Hayashi Kyoko, born in Nagasaki in 1930, spent much of her childhood in wartime Shanghai. Returning to Nagasaki in March 1945, she attended Nagasaki Girls High School and was a student-worker in a munitions plant in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing on August 9.

Hayashi made her literary debut with the Akutagawa Prize-winning “Ritual of Death”, which records her exodus from the area of devastation and eventual reunion with her family. Her atomic bomb novella, “Masks of Whatchamacallit” (Nanjamonja no men) appeared the following year, followed shortly by a sequence of twelve short stories called Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Giyaman biidoro, 1978). These works established her as an important chronicler of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the lives of hibakusha in the wake of the bomb, themes she would elaborate in future work. A recent work “From Trinity to Trinity” (Torinitii kara Torinitii e) records her trip to Los Alamos New Mexico, the site of the first atomic bomb experiment, the source of her fifty-five years of experience of living with the bomb.

On the eve of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War Two, and the first anniversary of progressive political leadership by the Democratic Party of Japan, redress campaigns for wartime forced labor are bearing promising fruit and entering a decisive phase.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced on July 14 it would start talks on compensating the 300 Korean women who were deceived as teenagers into toiling without pay at a Nagoya aircraft factory. The so-called “teishintai” (volunteer corps) workers lost their lawsuit at the Japan Supreme Court in 2008, but last December the Japanese government issued seven of the women refunds of 99 yen (about one dollar) for pension deposits withheld during the war. The move enraged the Korean public and led to persistent protests at Mitsubishi offices in Tokyo and Seoul.

The Obama administration took office in 2009 determined to move beyond might-makes-right-makes-might unilateralism of the Bush years, and reassert America's global influence as the most principled and powerful guarantor of rule-based multilateralism.

With respect to China, this approach was presented as a doctrine of “strategic reassurance”.

Duara argues that the relationship between Manchukuo and Japan was a new form of imperialism, rather than a mirror-image of European imperialism. As Duara explains, the political relationship between the two showed “a strategic conception of the periphery as part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power.” The Japanese developed this strategy in response to growing nationalist movements by colonized people for independence after World War I. Many Japanese also thought they could win the cooperation of those movements by stressing their own frustrations at racial discrimination in the international sphere. Further exacerbating the sense that they were criticized by everyone, the Japanese faced racial discrimination when they tried to emigrate to Europe and North America and were refused even the principle of racial equality at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. Japan thus began to articulate itself as the anti-imperialist leader in Asia, set to lead the other Asian nations and throw off the yoke of western imperialism.

On January 17, PBS documentary program Frontline ran a feature on the Fukushima nuclear meltdown entitled Nuclear Aftershocks. It is available online here. The show has generated buzz, but also drawn significant critiques. The most powerful criticisms come from author Gregg Levine, writing on the website my FDL. The review is reproduced below. Please view the original here.

ULSAN, South Korea — Led by fast-growing China and India, Asia is going nuclear in a big way to feed its ravenous appetite for energy.

The strains of economic growth are already showing. Energy shortages have forced Chinese factories to scale back production, and farmers in India often have power for only half the day. Both countries say their future growth is at risk unless they diversify their energy mix.

Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neoconservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.

Writing in publications from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neoconservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by “realist” and other critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday's test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with “rogue” states like North Korea are useless and that “regime change” -by military means, if necessary – is the only answer.

The renowned architect's life work and his new book, My Place, reflects an awareness of humanity's close affinity to the world around us

“I wanted to go to a place that wasn’t neat and tidy, somewhere dangerous. I was bored, and it had something to do with the era and something to do with myself too.”

In a recent letter to fellow architect Sejima Kazuyo, Kuma Kengo expressed in the above words the tenor of his mood and the disarray of his esprit during his student days.

These drawings and paintings by Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb were created more than a quarter century after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. They are provided courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and form part of a much larger archive of more than 2,000 images and annotations. Posted at Japan Focus on April 27, 2005.

On April 11, the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability published a report entitled The Path from Fukushima: Short and Medium-term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on Japan's Electricity System (Executive Summary). The document, authored by a team headed by David von Hippel and Kae Takase, looks at an issue that has been frequently overlooked amid radiation concerns and attention to the tsunami-ravaged north – demand for electricity. Will Tokyo and surrounding regions have enough power to fuel revival? How will Japan's energy industry change in the wake of the Fukushima disaster?

Around 10pm on 5 October 1948 a small boat made its way along the coastline of Cape Sada Peninsula, the long finger of land that juts west from Ehime Prefecture on the Japanese island of Shikoku. The darkness was intense. It was a moonless autumn night, and the forested spine of hills above the jagged cliffs of the peninsula was devoid of lights.

