In 1877 Robert Myers and four others living on the Bonin/Ogasawara Islands became the first foreigners to be naturalized as Japanese subjects after more than two hundred years of Japan's semi-exclusion from the outside world. In the space of five years, fifty-nine other first settlers became Japanese subjects/‘naturalized foreigners’ through entry on the Household Family Registry (koseki). At a time when Japan was emerging from a feudal-like system to a modern nation state the Islands were one of Japan's first attempts, in modern times, at overseas expansion. The multinational community on these islands presented the Meiji authorities with unprecedented challenges that could only be overcome through extraordinary measures. In this study I explore the circumstances and context surrounding the unusually placed Bonin Islanders in the late nineteenth century to shed light on the processes of Japanese colonization and social control. I argue that the koseki, as an instrument of ‘bio-power’ (Foucault, 1998: 140), was indispensible in successfully legitimizing and exercising sovereign power over the Islands.

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.

Caught up in the vortex of the American war in Vietnam, Laos (known as the Lao People's Democratic Republic since 1975) is reputed to be the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in the world. U.S. Department of Defense records reveal that 520,000 bomb runs were made over Laos, dropping more than 2 million tons of ordnance. Major targets were the Plain of Jars area in northern Xieng Khouang province and the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” coursing through the southern panhandle with routes connecting North to South Vietnam. These were not uninhabited zones but the ancestral homeland of many ethic minorities. Compared with U.S. bombing in Vietnam and Cambodia, what were the effects on Laos? And, decades after the end of the war, how do the peoples of Laos live with the consequences of the bombing?

Since the decades of authoritarian anticommunist rule ended in the late 1980s, and the geopolitical order of the cold war collapsed in the wider world shortly thereafter, there have been several important changes in the political life of South Koreans. One notable change is found in the domain of ritual life or, more specifically, in the activity of death commemoration and ancestor worship. In increasing numbers of communities across South Korea, people are now actively reshaping their communal ancestral rites into a more inclusive form, introducing demonstratively into the ritual domain the politically troubled memories of the dead, which were excluded from the public sphere under the state's militant anticommunist policies.

Japan's neonationalists have launched three major attacks on school textbooks over the past half century. Centered on the treatment of colonialism and war, the attacks surfaced in 1955, the late 1970s, and the mid-1990s. The present study examines three moments in light of Japanese domestic as well as regional and global political contexts to gain insight into the persistent contention over colonialism and the Pacific War in historical memory and its refraction in textbook treatments.

Police death squads are out of control in The Philippines say human rights campaigners, murdering slum children, the poor and political enemies with impunity.