In 2010, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) launched a highly successful TV show called The Gruen Transfer. The title refers to the disorienting psychological effects produced on consumers by the architecture of shopping malls, whose dazzle and noise are deliberately designed to mesmerize: on entering, “our eyes glaze over, our jaws slacken… we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers”. The ABC's Gruen Transfer explored the weird, wonderful and disorienting effects produced by the advertising industry. Its most popular element was a segment called “The Pitch”, in which representatives of two advertising agencies competed to sell the unsellable to the show's audience - creating gloriously sleek videos to market bottled air, promote the virtues of banning religion, or advocate generous pay raises for politicians.

A free trade agreement is one form of trading bloc, a preferential economic arrangement amongst a group of countries that reduces barriers to trade. Trading blocs have emerged as the most debated topic in world trade. While countries around the world are making efforts to harmonize interests through trading blocs, these groupings are also emblematic of difficulties associated with the current global trading system under the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote Enduring Legacies: Economic Dimensions of Restoring North Korea's Environment. This essay not only described a set of urgent environmental problems in North Korea, but also described its institutional and legal framework for environmental management. At the time, I had no idea that so many years would pass with no improvement in North Korea's situation. It has actually become far worse than I could then imagine. In 1994, I led a UN mission charged with helping North Korea to compile its first greenhouse gas emissions inventory for its national report under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which North Korea had signed. Part of the justification for providing Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding for greenhouse gas reduction projects in North Korea was the creation of other benefits such as biodiversity. For this reason, I was looking into reforestation in North Korea as a way to capture carbon from the air as a way to preserve and restore biodiversity. I was talking over dinner with the head of North Korea's biodiversity program about such a project. He offered to pour me a shot of liquor from a bottle containing a snake. I demurred but he insisted, saying the snake liquor for public sale was low grade whereas this one — a snake with a diamond head not a square one — was the real thing, made from a rare and endangered species!

So often, Okinawan voices go unheard outside of Okinawa. So often, probing TV documentaries on such sensitive issues as the Battle of Okinawa or on Okinawa-Japan-U.S. relations are shown once and archived, never to return to public view. So often, even if they are broadcast outside of Okinawa, they are aired at odd times. This was the fate of this documentary on Oura Bay, which TV Asahi scheduled at 2:40 a.m., but it deserves the attention of more than a few night owls. The documentary, “Nerawareta Umi: Okinawa, Oura-wan - Maboroshi no gunko keikaku 50 nen” (The Targeted Sea - A 50-year Unrealized Plan for a Military Port in Oura Bay, Okinawa), was produced by QAB (Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting) and broadcast in the first week of October 2009. This program reveals the little-known fact that the plan to build a large-scale U.S. military complex in Oura Bay, including a military port, was initiated as early as the mid-1960s. Oura Bay is located on the northeastern shore of Okinawa Island, adjacent to USMC Camp Schwab and Cape Henoko, where the U.S. and Japanese governments are planning to build the controversial “replacement facility” for the Futenma Air Station. While it is widely believed that this facility is being built as a substitute for the dangerous Marine airbase in a crowded residential area of Ginowan City, the evidence disclosed here confirms that the U.S. aims to take advantage of this opportunity to close an obsolete base and build (for the most part at Japanese expense) the brand-new military complex that it has sought to build since the 1960s.

In 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer declared, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” after he witnessed the first nuclear explosion under the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His statement, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita, displayed his own apprehensions with helping to create weapons capable of overwhelming destruction Almost 60 years later, Los Alamos, located in northern New Mexico, once again stands at a major crossroads in nuclear weapons development, but this time around lab officials do not openly harbor the same reservations as Oppenheimer. In fact, Los Alamos, in its own entrenched institutional interest, has been driving drastic changes in national nuclear weapons policy. Now that Bush has been reelected and Congress has drifted farther right, these troublesome developments are sure to continue.

