Eight years ago, on the eve of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, a bipartisan group of Washington experts released the Armitage Report, named after Richard Armitage, one of the main authors and an eventual deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush.

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

The major reason for writing a paper on Japanese unionism is that much of the debate assessing Japanese enterprise unions was set in the pre-1990s period when the economy was strong and there was a shortage of skilled labour. Thus, whilst some commentators argued that Japanese enterprise unions were little more than an arm of management, it was difficult to refute the argument that this form of unionism had resulted in real wage and benefit increases for a considerable period of time whilst generally ensuring a high level of job security for large numbers of workers. Over the past 15 years or so a different economic context has arisen where wage gains have been harder for unions to achieve, where unemployment and irregular employment have increased, and where globalization has made the market for Japanese goods highly competitive. It is time to provide a more contemporary assessment of this form of union organization.

In Kaneshiro Kazuki's Go (2000), the protagonist, Sugihara, opens the novel with a description of his communist, North Korean father, the Japanese colonization of Korea, and the family's desire to visit Hawaii—a vacation that requires switching their nationality from North Korean to South Korean (and shifting their membership from North Korea-affiliated Soren to South Korea-affiliated Mindan). The stuff of the novel's first five pages has been recounted countless times by Japanese and Zainichi writers, but no one would have imagined that it would make a best-selling novel. Reciting Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the U.S.A.”—though observing that Springsteen grew up in a poor family whereas his family is well-off—Sugihara sings his own refrain of “Born in Japan.” At once erudite and violent, he is highly individualistic and antiauthoritarian; he is the proverbial nail that should have been hammered in. In the 1960s and 1970s, Zainichi was all seriousness and suffering: as the pejorative slang would have put it, “dark” [kurai]. The unbearable burden of Zainichi being traumatized, Zainichi life-course and discourse. Instead, Kaneshiro's prose and protagonist exemplify a striking mode of being cool [kakkoii] in contemporary Japanese culture.

For the last few years the global economy has been running on two engines, the U.S. on the consumption side and China on the production side, both lifting the entire global economy. The U.S. has been the consumer of first and last resort spending more than its income and running large current account deficits while China (and other emerging market economies) has been the producer of first and last resort, spending less than its income and running ever larger current account surpluses.

Since President Lee Myung-bak took office, virtually all official channels of inter-Korean dialogue have been shut down, and it seems that the strained relations between Seoul and Pyongyang are likely to continue for an indefinite period of time. If confrontation replaces dialogue, it would further ratchet up the tension on the Korean Peninsula.

An anthology necessarily follows “personal predilection,” stressed William Rose Benét, having discharged his end of Famous English and American Poetry, whereas Conrad Aiken, having done his, chose to note, “American poetry has been extensively anthologized.”(1) What Aiken said hardly applies to modern Japanese poetry,(2) but what Benét said does, and not just to the anthology I've recently published, Japanese Women Poets (M.E. Sharpe, 2007), of course, but also, with startling force, to the male-female proportions in some of the larger-scale anthologies. These are often oddly mislabeled zenshu, “complete works.”

The Yomiuri Shinbun has announced the formation of the “Ito Kazuya Fund” on November 5th to help rehabilitate Afghanistan. Ito is the young aid worker who was kidnapped and killed in Afghanistan in August. The fund will be initially based on a US$30,000 posthumously awarded to Ito as part of the 15th Yomiuri International Cooperation Prize. Ito's parents, Ito Masuyuki and Junko, were honored at the ceremony at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Ito Masuyuki announced that the prize will be used “to help Afghanistan, via agricultural assistance, to become a country that can provide its people with enough to eat.” Japan Focus

On October 31, 2008, General Tamogami Toshio, Japan's Air Self-Defense Force [ASDF] Chief of Staff was abruptly dismissed from his post in the Defense Ministry, but allowed to retire with his full pension rather than be summarily fired. At a press conference several months earlier, Tamogami, who had also been the superintendent of the SDF Joint Staff College, publicly expressed contempt for a ruling by the Nagoya High Court that the Japanese military mission in Iraq was unconstitutional. On this occasion, the outspoken General, widely known among his peers for provocatively hawkish views, crossed several more lines.

The US global “empire of bases” has been well analyzed by Chalmers Johnson, especially in his Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, 2006. The complex of bases in Okinawa, ever since the islands fell into US hands in 1945, were central to the 20th century wars in Asia from Korea and Vietnam to the Gulf and Iraq. Okinawa was (and is) in the poignant position of being passionately antiwar, a lesson driven home by the catastrophe it suffered in 1945, yet forced by the Japanese and US governments to accept war and war preparation as its basic collective raison d’être. In that sense, Okinawa may be compared to North Korea, both states whose essence is defined in terms of “Sengun” - priority to the military.

As Japan and India move toward bilateral security cooperation, it is not surprising that Prime Ministers AsÅ▯ TarÅ▯ and Manmohan Singh have vigorously denied that the arrangements were aimed at counterbalancing China. But will Beijing read it in this way?

