In the midst of one of the most serious nuclear crises in history and with 30,000 dead or missing and close to half a million people rendered homeless in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has submitted plans to build more reactors in Fukushima.

Tokyo ~ Ko Bunyu's comic book Introduction to China is not for the fainthearted. In 300 graphic pages, it claims that the Chinese are incapable of democracy, practice cannibalism, and have the world's leading sex economy. In one sequence, famous political figures say the country is the source of most of Asia's contagious diseases. In another, illustrated with naked, spread-eagled women, China is said to have exported 600,000 “AIDS-infested” prostitutes.

New Delhi — Sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven in part by high growth rates in gross domestic product and in part by mercantilist attempts to lock up supplies, has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are beginning to threaten rapid economic modernization, prompting the building of upstream projects on international rivers. If water geopolitics were to spur interstate tensions through reduced water flows to neighboring states, the Asian renaissance could stall.

Did in Meiji 43 [1910] Japan annex Korea, the Empire of Korea (J. Daikan teikoku, K. Taehan cheguk)? Do you call this Japan's colonizing the Empire of Korea? If so, [Mr. Education Minister], I would like to ask, is Scotland an English colony? Please, could you answer this question for me? Are Northern Ireland and Wales English colonies? Please let me know. Before World War I, was Hungary an Austrian colony?

Japan did not want to annex Korea. Koreans came to Japan and asked to be annexed. This was expressed in the Korean Emperor [Sunjong]'s last Imperial Rescript, where it is written, “From now we have no choice but to request the Emperor of Imperial Japan's protection.” Also, in 1910 a demonstration took place in Seoul, the capital. Those leading this demonstration were from the Advance in Unity Society (J. Isshinkai, K. Ilchinhoe). Do you know what kind of demonstration this was? It was one that requested Japan to merge with (J. gappei), or annex (J. heigō) Korea.

In addition to defining specific rights for women, the post-WWII Constitution of Japan (enacted 1947) also articulated a commitment to preserving peace. Article 9 of the Constitution reads in part, “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a mean of settling international disputes.” The “Peace” Constitution includes a statement that Japan will “never” maintain military forces. With the start of the Korean War in 1950, U.S. occupiers re-interpreted the Japanese constitution to create the “National Police Reserve,” which became Japan's Self Defense Forces (SDF) in 1954. SDF troops have since been deployed beyond national borders for “relief operations” beginning in 1992. Under international pressure following 9/11, Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi supported an anti-terrorism law in October 2001. This legislation allowed the SDF to provide “logistical support” for U.S. combat troops in the Indian Ocean. Based on the constitutional protection of peace, a group of 15 women led by feminist lawyer Nakajima Michiko (1935-2007) sued the Japanese state for deploying local troops to Iraq in 2004. Nakajima and the other plaintiffs argued that the continued presence of Ground SDF in Iraq violated the “right to live in peace.”

Mark Ealey translates and Introduces Yoshimura Akira's novel probing the moral equation underlying the Pacific War in a novel that explores American firebombing of Japanese cities and the Japanese revenge killing of U.S. POWs.

Throughout history, acts of hypocrisy have come easily to the world's Great Powers. In 1938, in reaction to Japan's “barbarous” bombing of Chinese civilians, the United States placed a “moral embargo” on the supply of planes and aviation equipment to Japan. One year later, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the following appeal:

The President of the United States to the Governments of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and His Britannic Majesty, September 1, 1939.

On May 23, 1988, in Arlington, Texas, Bell Helicopter unveiled with much fanfare a new combo-aircraft; a fixed-wing plane that could climb and hover like a helicopter, but also rotate its giant propellers forward and fly like an airplane. On that day, Peter Van Sant, then correspondent for CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, called the plane a “revolutionary new aircraft” that was the latest “future shock”. He expected it to carry commuters to Washington or Boston from Manhattan, as it could take off and land in downtown business districts, reducing travel times. It was called the V-22. “By the year 2000, there could be a market of five to eight million passengers annually,” a company spokesperson at Bell Helicopter predicted at the ceremony. Twenty-four years later, the V-22 has yet to be used as a commuter aircraft between New York and Boston. Instead, across the Pacific, the Bell- Boeing MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, having been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, is becoming the next tinderbox issue on Japan's southernmost subtropical island prefecture, Okinawa.