With the recent ethnic riots in France, The Economist (London) ran a thoughtful article (“Minority Reports”) on their causes. It posed an important question: Why are some countries able to assimilate immigrants and their children more peacefully than others? It took a stab at comparing “integrationist” vs. “assimilationist” public policies in France, England, Germany, Holland, and the United States.

The United States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s deterrence theory worked—nations knew that if they used the awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant and the equations of military power that existed in the period after World War Two no longer hold.

[This article illuminates the geopolitical background and implications of the continuing Russia-Ukranian gas dispute whose reverberations extend across Western Europe and beyond. Many market analysts regarded Russian President Vladimir Putin's early January decision to threaten cutting gas supplies to the Ukraine (and by extension, Europe) as insane. The business press filled with claims that Putin was shooting himself in the foot and that he had embarrassed Russia just as it was slated to assume leadership of the G-8 in January (on a platform of energy security, no less!).

Global climate change is profoundly reshaping the Arctic region, not only physically but also in international politics. Yet Arctic development is of concern to more than the Circumpolar states. The issues are global, and East Asia is no exception. Japan, South Korea and China in particular have been increasingly deepening their involvement in Arctic affairs. The evolving situation of the Arctic region could also have significant impact on political relations and the regional security architecture in East Asia, providing new opportunities for cooperation and additional sources of conflict. This paper considers security implications of the Arctic thaw to East Asia, where the structure of the regional Cold War confrontation profoundly shapes the geopolitical order to this day.

A recent Bloomberg article and New York Times op-ed provide important and rarely reported historical perspectives on the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a maritime border drawn in the West (Yellow) Sea that has been disputed for decades by North and South Korea after it was imposed by the US following the end of the Korean War. As is now well known, on Nov. 23 North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong, one of five islands near the NLL controlled by South Korea. The shelling was in response to an artillery drill the South's military garrison on the island conducted earlier in the day, which saw shells land in waters claimed by North Korea under the 1953 Armistice Agreement and the UN law of the sea.

The nuclear test by the DPRK has led to a predictable deluge of hype and hypocrisy, amidst a dearth of informed and sensible comment. Politicians, and journalists, have reveled in the situation. North Korea is a convenient whipping boy, with few friends. It tends to be excoriated across the political spectrum. Since it is a small country targeted by the world's superpower, which, though hemorrhaging and perhaps in relative decline, still possesses such formidable political, economic and military power that no country, or international civil servant for that matter, dares openly speak up, even if they so desired. Politicians have hastened to express moral outrage even if, and perhaps especially if, they come from countries which have many nuclear weapons and have conducted tests. Journalists have been having a field day, many delighting in the opportunity to write lurid stories unencumbered by the need to check facts and qualify opinions. Under the circumstances, it is more necessary than ever before to keep a clear head and try to disentangle fact from fantasy, to unearth what has been going on, and what is likely to happen.

Contrary to the post-Cold War globalization discourse, which tends to posit a de-territorialized and borderless world, issues of border demarcation and territorial sovereignty, which are classical components of international relations, continue to provide sources of conflict and remain significant problems of international concern. Even though emphasis in international relations shifts from time to time, it does not necessarily diminish the residual sources of confrontation. Yet, while a source of confrontation remains unchanged, so does the possibility of its resurgence. With regional conflicts in many parts of the world as yet unresolved, there may be lessons to be learned from historical precedents of conflict resolution.

Recently, not only are countries in Latin America parting ways with the United States, so too is its northern neighbor, Canada. On February 24, 2005, Canada's Prime Minister, Paul Martin, announced that Canada would no longer participate in the Ballistic Missile Defense agreement (or the BMD, the antiballistic missile defense system organized by the United States for the defense of the U.S. and North America). This decision repudiates parts of the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) agreement which Canada accepted in 2004.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is accused of censorship after the forced cancellation of a lecture by gender-rights advocate Ueno Chizuko.

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan this January, Tokyo University professor and well-known gender-rights advocate Chizuko Ueno accused the Tokyo Metropolitan Government of censorship.

