Indonesia since the fall of Suharto in 1998 under reformasi remains subject to powerful tendencies for disintegrasi—both province-based “separatism” and general socio-political decay. These tendencies are greatly aggravated by the failure of democratically elected presidents and parliaments to effectively tackle endemic corruption or reform the armed forces, which continue to enjoy near-total immunity as a major practitioner, guarantor and enforcer of corrupt business practice and extortion. This article notes the activism of civil society and liberal media on the corruption issue and the commendable new array of anti-corruption institutions. But it argues that reform efforts have been virtually nullified by broad collusion of Indonesia's political, bureaucratic, military and business elites in sustaining—while “democratizing” and decentralizing—the system of corruption inherited from Suharto. The reform effort is now subject to political stasis or gridlock induced by money politics. Some reformers believe that politics in Indonesia has been effectively replaced by “transactions”. In arguing that “KKN” “ruins everything”—people's well-being, investment prospects, government budgets and development planning, democratic politics, the justice sector (including its corruption-fighting capacities), military professionalism, the environment and more—the author is serious. The article suggests that real change must await new social and political constellations and struggles initiated outside the parliamentary arena.

The examples above suggest governmental paralysis in the face of a pervasive corruption which impacts severely upon every important policy and institution in the republic. The President takes initiatives but hesitates fatally to follow through, and compromises his own reputation and effectiveness in the process. Most government ministries, for whom tactical funds and off-budget budgets are the stuff of life, do not even have a reform plan in front of them which would permit them to parlay their own essential income-boosting black funds (civil service pay being universally inadequate) against budgetary reform and a big boost to salaries.

Japan's defeat in World War II transformed East Asia into a Cold War arena of East-West confrontation. With China's involvement, the bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union flared during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. This article explores the impact of these wars on the people of East Asia.

This paper traces the emergence and development of the idea of “exit” as a form of resistance or challenge to the system in the writings of Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin. I show that the rhetoric of exit as resistance grows out of the climate of political disillusion in the aftermath of the political activism of the 60s as a strategy for finding a potential for popular resistance. With Karatani's attempt to create a social movement, NAM (the New Associationist Movement), the rhetoric shifts from emphasizing a defense of withdrawal from the “public” in order to elude control, towards emphasizing exit as an offensive weapon to be used actively by social movements in confronting the system. Today the idea of exit remains an important influence among activists and intellectuals associated with social movements. At the same time, there is a dilemma, which stems from its paradoxical attempt to mobilize political disillusionment and withdrawal from public involvement into a political force.

Just over one hundred years ago, in 1902, Americans participated in a brief, intense and mostly forgotten debate on the practice of torture in a context of imperial warfare and counter-insurgency. The setting was the U. S. invasion of the Philippines, a war of conquest waged against the forces of the Philippine Republic begun in 1899. Within a year, it had developed into a guerrilla conflict, one that aroused considerable anti-war opposition in the United States.

It all seemed deadly familiar: an adult, 38-year-old US Marine sergeant, Tyrone Hadnott, accused by the Okinawan police of sexually violating a 14-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl. He claims he did not actually rape her but only forcibly kissed her, as if knocking down an innocent child and slobbering all over her face is OK if you're a representative of the American military forces. The accused marine has now been released because the girl has refused to press charges - perhaps because he is innocent as he claimed or perhaps because she can't face the ignominy of appearing in court.

At 12, Pov knows the sexual geography of the riverfront area in Phnom Penh like the seasoned prostitute he has become. The four middle-aged Frenchmen in front of us? “They like girls,” he explains, giggling. “Small girls.” The sun-blackened and tattered woman a few yards away? She will rent her daughter for the price of a hamburger. If I don't like boys he can fetch girls. Otherwise, in exchange for the meager contents of my wallet, Pov and his three barefoot, scruffy friends will guide me to a safe hotel and stay the night. “What would we do there?” I ask. “Up to you,” he says.

Until March of 2007, Stephen Roach was the chief economist for Morgan Stanley and the analyst to read on the Morgan Stanley Global Economic Forum page. But his repeated warnings of a bubble economy about to burst went unappreciated by his paymasters and - rumor has it - many Morgan Stanley investors. Yet even as they moved Roach to the Morgan Stanley Asia desk, far away from his forum, the housing bubble he warned of was already showing strong evidence of impending collapse. Late last summer, of course, the subprime market in the financial sector slipped suddenly into meltdown mode, leaving not only homeowners in the lurch, but striking deep into the profits of the likes of Citibank. Now it seems that not only the US economy but others, too, are sliding into something truly ominous. So inside the year since Roach was silenced, we have moved from bubble-era euphoria to the growing possibilities of a major recession, and some believe even a 1930s style collapse. So Roach is clearly someone worth listening to, in this instance comparing the US with Japan's 1990s implosion.

Historical issues involving Japan and South Korea have entered a new phase with the inauguration in Seoul on February 25 of a conservative president and the repatriation in January of the remains of 101 Koreans who died while forcibly serving in the Japanese military during World War II.

