When Shiori was 10, her mother took her to Tokyo Summerland, an indoor pool. Wearing a new swimsuit, she splashed happily in the water until she was sexually assaulted. “A man came from behind and touched me on every part of my body,” she recalls, crying at the memory. Shaking and terrified, she told the grownups but their response was bewildering. “My friend's mother said it was because I was wearing a bikini.”

The erosion of civil liberties proceeds apace in Okinawa, the most conspicuous case being the imprisonment for five months (17 October 2016 to 19 March 2017) of Yamashiro Hiroji, head of the Okinawa Peace Movement Center and a prominent activist opposing base activist. In most developed democratic countries, a suspect may be held in police custody for up to four days before she or he is either indicted or released, but in Japan the limit is 23 days, and in Yamashiro's case it was arbitrarily extended by serial arrests on unrelated charges.

This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, a resolution of the history problem will finally become possible.

North Korea is on the verge of developing boosted energy nuclear weapons with higher yield-to-weight ratios. It is test-launching mobile ICBMs and intermediate-range missiles to deliver them. It is churning out plutonium and highly enriched uranium at a rate of six or more bombs' worth a year.