Two reports follow on the vast, and vastly expensive, Tokyo International Conference on African Development designed to showcase Japan's aid to Africa. The conference, held in Yokohama with the presence of 51 of 53 African nations, was attended by 40 Presidents of African nations. The first report by Ramesh Jaura concentrates on the proposed Japanese aid package, as Japan proposes to double both trade and investment in Africa within five years. The second report by the Yomiuri Shimbun's Kawakami Osamu highlights the real stakes for Japan: the effort to outbid China whose burgeoning trade, investment and presence in Africa is a cause of Japanese, and the continued pursuit of the chimera of a Japanese UN security council seat. Neither report mentions either oil and energy or military strategic issues. MS

Whatever can be said about who's up and who's down at any particular point in time in Asian great power politics, one immutable fact is that three major powers – Russia, China and Japan – are geographic neighbors. Living in proximity in a region with a long history of warfare and protracted struggles over resources, the three countries have powerful incentives to negotiate energy, trade and arms limitation agreements and establish conditions conducive to a peaceful and prosperous coexistence.

A large fiberglass boat propelled by a 40HP engine speeds across the pristine waters of Marovo Lagoon, a double-barrier enclosed lagoon with hundreds of stunning islets. The area is on UNESCO's provisional world heritage list. Having left Ramata, a small settlement almost at the Northwest extreme of the lagoon, it is heading for New Georgia Island, locally known as the “mainland” because of its size.

Both official Chinese and exile Tibetan responses to the protests that broke across Tibet last month followed a familiar, worn-out script. For the Tibetan exiles and their international supporters, this was a last gasp for independence by the victims of cultural genocide. For the Chinese government this was premeditated mayhem orchestrated by the “Dalai clique” and “criminal elements” bent on splitting China. Both sides have it wrong.

One of the tragic ironies of the recent earthquake in China is that it has created numerous new, extremely dangerous dams in a country that already is the most dam-populated country on earth. At more than 85,000 dams and counting, Chinese leaders already boast of having the tallest dams, the largest by reservoir capacity, the dam with the highest ship lift, and the most powerful electricity producer. From arch dams, earthen dams, and gravity dams to cascade and concrete-faced rockfill dams, China has it all.

In a recent article by Bumsoo Kim entitled “Bringing class back in: the changing basis of inequality and the Korean minority in Japan,” I read:

If the entire Japanese architectural fraternity was one big royal family, then Isozaki Arata would be a king approaching the end of a long and glorious reign.

The "pedigree" of this majestically silver-maned 76-year-old is, quite simply, faultless.

Architecturally speaking, Isozaki's “father” was the great Tange Kenzo — best known for his 1950 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the National Gymnasium in Yoyogi built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Isozaki was taught by Tange at the prestigious University of Tokyo in the early 1960s — along with those other architectural luminaries, Kurokawa Kisho and Maki Fumihiko.

Benedict Anderson's “Exit Suharto” examines the life of the late Indonesian dictator in a wide-ranging political-cultural analysis. The article is reprinted from New Left Review 50, March-April, 2008.

In 1971, the Indonesian presidential machine informed the public that Suharto and his wife were planning a mausoleum for themselves on a spur of Mount Lawu, the dormant, 3,000m sacred volcano that lies to the east of the cidevant royal Javanese city of Surakarta. The site had been carefully chosen, respectfully situated some metres below the early tombs of the Mangkunegaran dynasty—the second most insignificant of the four small Central Java principalities instituted by colonial authority in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Mrs Tien Suharto—by then already quietly mocked as Tientje (Ten Per Cent)—claimed some connection with the little dynasty which had barely survived the revolution of 1945–49.

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle's plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools. Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who subsequently died of polonium poisoning in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).

Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.

