This article assesses the significance of China's recently announced investments in large copper and oil development in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively, with potential significance not only for development and peace in the two war-torn nations, but also for China's global role and the US-China relationship. With foreign and domestic investment in both nations barely trickling in despite UN, World Bank, NATO and US efforts, the Chinese plans are highly significant.

[Editors' note: The final version of this article was received just prior to the announcement of Fukuda Yasuo's resignation as Prime Minister. Tanter comments: Fukuda's resignation will change nothing in the underlying domestic and alliance strains that lead to his decision to resign. The next Liberal Democratic Party leader, whether Aso Taro, Koike Yuriko, or someone else, will face the same limitations, and the same demands on military policy, but with even more diminished political resources and room for maneuvre. If the LDP moves to a general election following the selection of a new Prime Minister, the Democratic Party of Japan would be under severe pressure, on the one hand, from domestic sources to make good on its criticism of the Indian Ocean deployment, and on the other, from the United States, to recognize US understandings of Japan's global responsibilities – and maintain the deployment - possibly as the price of power.]

The Republic of Korea has turned 60. Birthdays are a time for looking back over the past as well as for planning the future. The sad truth, however, is that the Republic that was born in 1948 was only the first of six, and that its record contains little to celebrate and much to lament. It is unlikely that many Koreans today remember it with pride or pleasure.

On the morning of August 26, 2008, aid worker Ito Kazuya arrived at work as usual. Four armed men suddenly appeared and abducted him. Local people witnessed the abduction, and a force of policemen and villagers gave chase into the mountains above north of the village of Bodyalai near Dara-e-Noor, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. The result was a tragedy: Ito was shot three times in the leg and once in the left thigh. On the morning following the abduction, his body was found by the local people: Ito had bled to death.

This is a revised version of a paper that was prepared for the Conference in Commemoration of the June 15 South-North Joint Declaration, Kim Dae Jung Peace Center Seoul, June 12, 2008.

A major purpose of this conference is to take stock of the June 2000 summit with the benefit of eight years of hindsight, also to examine the achievements of the October 2007 summit, and to assess where we are today in relations with North Korea. My perspective is obviously an American one, and I am deeply interested in where Korean affairs might go after the inauguration of a new American president only eight months from now. But I am afraid I sometimes overestimate American influence on Korean affairs. I think recent years have demonstrated that when Korean leaders want something badly enough, and stick to their policies and principles, they can directly or indirectly influence American leaders toward adopting similar policies. And so I want to make one major point that I will come back to in the end: Presidents Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun persisted with their engagement policy toward Pyongyang through five years of intense American pressure, criticism, and provocation, and ultimately were vindicated when the Bush administration turned 180 degrees and also adopted an engagement policy. Why this happened is still something of a mystery, but it certainly did happen.

If the struggle in the Caucasus was ever over oil and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) agenda towards Central Asia, the United States suffered a colossal setback this week. Kazakhstan, the Caspian energy powerhouse and a key Central Asian player, has decided to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia over the conflict with Georgia, and Russia's de facto control over two major Black Sea ports has been consolidated.

Since 1990 both Japan and Korea have experienced “commemoration booms,” in which the number of private and public memorial museums and monuments has tripled. These institutions provide narratives of each nation's recent past and articulate the ideals of “nation” and “citizenship.” They recompose tales of a nation in order to make them relevant for public and private life. Like writing history, the museum collects and assembles fragments of the past and carefully re-contextualizes them into a narrative of the present. Precisely because of its role in institutionalizing social norms and values, the museum plays a crucial role in the production of national identity. It shapes the manner in which the nation creates its history, imagines its boundaries, and constitutes its citizenship.

Out of the thick political fog produced by Japan's G8 Summit in Hokkaido emerged one key pledge: the world's second-largest economy has announced a 60-80 percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2050, one of the most ambitious national targets. The pledge has since come under intense scrutiny, particularly over the telling lack of mid-term targets and deliberate fudging on the starting or base year for cuts – 1990 or 2008? But one thing remains very clear: nuclear energy will shoulder much of the burden of the country's climate-change strategy.

While a handful of the wealthy routinely drink expensive, high function mineral water, “boutique water”, as it is called, one out of five people in the world cannot count on getting any safe drinking water at all.

One in three of the world’s population lives in an environment lacking such basic sanitary facilities as toilets and sewers and where untreated waste is discharged into rivers, lakes and marshes. People who must use that water for drinking and cooking are at high risk of contracting diarrhea or diseases from parasites transmitted through the water.