Translator's Introduction: On 17 July, 2006, The Asahi Shinbun began a daily feature entitled Shashin ga Kataru Senso (The war as photos tell it) based on photos taken during World War II by the newspaper's cameramen. Stored in an Osaka warehouse during the Occupation, the photos are now being catalogued and stored digitally. Accompanying the introductory article was an explanatory statement: “The collection of 70,000 prints leaves behind an immediate (nama-namashiku nokosarete-iru) record of the lives of individuals at the front in China, in the colonies, and in areas occupied by the Imperial Army.” The first prints shown – soldiers and nurses at the front in China, anti-atrocity graffiti in Nanjing, kindergarten students in Jakarta raising Boys' Day carp banners, grass-skirted girls in a Yap Island primary school, a child laborer in a Korean silk factory wearing a “Rising Sun” headband among others –demonstrate the intended scope of the feature.

In March 2007 the Japanese Foreign Ministry began speaking of a “long-term and strategic partnership” between Japan and Iraq. The terminology was new: Japan had previously described its policy in post-Saddam Iraq in terms of “reconstruction activities” but not as a “strategic partnership.” What accounts for this shift in language? What does the new policy entail? What does it overlook?

On July 19, 2006, the final elements of the Ground Self-Defense Forces (GSDF) mission rolled across the border between Iraq and Kuwait. The 2 1/2 year mission in Samawa ended without the deaths of any GSDF member on Iraqi soil – although it was indirectly related to the deaths of several Japanese civilians. As this watershed event was taking place, the future policies of the Japanese government remained shrouded in uncertainty. Was this the effective end of Japanese support to the post-Saddam Iraqi government? Or was it simply the beginning of a new phase?

In four years, China will be celebrating the centenary of the 1911 Revolution which toppled not only the Qing dynasty but imperial rule itself, a system that can be traced back 2,132 years when “China” was a much smaller place. In order to understand the central role played by a handful of extremely energetic (and in some cases equally eccentric) Japanese, it is helpful to consciously try to forget much of what has occurred in the intervening century, especially the two decades leading up to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 and commencement of the Sino-Japanese War. A motley group of activist Japanese, men whose activities were not necessarily coordinated, but who felt impelled to risk their lives for the Chinese cause, early on identified Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) as the leader to bank on and offered him their wholehearted support. Native Anglophones have for the past half-century been in the unusually lucky position of having the best book on this subject in their native tongue. This is Marius Jansen's The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen, a book that can be read today with the same freshness as when it was first published.

The diary of Victor Klemperer, who had repeated tragic experiences in the 1930s as a German Jew, provides a valuable record of that epoch. In the diary he frequently asks why “extreme nationalism” has become so rampant in Germany and some other countries at a time when “modern technology annuls all frontiers and distances.” Klemperer remained basically optimistic, and he wrote in late 1938 that nationalism was “already a thing of the past” and that its appearance in such extreme forms was perhaps its “last convulsive uprising”.

In late May 1949, after troops of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entered Shanghai, Mansfield Addis, then First Secretary of the British Embassy in Nanjing, wrote to his mother back home: “Shanghai liberated! We rejoice that it was not more difficult! It brings the end nearer.” The sentiment expressed in Addis's letter drew the attention of the British Foreign Office, which felt the matter serious enough to warrant a special telegram to its Nanjing embassy in July 1949:

We notice a growing tendency in telegrams from China to refer to the Communist occupation of an area as “liberation”. In the case of a Consular officer reporting to you en clair and post facto the expression may possibly be unavoidable, but we feel bound to point out that China telegrams get a wide distribution here with the consequent danger that expressions such as this, oft repeated, may serve to strengthen beliefs all too prevalent that Chinese Communism is different from the Soviet brand. We hope therefore that posts will in future refrain from using this word in a sense so far divorced from its true meaning.

[We present a two part series on Angkor Wat and Asian tourism. See Geoffrey Gunn, “Angkor and Beyond: the Asian tourism phenomenon”]

SIEM REAP, Cambodia–Tourism is becoming the lifeblood of this land that survived the “killing fields” and a civil war. There are many signs of progress in the 13 years since United Nations-sponsored elections brought peace.