The Bush administration's approach to North Korea was once quite consistent with its overall foreign policy. There was name calling, a preference for regime change and an emphasis on military solutions. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the United States and North Korea, like so many other tense standoffs, deteriorated over the last seven years. The U.S. accused the third member of the “axis of evil” of money-laundering, missile sales and a secret program for the production of nuclear material. For its part, North Korea responded tit for tat at the rhetorical level. In October 2006, it upped the ante by exploding a nuclear device. If the United States were not tied up in other military conflicts — and eyeing Iran — a war in Northeast Asia might have been higher on the administration's to-do list.

The “Declaration for Greater East Asian Cooperation” was a wartime booklet and elementary text published for use in Japan's Asian and Pacific colonies and occupied territories. Through the presentation of attractive images of children and people of many lands and cultures, the images convey the noble mission that informed Japanese wartime propaganda—that Japan would unite fellow Asians under its leadership to throw off the yoke of exploitive Western imperialism. The text also reveals the imperialist assumptions that Japan shared with those same imperialist powers, but here cloaked in a rhetoric evocative of Confucian benevolence.

Nakata Takako, 85, runs a small furniture store in Osaka. She lives alone in a wood-frame building that contains both her residence and the shop. Married during the war, she and her husband started the business after the war ended. They raised two daughters. Her husband died some 25 years ago, and she has run the business alone since then.

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed in North Korea on February 25 to much international attention – and controversy. When news of an invitation from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, the official name of North Korea) surfaced last fall, it ignited a storm of North Korea-bashing as well as hope in some quarters for a breakthrough in DPRK-US relations modeled on the ping pong diplomacy that jump-started US-China relations earlier. The media coverage of the event recapitulated the regime change vs. engagement debates argued in the security realm. After examining the background to the events in Pyongyang, this article assesses Western responses to the proposed visit and its potential significance for the US-North Korea relationship.

One of the most striking aspects of the international history of the 1930s is the revival and official endorsement of a pan-Asian vision of regional world order in Japan. The pan-Asian discourse of East-West civilizational difference and comparison was influential in various intellectual circles in Asia. But during the 1920s, as a political project of Asian solidarity, it was irrelevant for Japan's foreign policy, and it did not have any international momentum or movement. The period after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, however, witnessed a process by which pan-Asianist ideas and projects became part of Japan's official foreign policy rhetoric. After 1933 Japan's pan-Asian internationalism began to overshadow liberal internationalism, gradually becoming the mainstream vision of an alternative world order. This process culminated in the declaration of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere in 1940, a project that relied heavily on the rhetoric of pan-Asian internationalism. In 1943, seventeen years after the ineffectual 1926 Nagasaki pan-Asiatic conference that was ridiculed by official and liberal circles in Japan, the Japanese government itself hosted a Greater East Asia Conference to which it invited the leaders of the Philippines, Burma, the provincial government of India, the Nanking government of China, Manchukuo, and Thailand.

The use and potential misuse of sovereign wealth funds in Asia has been newsworthy of late, especially because of their size and high profile investments. China and – and possibly Japan as well – look to parlay their governmentowned investment vehicles. With its small population base, and vast reserves of oil and natural gas, the small Southeast Asian nation of Brunei Darussalam, located on the northeastern side of the island of Borneo, has been able to lever its economy into providing an enviable standard of living for its population and mega-billions for its ruling Royal family.

With the price of oil skyrocketing to more than $100 a barrel, many nations including Japan and the United States, are looking to the nuclear power option among others. Is nuclear power a viable option in a world of expensive and polluting fossil fuels? Japan Focus, in the first of a series of articles on energy options centered on renewable options and the environmental costs of energy options, presents the case for nuclear power recently made by Endo Tetsuya and a critique of the nuclear option by Arjun Makhijani.

We are in a period of transition involving a protracted energy crisis and an energy revolution evidently on the way as well. Oil prices have blown through US$ 100/barrel, and it is anyone's guess if and when they'll drop below three figures again. Even if oil prices do decline significantly through what appears to be a deep recession in the United States, swelling demand in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and elsewhere will likely bring them back up and over 100 dollars in a matter of months. On top of that, the evidence of a global environmental problem increasingly reads like dystopian fiction. The February 21 midterm report of the latest comprehensive study of global warming (the Garnaut Review) warns that we must be well on the way to making deep cuts in CO2 emissions before 2020 or the “show will be over.” In short, we face escalating energy and environmental costs in the twilight of the oil age.

The exhibit was in Tokyo from August 6-24, 2008. An exhibit is also planned for Okinawa in 2009.

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” 〠€ Article 9, Japanese Constitution

For divided nations such as the two Koreas, which by their very rationales are involved in a highly-charged competition for legitimacy with their other ‘part-nation’, the Olympics have been a particularly potent arena for political posturing. This article examines the troubled history of the two Koreas' endeavours to out-do each other in the Olympic movement, the prospects of a joint Korean team for the Beijing Olympics being realised, and the potential Chinese role in the run-up to those Olympics, which mean so much to China.

In Japan at War: An Oral History, Hideo Sato recalls being forced to hoist the hinomaru, the Japanese flag, in tandem with the playing of Kimigayo — “His Majesty's Reign,” the Japanese national anthem — as a schoolchild in the 1940s. If the flag reached the top of the pole too early the teachers would beat him. More than 60 years later, he's “chagrined that they still raise the flag.”