As Japan's trade with South Korea and China continues to surge, there is mounting evidence of growing mistrust of Japan among its near neighbors. A recent poll conducted by Japan's Yomiuri and South Korea's Hankook newspapers is indicative. The poll comes in the wake of angry South Korean responses to Japanese claims to Takeshima/Tokdo islands, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro's widely publicized Yasukuni Shrine visits, and the continuing controversy over Japanese textbook treatments of colonialism and war.]

Letters in the Heian Period (794-1185) were written on paper made from the bark of the dakekanba birch tree. It's a bit of trivia that few know. One who does is Shinji Iwata.

Iwata, 58, is an aspiring nature guide. Every weekend he drives 150 kilometers to a campsite in Takayama, Gifu Prefecture, where the forest is deep and skunk cabbage blooms in tiny brooks. He has been training here as a guide for the past nine months.

The military implementation of the George W Bush administration's unilateralist foreign policy is creating monumental changes in the world's geostrategic alliances. The most significant of these changes is the formation of a new triangle comprised of China, Iran and Russia.

The original Godzilla film was produced in 1954 and released in November that year, only nine years after the end of the Pacific War. The same production team produced a sequence of 22 Godzilla films between 1954 and 1995, and six more films were created in the years 1995 to 2004 by a different production team. The original Godzilla film, Godzilla, and its first sequel, Godzilla Raids Again produced in 1955, were the result of close cooperation between Producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, Director Honda Ishiro, Special Effects Director Tsuburaya Eiji, and scriptwriter Koyama Shigeru.

Thursday, June 16, 2005 is a date that will be etched in memory as the day Japan's proposal for United Nations reform was dealt a fatal blow by the U.S. government.

The United States’ proposal on reform of the U.N. Security Council released that day calls for expansion of membership from the current 15 to 19 or 20, by adding “two or so” permanent members to the current five– Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States–as well as two or three additional nonpermanent members.

A law enacted six years ago has given historians a new powerful weapon to challenge a long-held taboo preserved by the Imperial Household Agency: investigating the secrets of ancient emperors’ tombs. The weapon is the public information disclosure law, which has allowed Noboru Toike, assistant professor at Den-en Chofu University and an expert on Imperial tombs, to access and obtain copies of internal agency documents.

Over the nearly six decades since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a substantial majority of Americans has continued to defend the action. The heated controversies surrounding the opening in 1995 and 2003 of bomb-related exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum of the U.S. government's Smithsonian Institution help to clarify the bases for this stubborn defense. During the Smithsonian disputes, peace groups and historians provided a spirited and informed critique of the necessity for the Hiroshima bombing and highlighting its human costs. Nevertheless, more hawkish forces, appealing to narrow definitions of patriotism, easily won the battle for public opinion.

[The press is filled with reports on the multiple conflicts erupting in the China seas: territorial conflicts, resource conflicts, and historical conflicts. Rarely is there serious discussion of the efforts by the nations of the world's most dynamic economic region to achieve amity and cooperation on issues of mutual interest. Fisheries and the resources of the sea is one such realm, and David Rosenberg explores the impressive progress among the powers of the region in attempting to regulate fishing, while highlighting the continued conflicts and difficulties in regulating fishing at a time of sharp decline in catch. Japan Focus.]

Over the past three years, much of the Japanese public and many students of its political economy have grown used to being disappointed by the Koizumi style of reform. Koizumi came to office through internal party selection on April 26, 2001, his candidacy largely driven by the desperation of local Liberal Democratic Party chapters facing defeat in Upper House elections. Koizumi was supposed to be the Japanese equivalent of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and in his first year became akin to a rock star for his willingness to talk about as well as take on taboos and sacred cows. His talk of painful fiscal and economic reform would have scared off electors in any other society not gripped by a sense of foreboding and the need for drastic change.

[Debates over the best film of all time tend to go no further than Hollywood classics such as Citizen Kane. But the influential Halliwell's Film Guide now says the title belongs to Tokyo Story, a little-known Japanese film in which nothing much happens. Peter Bradshaw pays tribute.]

Japanese archaeologists and historians have long rejected the government's claim that Japan has had 124 emperors from the mythical Jimmu, descendant of the Sun Goddess, to the controversial Showa Emperor Hirohito, whose pre-World War II reign brought havoc to Asian and Japanese people. The scholars recognize that most sites of ancient imperial tombs should be treated as objects of scientific inquiry rather than as religious remnants of discredited State Shinto. But bureaucrats of the Imperial Household Agency, claiming to follow the Imperial Household Law, interpret the rules and control the tombs. They will neither allow the tombs to be treated as ordinary historical sites for investigation nor release copies of documents pertaining to them or to more recent emperors. Professing concern for the peace, calm, and privacy of emperors, but really fearing public scrutiny of the imperial institution and its “traditions,” they continue to deny permission to excavate the tombs.