As the most pressing resource, water holds the strategic key to peace, public health and prosperity. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look more real than in Asia.

The G8 Summit has come and gone, and with it a missed opportunity for Japan to take center stage for helping to resolve the world rice crisis. Although significant relief from the peak rice prices in April has already been achieved, in part due to an early announcement by Japan that it would release some of its imported rice stocks, there has been no follow-up by the Japanese government to sustain the momentum achieved in May, and to keep rice prices falling back to levels more affordable by poor countries and poor consumers.

The capability approach (CA) pioneered by Amartya Sen and developed by many others has become decisively influential over the last two decades as a normative framework for assessing social arrangements, social justice, equality, and quality of life, as well as for designing policies (Robeyns, 2011). The CA has also been seen as a theory of social justice seeking to reduce social exclusion and inequalities and to enhance global justice. The CA is probably best known for having inspired the creation of the Human Development Index (HDI) in 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to annually rank countries by level of human development or well-being. This well-known approach has played a key role in advancing alternative ideas about development and welfare, rather than GDP growth. Thus, evaluated in CA theoretical terms, countries like Japan, for example, may not necessarily be judged to be rich, although on paper, by such measures as GDP and per capita GDP they may rank amongst the world's most prosperous nations.

[In recent weeks, a number of protests directed against Japan have erupted throughout China. The most widely reported have been sparked by anger at new Japanese school textbooks that elide discussion of World War II atrocities, by territorial conflicts over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands, and by the Japanese bid for a permanent Security Council seat. Participants in those protests appear to have been overwhelmingly from the ranks of students and intellectuals. The strike at the Japanese-owned Uniden factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong carries the protest movement to a new level. It is significant as one of the first actions by workers in opposition to Japanese labor practices, as well as being an action that could simultaneously impact on the American giant firm Wal-Mart that has thus far resisted Chinese government pressures to permit a union. This is an unusual example of a strike whose principal demand is the right guaranteed by Chinese law to form a union. The 12,000 workers at the plant in the heart of China's export zone, mainly women migrants from poor interior provinces, make telephones most of which end up on Wal-Mart shelves. According to a New York Times report, Uniden workers typically work eleven hour days (three hours of compulsory overtime) to earn salaries of 484 yuan (US$58) a week. The present strike, following on the heels of walkouts on November 29 and December 10, 2004, contains echoes of the strikes directed at Japanese enterprises that exploded in the 1920s fueling nationalist and revolutionary movements. It also evokes the Chinese government's worst fears during the 1989 movement upsurge: that workers might join the protests on the side of students and intellectuals. Japan Focus.]

What lies behind a series of over-the-top police interventions against antiwar activists?

Venerated by neonationalists and marinated in over a century of militarism and war, Yasukuni Shrine may well be Japan's least friendly venue for a demonstration by pacifists.

As the crisis in Fukushima grows more serious (see reports here, here, and here), international scientific organizations have begun painting an increasingly dire picture of radiation releases from the plant.

The Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics reports here on March 24 that the dispersion of certain radioactive compounds are approaching those emitted in the Chernobyl disaster. The data on cesium and iodine emissions are drawn from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna: “The three day emissions from Fukushima of Iodine-131 would be about 20% of the total Chernobyl emissions, while those of Cesium-137 would be between 20 and 60% of the total Chernobyl emissions, depending on whether one believes in the different Iodine to Caesium ratio measured in Japan.” The Institute forecasts, moreover, that the winds, which have for the most part been taking the radioactivity out to sea, were predicted to shift to carry the poisoned air inland, as it has on a few earlier occasions.

