Much English writing about pacifism and peace movements has focused on the ideas and activities of Europeans and Americans. While attention has been paid to Mohandas Gandhi, peace movements in other parts of the world have been largely ignored. Like most Western peace activists, however, Gandhi was an exceptional figure in Indian society, far from the political mainstream.

In contrast to most other societies, there has been a widely shared public consensus in Japan throughout most of the post-war years that the Japanese government should abide by the pacifistic guidelines decreed by its Constitution, which forbids Japan from waging wars or maintaining armed forces. This charter won approval ratings of 70-90 per cent in public opinion polls taken from the 1960s through the 1980s. These figures demonstrate that a wide sector of the general public in Japan, although not engaging in any political activities, shared pacifist views that are minority opinions in the rest of the world.

The Fox-ification of the US media proceeds apace. In Italy, the country's media mogul doubles as Prime Minister. In Britain public broadcasting is under pressure from Blairite forces. Japan, the world's No 2 capitalist power, is left out of most discussion on global media trends, but is undergoing the same pressures. Allegations of political intervention to tailor the way the issue of “comfort women” in 1930s and 1940s Asia should be addressed in a 2001 documentary stirred a full scale media war in 2005.

With the lunar New Year, in Northeast Asia the darkness of winter recedes, a pale sun gains strength, daylight hours lengthen and the earth stirs. However, in one of the bleakest and coldest corners of the region, North Korea, the land is still hard-frozen, spring is far off, and political frosts have not melted for more than half a century. Yet all extremes are eventually exhausted and yield, as yang to yin, and even for North Korea that time may not be far off.

Chinese fans subjected the Japanese team to intense booing at the Asia Cup Games held in China in August. They also made their disgust evident when Kimigayo, the Japanese anthem, was sung. Chinese fans vandalized Japanese Embassy cars in Beijing after the final match. These events sent shockwaves through Japan and the incidents were taken up by the foreign media.

The impact was not limited to the attention given to the radical actions of the Chinese fans by the Japanese media. Japan's China experts also categorized the violent behavior of the Chinese fans as a product of the nationalistic anti-Japanese education that young Chinese receive. Some like Professor Kojima Tomoyuki of Keio University harshly criticized China. “The anti-Japanese bias in their education has gone too far,” he wrote in The Asahi Shimbun of August 31, 2004. Television news and variety “Wideshow” Programs went as far as to assert that if China continues to drag politics into sports, it is not qualified to host the 2008 Olympics. An August 8 editorial of the Asahi Shimbun states, “[The actions of Chinese fans] at the final match between China and Japan gave us an opportunity to see the mindset of the Chinese who will be welcoming us at the Olympics in four years.”

At first glance, the handful of Tokyo rightists who created a furor about a graphic scene of the Nanjing Massacre in two September issues of the popular manga magazine Young Jump Weekly are a surprisingly tolerant lot. They restricted their complaint to technical issues in “My Country is Burning” (Kuni ga moeru!) by Motomiya Hiroshi, the only remotely educational series in a popular weekly comic book, and ignored 400 pages of gratuitous sex, violence, scatology and gore that dominates this illustrated publication with a reported circulation of 2 million.