[Beginning on April 18, 2005, The Yomiuri Shimbun ran a 21-part series on “Planning National Strategies - Resources and Energy,” highlighting Japan's resource anxieties in the context of rising China-Japan tensions over issues that include the struggle for scarce oil and other natural resource and the voracious quest for energy by Japan's rapidly growing neighbor. The conflict is set within a global milieu in which oil prices soar to %50-60 a barrel, the consumption of China, India, the U.S. and a number of other powers continues to soar, and nations seek to secure access to oil and national gas supplies that show strong signs of reaching a tipping point at which demand exceeds supply. The Yomiuri is Japan's, and the world's, largest newspaper, a generally conservative paper with a daily print of around 11 million copies. We present four articles from the series. Japan Focus.]

Recently, not only are countries in Latin America parting ways with the United States, so too is its northern neighbor, Canada. On February 24, 2005, Canada's Prime Minister, Paul Martin, announced that Canada would no longer participate in the Ballistic Missile Defense agreement (or the BMD, the antiballistic missile defense system organized by the United States for the defense of the U.S. and North America). This decision repudiates parts of the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) agreement which Canada accepted in 2004.

[For twenty years, Prime Ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, have provided a flash point for Japan-China and Japan-South Korea clashes, together with conflicts over territorial and textbook issues. Yasukuni, Japan's war memorial, is a facility with close association with the Emperor. It preserves the remains of Japan's military war dead, enshrined as gods. It also includes the remains, among those of other leaders, of fourteen Class-A War Criminals convicted at the Tokyo Tribunal. With China's emergence in the last year as Japan's leading trade partner, the Yasukuni issue continues to poison the atmosphere between the two nations as well as those with South Korea. The issues are central both to rising Japanese nationalism and to diplomatic relations throughout East Asia. Pressure is building within Japan to resolve the Yasukuni issue. One sign of this is the recent statement by Lower House Speaker Kono Yohei and five former prime ministers urging caution in visiting the shrine to avoid further deterioration of Japan's ties with neighboring countries. The five former prime ministers are Kaifu Toshiki, Miyazawa Kiichi, Murayama Tomiichi, Hashimoto Ryutaro and Mori Yoshiro. Recent editorials from the Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun highlight important parameters of the debate.]

This “Evaluation of China's Energy Options” (ECEO) is a very important and informative analysis of China's energy-supply challenges. The ECEO was prepared for and with the support of the China Sustainable Energy Program. The Program links American and Chinese experts and is aimed at assisting “in China's transition to a sustainable energy future by promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy.” The ECEO was itself written by an international group of experts on energy issues. They seek to augment the Chinese Development Research Centre's 2004 “National Energy Strategy and Policy 2020” (NESP), an assessment of China's current and future energy needs and how to satisfy them. The ECEO is thus a treasure trove of data and concise analyses of the structure of China's energy demand and supply as well as the relevant institutions and organizations.

NEW DELHI: It is the hottest issue concerning Indo-US relations in which both the countries have an equal stake. It concerns the give and take as well as push and pull over energy security in the face of growing prices and depleting oil resources.

A crisis is brewing with India, China and USA identified as the future powerhouses competing for control of far more oil than they can possibly produce. Oil prices have sky-rocketed to $50-60-a-barrel, with petrol and diesel prices undergoing another round of hikes last week in India. China and other Asian nations have raised fuel prices in recent months but India Asia's fourth-largest economy postponed it for weeks due to opposition from the ruling coalition's communist allies. The rise in prices, however, is expected to do no more than reduce demand in the short-run.

Japan's government remains firmly committed to a large scale nuclear power program despite sustained resistance from local communities. Recognizing the concerns of many citizens about nuclear power and its health and property risks, the government instituted tactics to smooth the path for its nation-wide energy agenda undertaken in cooperation with private utilities. The responsible government office, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy (ANRE, or Shigen enerugi cho), honed a wide variety of strategies designed to quell resistance to nuclear power plant siting. Despite innovative and expensive programs such as awards ceremonies for cooperative local government officials, pro-nuclear curricula for local schools, and extensive subsidies for host communities, the time necessary for siting new plans continues to increase and some plans have been defeated. Local communities and anti-nuclear activists remain resistant to central government inducements and will no doubt seek to block future siting attempts.

Yasukuni is first and foremost a site for the performance of ritual before the kami (gods), those men, women and some children who sacrificed their lives for the imperial cause. This article examines the organizing of space and ritual at Tokyo's shrine to the war dead and the implications for memory.

Bulletin/message/564.July 16, 2005, will be the sixtieth anniversary of the plutonium-fueled atomic bomb, tested at White Sands, New Mexico. On July 15th and 16th the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear-weapons watchdog, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will hold poetry readings and a silent auction in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. John Bradley, a fellow poet, and editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (1995), and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader (2000), and this writer, are two of the writers invited to participate.