Japan's revised ODA Charter, a 2003 revision of the original 1991 set of principles governing Japan's Overseas Development Assistance, proscribes aid to countries producing weapons of mass destruction. Thus it is all the more perplexing that in September this year, Japan joined the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, which controls the export and sale of nuclear technology, to approve a waiver on trade with India. In joining the Washington consensus on this issue, Prime Minister AsÅ▯ is obviously moving into uncharted waters if he is seen as abandoning Japan's non-nuclear principles and pandering to Japanese companies eager for a slice of India's nuclear energy market. It is worth recalling that India's failure to ratify the NPT continues to raise public hackles in Japan, just as Prime Minister Hashimoto RyutarÅ▯ suspended all but humanitarian aid to India in response to India's nuclear tests conducted in May 1998.

By virtually every measure, the war in Afghanistan is getting much worse for both the western coalition and for the Afghan civilian population. The strategic benefits are minimal to non-existent, the risks of a widening war alarming, and the moral and humanitarian consequences appalling. Strategic confusion, institutional inertia and self-interest provide most of the answer as to why the US remains in Afghanistan. Australia's commitment shares the same strategic confusion, mixed with a diffuse paternalistic enthusiasm not too far distant from a nineteenth century imperialist ideal of civilising the natives. The US, and its allies, will leave, without any definable or honourable victory. The Afghans will stay. If the current logic of expansion of the war engulfs Pakistan, withdrawal and defeat will take place eventually, but later, and after an infinitely more catastrophic and dangerous war. Could a new US administration transform these outcomes?

China and Vietnam have outlined new steps to resolve their long-running territorial disputes in the South China Sea in an effort to avert further conflict and put their relations on a steadier footing for the future. Although both countries are ruled by Communist parties and share extensive land and sea borders, they have had a tense relationship. But they now face political challenges at home as their export-oriented economies and investment slow under the impact of global financial turmoil and deepening recession. They have evidently decided to give primacy to strengthening bilateral party, trade and investment ties to offset the wider economic downturn.

In this interview, Wang Jisi, Dean of International Studies at Beijing University and a leading Chinese specialist on international relations, tackles the question of the end of US hegemony and US-China relations. The interview, conducted prior to the October financial pandemic in the US and globally, and prior to the election of Barack Obama as president, ranges widely over China as a rising power, the United States and changing world dynamics. While rejecting the very premise of a US-China alliance, pointing to reactionary US policies in Israel/Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Noting US hypocrisy as in its embrace of Saudi Arabia while speaking of human rights, and pointing to fundamental US weaknesses, Wang nevertheless makes the case for US-China cooperation and challenges the view that the US is in ineluctable decline as a global power. ms

From Rarotonga, the Cook Islands. The sea is blue, beaches with golden sand boast palm trees bending almost to the water surface. Beneath barely detectable waves, marine life is fascinating and diverse. On hotel terraces, coconut juices cool the refined throats of jet setters. Traditional huts rub shoulders with some of the most expensive resorts in the world. 500 US dollars would hardly sustain a couple for more than a day here in one of the most expensive parts of the world. Together with neighboring French Polynesia, this has become one of the most expensive parts of the world.

Three aging veterans of Japan's Imperial Army discuss their postwar commitment to peace activism in Japan and their current efforts to find young people willing to carry on their work as they confront their gradual decline and inevitable deaths. One veteran was incarcerated in a Chinese “re-education” camp for his war crimes against Chinese civilians, much like the veterans featured in the documentary film, Japanese Devils. Although neither of the other two veterans committed war crimes, each put himself through a soul-searching reevaluation of his loyalty to the Emperor and conviction that he had fought for a righteous cause. The three veterans share a deep commitment to speaking about the actual horrors of war and to preserving the testimony of other veterans who are slowly dying.

One morning this September, Mantani Yoshiyuki, Yamamoto Mineteru and Hirano Isamu were told by prison wardens they would shortly be dead. As is common under Japan's death penalty system, the three men, all in their sixties, were given about an hour to get their affairs in order before being blindfolded and hanged. Their deaths brought the total number of people executed in Japan this year to 13 and ended any hope by anti-death penalty advocates that new justice minister Yasuoka Okiharu might slow the pace of executions. Two more executions on October 28 brought the number this year to 15, the largest number in 33 years according to the Japan Death Penalty Information Center.

China is spending nearly $1 trillion to revive its economy. Will it work? John Garnaut reports from Wenzhou City, Zhejiang.

Wenzhou, the heartland of Chinese capitalism, is once again fighting for its survival. The city was famously forsaken by Maoist China but it stayed alive and later thrived by building one of the most entrepreneurial and dynamic marketplaces on the planet.

What are the links among Japan, China and the United States that will shape the outcomes of the current economic and financial crisis that appears to have metastasized into a global crisis of the whole postwar international order? Because that order rests heavily on Asian export-led export growth strategies and the transfer of massive Chinese and Japanese trade surpluses that support the dollar's role as the universal currency, any solution for the US and the international order will require the cooperation of the two Asian economic powers. John Judis looks far beyond the US treasury bailouts to offer thoughtful perspectives on the crisis and its resolution. MS

By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with its verdant paddies and canal-side hamlets, was the rice bowl of South Vietnam and home to nearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one of the most important revolutionary strongholds during the Vietnam War. Despite its military significance, State Department officials were “deeply concerned” about introducing a large number of US troops into the densely populated area, fearing that it would be impossible to limit civilian carnage.