Japanese politics are characterized by two related paradoxes: first, that the word “conservative” is usually applied to those who insist on the need to remake Japan's postwar society, including its constitution, and who in other words are actually radicals, while those who insist on “conserving” Japan's postwar democratic institutions are labeled radicals or leftists; and second, that those who most insist that Japan subordinate itself to the United States describe themselves as “nationalists,” while those who seek to prioritize Japanese over US interests are suspected of being somehow “un-Japanese.” It is an Alice in Wonderland confusion!

Military alliances are always sold as things that produce security. In practice they tend to do the opposite.

Thus, Germany formed the Triple Alliance with Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to counter the enmity of France following the Franco-Prussian War. In response, France, England and Russia formed the Triple Entente. The outcome was World War I.

To fly from Samoa (formerly Western Samoa) to American Samoa — two utterly remote split-nation island territories in the South Pacific — used to be extremely easy and cheap. One only had to drive 5 kilometers from the capital – Apia – to the small village of Fagalii, to buy the ticket, chat for a while with fellow travelers sitting on plastic bags and outdated suitcases, go through some sort of improvised security and passport control, then board a little propeller-driven aircraft to Pago Pago, capital of American Samoa, a 20 minute hop, favorable winds provided.

Given the slow - albeit important – progress that has been made in the process of North Korean denuclearization, it is clear by now that the task of finding a final verifiable resolution will inevitably be handed over to the next U.S. administration. Simply there is too much work to be done and not enough time left for the Bush administration.

“So, how do you like Japan, Mr. Binney?'

The scene: a party at the Sumitomo Bank back in 1984 for the new manager of Chase Manhattan's Tokyo branch where I was then working.

Whoops. Most of us from Chase looked at the floor while our hosts tittered politely. Our manager should have said he enjoyed Asahi Beer, not Sapporo. Because Asahi was the Sumitomo group brewer and naturally the Sumitomo Bank served as the company's socalled “main bank”. At that time, Sumitomo Bank was regularly seconding its own people to the then-troubled beer maker including two of its presidents.

This is the first of a two article series on developmental and cultural nationalism. The articles by Radhika Desai and Laura Hein are both substantially excerpted versions of essays that form part of a special issue of Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2008, pp 397 – 428. Other essays in the collection discuss China, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East.

This essay explores the connection between the economy and cultural identity in Japanese nationalism. After World War II Japan was a pacesetter in the global trend toward developmental nationalism, including a transformation of its economy into both a wealthy and a highly egalitarian one. In the 1970s and 1980s, ethnic nationalism re-emerged, with the claim that economic success was the product of Japanese cultural uniqueness rather than of the developmental nationalist policies of the previous quarter-century. The economic downturn of the 1990s thus challenged Japan both economically and culturally, At first, this crisis prompted a critical re-evaluation of national culture, manifested as serious attempts to both resolve tensions with Asia dating from World War II and dismantle domestic social hierarchies. By the mid-1990s, however, this moment had passed and government and business leaders adopted full-fledged neo-liberal policies, reversing the long post-war trend toward income equality, while adopting a more strident and militarist cultural nationalism.

Hamish McDonald, in a far-reaching examination of the shifting geopolitical sands emerging from the six-party talks on North Korea-US security issues, offers a post-hegemonic vision of a new region-centered order in East Asia. Envisaging a region in which a China- or China-Japan centric structure emerges, it is premised on a withdrawal of American military force as the geopolitical core of coastal East Asia to a still powerful military position centered on Guam. But can the US-North Korea agreement hold, and is such a strategic withdrawal in fact in the cards? Is the predominance of Condoleezza Rice's State Department the future of US global policy? Can China and Japan work out a modus vivendi that accommodates both the two major Asian powers and lesser regional powers? Time will tell. MS

There could hardly be a better time for publishing Kinglun Ngok's article on Chinese labor policy and legislation. Three major national labor-related laws were passed in 2007 and went into effect in 2008. These are: the Labor Contract Law, the Employment Promotion Law, and the Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law. What does this flurry of labor legislations mean? Why now? And perhaps most important: does it matter for China's workers?