The boat – a 20-ton wooden vessel called the Hatsushima – had left the heavy swell of the open ocean and now moved slowly and quietly through the calmer waters of the Uwa Sea. No doubt the captain believed that his craft's progress along this remote stretch of Shikoku coastline was unobserved. In the little fishing villages which dotted its rocky inlets the working day began and ended early, and most of the villagers were already asleep. But from the hills above, eyes were watching.

This article introduces the concept of “Insider minorities”, those whose difference is of a sort that currently does not deny their Japanese-ness in the eyes of other Japanese, as opposed to outsider minorities, who are considered foreign despite their long, even multigenerational, residence within Japan. Most surveys of minorities in Japan have focused on ethnic minorities, including Koreans and Chinese, as well as the indigenous Ainu and Okinawans. The Burakumin ends up being the only non-ethnic group to be included (see De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995; Weiner, 1997; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1998). Such a focus on ethnic and racial minorities, however, fails to recognize the extent of difference that exists in Japan. Indeed, ethnic minorities in Japan, together with the Burakumin, account for only 4 to 6% of the Japanese population (De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995, p.272), making it easy for many Japanese, most notably former Prime Minister Nakasone, to claim ethnic and racial homogeneity in contrast to other countries such as the U.S. (Creighton, 1997).

Japan's Ogasawara (or Bonin) Islands (Ogasawara shotou), dubbed ‘the ‘Galapagos of the East’, are a group of oceanic islands situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Many of their numerous indigenous fauna and flora are at the brink of extinction, mainly caused by human settlement and construction during the last half century. Among those destructive factors, a plan to build a commercial airport was the most controversial and divided the community. Although the airport plan was withdrawn by the Tokyo Municipal Government in 2001, the native species are still facing various dangers.

The zanryu fujin (stranded war wives) [1] are former Japanese emigrants to Manchukuo who remained in China at the end of the Second World War. They were long among the forgotten legacies of Japan's imperialist past. [2] The reasons why these women did not undergo repatriation during the years up to 1958, when large numbers of former colonial emigrants returned to Japan, are varied but in many cases, the ‘Chinese’ families that adopted them, or into which they married, played a part. [3] The stories of survival during the period immediately after the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War on 9 August 1945, the civil war that followed, and throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, are testament to their strength. At the same time, the history of how the zanryu fujin came to be in China is useful for understanding the Japanese government's colonial policies, its wartime attitudes toward women, and its post war handling of inconvenient war legacies.

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.

For six decades, the inhabitants of Okinawa have lived alongside thousands of US troops. Now new plans for base expansion have provoked fierce resistance.

Taira Natsume is a mild-mannered, bespectacled parson and pacifist in the Martin Luther King mode, but he warns he will not be pushed too far. “If the authorities come back with more people we'll be waiting for them,” he says. “I'm not a violent man but they're not going to get through.” It is a baking hot day in Henoko, a tiny fishing village in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture. For 110 days, the reverend and 8,000 supporters have been coming to this sun-bleached beach to fight off government engineers trying to begin drilling surveys for a proposed offshore helicopter base for the US military.

These are tough times for the people of Burma. They have endured decades of economic mismanagement, low living standards and brutal political oppression under an incompetent and negligent military that shows no signs of relinquishing its grip on power. Indeed, as the country approaches elections in 2010, the regime has cracked down on those it targets as opponents, imposing prison terms of up to 65 years on relief workers, comedians, writers, intellectuals, monks and others engaged in peaceful demonstrations or relief activities. No challenges to the junta are allowed and even local disaster relief workers are subject to arrest for embarrassing the regime. Those who joined peaceful demonstrations in the Saffron Revolution of 2007, or tried to help the survivors of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, have been singled out by the military junta for sentences that in many cases ensure the imprisoned will die behind bars. Moreover, political prisoners have been sent away to remote prisons where it is difficult for relatives to visit or to monitor their condition. Although the junta released about a dozen political prisoners in February 2009, the number of political prisoners has more than doubled since 2007 and stands at an estimated 2,100.

Translator's foreword: For the last two and a half years, I have been studying the inhabitants of Nagadoro, one of the twenty small hamlets in Iitate village, which has been evacuated and barricaded due to particularly high levels of radiation. Present government policy is to maintain the status of Nagadoro as a no-go zone for at least another four years. Among the 250 inhabitants is Shoji Masahiko, who until the nuclear disaster supported his wife and