The extent of radioactive contamination in Fukushima Prefecture is at the center of important debates as some scientists, NGOs, and citizen's groups argue that the Japanese government has not gone far enough in dealing with the fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi accident and has deliberately downplayed the potential health effects of radiation. With so much attention focused on Fukushima, however, there has been less consideration of the impact of the crisis, ongoing since March 11, on other parts of Japan. The August 22 issue of AERA magazine, published by Japan's major progressive newspaper Asahi Shimbun, ran a feature on contamination in the Kanto region entitled Kanto no ko kara hoshano (Radiation Detected from Kanto Children), which broadens discussions of the Fukushima Daiichi crisis’ potential impact. Below is a summary of the AERA article, published under the byline of editor Yamane Yusaku.

At the Chicago Liberty Meeting in April 1899, organized to protest U.S. imperialist advances in the Philippines, Jane Addams was the only woman of eight plenary speakers. There she stated, “To ‘protect the weak’ has always been the excuse of the ruler and tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of ‘the white man’” (Addams 1899). A few months earlier, in late 1898, the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain in the Treaty of Paris despite a preexisting revolutionary movement for independence. Subsequently, the Philippine-American War broke out, with Filipinos continuing to seek an end to colonial rule, be it the rule of Spain or the United States. President Roosevelt officially announced the war to be over on July 4, 1902, although fighting continued in some provinces through 1913.

Two years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began two media experts dissect how it has been covered by the media in Japan. Uesugi Takashi is a freelance journalist and author of several books on the Fukushima crisis, including Terebi Wa Naze Heiki De Uso Wo Tsukunoka? (Why does television tell so many lies?). He is also one of the founders of The Free Press Association of Japan (www.fpaj.jp), which attempts to offer an alternative to Japan's press club system. Ito Mamoru, is professor of media and cultural studies at Waseda University and author of Terebi Wa Genpatsu Jiko Dou Tsutaetenoka? (How did television cover the nuclear accident?).

The new Abe administration in Japan plans to re-examine the 1993 Kono statement in which Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei, apologized and admitted the Japanese government's responsibility for the comfort station operations. If it proceeds with this plan, the Abe government is likely to whitewash or revoke the Kono statement, which has been the consistent object of resentment and criticisms among neonationalists. Mr. Abe has been arguing that no historical documents exist to support the claim of forcible recruitment of girls and young women into wartime military sexual slavery. Suga Yoshihide, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, has stated that the government will invite a group of historians to study the warfront brothel operations (Morris-Suzuki 2012).

Biggs and Horie have written a thoughtful report on the recent rise in numbers of the homeless in Japan. Its value lies in the links it draws to a serious crisis in the Japanese system of social insurance and welfare support.

It is clear from this report—as also described in Toru Shinoda's recent essay on the New Years Dispatch Workers Village—that the plight of those recently labeled as the “working poor” in Japan is worsening rapidly. Where much other reporting on this problem has tended to focus on the younger homeless who spend their nights in internet cafes or rental video rooms, this report goes beyond that to look at older as well as younger workers, including those in the Airin district of Osaka.

As international pressures build to create a new international financial and currency order in the wake of the most severe global crisis since the 1930s, interest—and fantasy—center not only on the critical role of the United States but equally on China. China is now in the spotlight not only because of its position as a rising economic power, not only because of its vast financial currency reserves in the range of $2 trillion, but also because of currency strategies that align the yen to the dollar to keep its value low in order to maximize exports. Here Sebastian Mallaby looks back and forward to envisage a new financial order that would place China at the center. Japan Focus

Recent reports of Kim Jong-il's death may have been, to quote Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated,” but they did reveal a great deal about South Korean thinking regarding the future of North Korea. Anonymous officials leaked information that the government was looking at operationalizing ConPlan 5029, the contingency plan for joint US-South Korean intervention in the North that had been suspended under the previous administration. Given the lack of any signs of unrest in Pyongyang, the urgency of such planning was questioned by critics.1 But it reflects an ongoing concern that has been building in South Korea over the years: that if North Korea ever does collapse, the opportunity to determine the future of the peninsula may not fall to South Korea, but rather to China.