The Mekong, one of the world's major rivers, starting in Tibet and flowing through south China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, provides sustenance through irrigation and fishing to those living in its basin. But it also provides hydroelectric power through dams, three of which were built in China, with more planned. And it is precisely these dams that are now threatening the water supply, the livelihood of those living downstream, and the relations between China and its southern neighbors. A fourth Chinese dam, Xiaowan, that should generate 4,200 megawatts of power, could affect the level of fish stocks in Cambodia and water supply for Vietnam's rice fields. But China contends controlling the water flow will prevent the adverse effects of erosion caused by the Mekong's flooding cycle and will supply renewable energy. Winning the debate or coming to a workable compromise is further complicated by China's refusal to join the Mekong River Commission, an inter-government agency whose members include the four of the downstream countries. And though the global financial crisis has put on hold other dams being planned by the downstream countries, China is moving ahead with its plans.

It is Japan, but yet there is a difference somehow. Isabella Bird, 1878.

A whole history remains to be written of spaces — which would at the same time be the history of powers — from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power”

Though Hokkaidō may seem a natural part of Japan, manacled to Tokyo as it is by law, by language, by economics, and by the 54 kilometer undersea Seikan Tunnel, Hokkaidō was not always Japan. Hokkaidō was not always Hokkaidō. Hokkaidō was modern Japan's first foreign conquest; its first colony in a deliberate imperial trajectory begun in 1869, concluded in 1945 and eventually encompassing vast tracts of East and Southeast Asia. The colonization of Hokkaidō took place in many ways, most especially through the catastrophic deculturation, dispossession and subjugation of the island's indigenous population, the Ainu. [1] Yet, the business of making Hokkaidō, “Hokkaidō,” of turning the island known as Ezochi, a wild untrammeled sort of place, into an integral part of modern Japan was also about space, about creations of space and about remaking local space in ways that delivered Ezochi up to Hokkaidō and surrendered Hokkaidō to Japan.