The special waiver granted to India by the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) from its nuclear trade rules is being seen as a massive setback to the cause of global nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

Japan's Yasukuni problem is inseparable from the fact that nationalism is the dominant ideology of our era. This is abundantly clear in media representations, memorials, museums and popular consciousness during and after wars and other international conflicts. This is true not only of Japan but also of South Korea, China and the US, among many others. And it is surely nationalism—stimulated and emboldened throughout Asia following the end of the era of US-Soviet confrontation, the rise of China as a regional and world power, and aggressive US actions associated with the “war on terror”—that constitutes the most powerful obstacle to resolution of the issues that divide nations and inflame passions in the Asia Pacific and beyond. Throughout the twentieth century, nationalism has everywhere been the handmaiden of war: war has provided a powerful stimulus to nationalism; nationalism has repeatedly led nations to war; and war memory is central to framing and fueling nationalist historical legacies. This article considers Yasukuni Shrine and Japanese war memory and representation in relationship to contemporary nationalism and its implications for the future of East Asia.

The apparent success of Meiji Japan's rapid modernization project at the turn of the twentieth century did not go unnoticed by inhabitants of Ottoman lands concerned with their Empire's survival, including Ottoman statesmen and political activists determined to achieve the same results. Ottoman Arab journalists and intellectuals who were subtly objecting to their exclusion from political power within the Empire, however, produced a discourse on Japanese modernity that explored Japan's reform and modernizing projects as well as its distinct national identity. In doing so, these Arab writers formulated a critique of the Ottoman state by highlighting its failures in contrast to modern Japan, though their idealization of Japan resembled that of their Ottoman Turkish counterparts.

Many Japanese neonationalists contend that it is “masochistic” to look critically at the nation's wars of the 1930s and 1940s. They assume that criticism of Japanese militarism and love of the country and its traditions are somehow mutually exclusive. In place of an honest look at past crimes, revisionists present Japan as a victim, originally of Western imperialism, and now of a conspiracy of defamation by its neighbors.

Sixty-six years after Japan's annexation of the former Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879, in the waning months of the Asia-Pacific War, the American military partitioned the Ryukyu Islands from Japan. The replacement of Okinawa Prefecture by US military rule in the Ryukyus from 1945 had profound implications, for residents of the occupied islands. A major repercussion of the military government's separation of the Ryukyus was the enforced isolation of the four main island groups from occupied Japan. The Ryukyuan-Japanese border severed longstanding administrative and economic links, while restrictive border controls prohibited free travel and interaction between the two sides. Another consequence of this imposed barrier was the socio-economic problem of how to provide for the livelihood and welfare of the island residents, who thereby became entirely dependent on the military government. These problems were compounded by the massive destruction, loss of life, and overall displacement of residents in the wake of war, especially in Okinawa.

At the beginning of the third week of September in Hanamaki our thoughts turn, with the hand of the clock, to another world. The autumnal equinox certainly reinforces this; for this is the season in Japan of recalling those who came before us, a time when many Japanese people choose to visit the gravesites of their ancestors.

I respect the intention of Tawara Yoshifumi to alert the Japanese and international public to the designs of the nationalist right-wing on the Japanese school curriculum – with which designs I have no sympathy. However, the errors, exaggeration and misleading sensationalism in his article ‘The Hearts of Children’ (posted at Japan Focus on 25 August 2008) only serve ultimately to discredit liberal views on education, thus rebounding to the advantage of the right. This is unfortunate, especially given that the article also contains useful information. This brief reply aims to point out some of the ways in which Mr Tawara's article misleads.

Starving children, collapsing nuclear plants, a leader wearing sunglasses and a jump suit – when it comes to North Korea, the choice of imagery in the press is limited. Several coffee table books, illustrated travel accounts and even a graphic novel present impressions of empty boulevards, monumental statues, workers with a smile on their face and the colorful Arirang Mass Games.

Is there a more enduring World War image than the kamikaze pilots: those super-patriots who, according to the stereotype, willingly, even joyfully, pledged loyalty to their beloved emperor as they flew their doomed planes into Allied ships? The image still produces sympathetic tears and angry sneers: prime minister-to-be Koizumi Jun'ichirÅ▯ weeping at the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots in 2001; an American college history textbook referring to Japan's late-war air force as “a band of fanatical suicide pilots called kamikazes.” Indeed, Risa Morimoto began working on her provocative new movie, “Wings of Defeat,” out of a desire to understand how her own uncle, “a funny, kind, and gentle man,” could have been such a “crazy lunatic,” one of those “jumping at the chance to die for their emperor.”

A bloody dispute between two rival Yakuza groups in a southern Japanese city has led to a historic fight-back by local people. But rooting out the mob from society will not be easy.

“Get lost.” Not a promising start to an interview but this is hardly a standard interviewee: a flint-eyed gangster sporting a crew cut and a boiler suit. His two colleagues glower from behind oversized sunglasses and thick layers of suspicion. Rippling tattoos snake out of the rolled-up sleeves of Goon No. 1. “Kieusero,” [Fuck Off], he growls before slamming down the shutter of his office garage.

For half a century, Australian journalists and academics have fought bitterly over the legacy of journalist Wilfred Burchett. Burchett broke the US embargo to report on radiation from Hiroshima in August 1945, calling it “the atomic plague, then controversially covered the Korean and Vietnam Wars from “the other side”. “Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale?” he pondered of Hiroshima.