be the best among a narrowing list of American options.

Japanese space activity started in 1955. After fourteen years of rocket and satellite experimentation, space activity was initiated in such practical realms as weather forecasting and broadcasting. Scientific missions extending from the near-Earth region to deep space were organized by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), which was founded at Tokyo University in 1964. Other missions such as weather satellites, communication satellites, broadcasting satellites and environment monitoring satellites were managed mainly by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), which was established in 1969. The two organizations together with the National Aerospace Laboratory were merged to form the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2003. When NASDA was founded, the Diet unanimously adopted a resolution stating that Japan's space programs were exclusively for peaceful purposes, consistent with Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. The word “peaceful purposes” was strictly interpreted to mean that Japan could use and exploit space only for “non-military” purposes. Japan's “non-nuclear” policy was simultaneously proclaimed. The Diet resolution of 1969 established “the principle of peaceful use of space” as the bedrock of Japan's space policy. As discussed below, military space activity would infiltrate the space program despite the principle. Indeed, Japan would become the most active military partner of the U.S. with respect to so-called “missile defense” systems. Even the “non-nuclear” policy has been discarded in practice through official tolerance of entry into Japan of U.S. nuclear submarines and nuclear missiles. After two decades of inconsistency between “the Principle of peaceful use of space” and the reality of militarized space activity, the new Japanese space law enacted in 2008 lifted the ban on the use of space technology for military purposes.

In 1993, an onsen (hotspring) in the city of Otaru, Hokkaido, decided it had had enough of Russian sailors not following bathhouse rules. The managers put up signs saying “JAPANESE ONLY,” and refused entry to all foreigners.

Excluded people complained about this situation for years, but the Otaru city government ignored the situation. Although they admitted that this activity was discrimination, they maintained that they had no power to stop it. This was, after all, not specifically illegal in Japan, and they considered it “too early” to legislate against it.

In the 1930s and 40s, a young, politically precocious Noam Chomsky was much affected by the Great Depression and the slow, seemingly inexorable slide toward world war. The jingoism, racism and brutality unleashed on all sides were appalling, but it seemed to him from his home in Philadelphia that America had reserved a special level of animosity for the Japanese. When Washington ended a campaign of mass civilian slaughter from the air with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in the summer of 1945, the 16-year-old, deeply alienated by the celebrations around him, walked off into the local woods to mourn alone. “I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone's reaction,” he said. “I felt completely isolated.”

March 1 and May 4 are important dates in the calendars of South Korea and China as they respectively mark the anniversaries of popular uprisings in 1919 against Japanese imperialism.

In South Korea, the anniversary is observed with a commemorative ceremony in which the president delivers a speech.

This year, President Roh Moo-hyun remonstrated with Japan about its “mistaken glorification and justification of history” and demanded that it engage in sincere soul-searching on the issue. Last year, South Korea's Prime Minister Lee Hae Chan came under public criticism for skipping the ceremony to play golf and was forced to step down.

In two communities in Nagano Prefecture an increasing number of citizens are complaining of swollen lymph glands and muscle pain, and at the same time deformities are appearing in plants. The causes have not been clarified, but some people suspect that the electromagnetic waves from mobile phone base stations may be a factor.

This is the second of two paired articles which view the U.S.-Korean War through the lens not of great power conflict, or even of contending armies in a civil war, but from the perspective of its impact on Korean society in countryside and city, and the continuing traumas that remain unresolved sixty years late. The first article is

Japan's Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, determined to promote Japan as (in the words of his book) a “beautiful country,” whose school students will be taught to love it and whose citizens will be offered a version of its history in which they can take pride, finds himself in the incongruous position of sinking deeper and deeper into a shameful mire over his refusal to accept state responsibility for the mass mobilization of women for the sexual slave services for the Imperial Japanese Army during the Asian and Pacific wars to 1945.

The President of the Republic of Korea is unique as a politician in the media age, both in embracing the potential of the Internet and refusing to pander to the sound bite. He spends hours on-line each week promoting his vision of e-government. The website of the Cheong Wa Dae presidential residence, the Korean equivalent of the White House, features a picture of Roh typing away furiously at his laptop. Roh, who has authored a biography of Abraham Lincoln, on whom he models himself, and like Lincoln, crafts speeches of great intellectual complexity. Roh also sees himself as the leader of a nation divided between North and South, and fragmented within. He works on the assumption that concepts and ideals can transform a society.

[The chief of the Asahi shimbun's editorial board here draws attention to the cycle of reconciliation/repudiation, apology/assertion in Japan's attitudes towards Asia. He dubs this the “Law of Next Year,” meaning that the one is inevitably followed by the other.

Since the Six Party Beijing Agreement on North Korea of 13 February 2007, optimism has spread on all fronts save one – Japan. For the Abe government, nuclear weapons constitute only part of the North Korea problem. Indeed, as Wada Haruki notes below, for the Japanese government it is not nuclear weapons but the abduction problem that constitutes “the most important problem our country faces.”

The reverberations of the act of self-immolation next to Shinjuku Station on June 29, 2014 seem akin to the sound of one hand clapping. Japan's mass media reliably jumps all over any sensational story, but not this one. While not ignored, it was certainly not pursued, as the story of a man reciting an anti-war poem by Yosano Akiko, a national legend, before igniting himself in front of throngs on a Sunday afternoon at Tokyo's most crowded commuter station somehow failed to gain traction. It was a remarkable political statement without precedent in the Japan I have lived in since 1987 making the negligible coverage all the more newsworthy.

BANGKOK - Energy-hungry China has started to use the Mekong River as a new oil-shipping route, raising new environmental concerns that accidental spills could adversely affect the livelihoods of nearly 60 million downstream river dwellers and eventually evolve into a bone of diplomatic contention between Southeast Asian countries and China.