On 16 February 2005, the Shimane Prefectural Assembly passed an ordinance designed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japan's assumption of control over Takeshima Island by establishing a “Takeshima Day.” This exposed a fundamental problem in the relationship between Japan and South Korea and drew a severe response on the part of the South Korean people and government. On 17 February the South Korean government announced a shift in policy towards Japan in the unprecedented form of a statement from the Permanent Committee of its National Security Council.

March 10 is the 60th anniversary of one of the great forgotten atrocities of World War 2: the fire-bombing of Tokyo which killed over 100,000 people

Saotome Katsumoto was 12 when he heard the familiar rumble of B-29 bombers.

“It was a midnight air raid, but unlike anything we had experienced before. The planes flew in very low, so low you could see the fires reflected in their undercarriages, and they dropped mostly incendiaries. The fires started everywhere and we tried to fight them, but there was a strong, northerly wind fanning the flames. All around me people were on fire, writhing in agony.”

In the wake of the North Korean famine, which began in 1995, hundreds of thousands of people fled to northeast China. Although many returned and a smaller number went to third countries, many tens of thousands remain. They face two main problems. First is the mistreatment they sometimes receive. China does not recognize them as refugees, or even the legality of their being in the country, so they are forced into an underground existence, making them targets for economic and sexual exploitation.

On the day of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March 1995, we were shocked beyond words. It was the first act of indiscriminate terrorism in Japan. It was also the first time for most of us to hear the term “sarin.” But this nerve gas with an unfamiliar name was actually released inside subway cars, killing and injuring many people.

The potentially powerful corrective offered in this provocative book to the contemporary U.S. political and media definition of “terrorism” calls to mind one of Mark Selden’s editorial efforts from a comparable time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Selden was among a group of young Asian studies specialists who pointedly challenged the then prevailing Cold War premises that were the basis of dominant American perceptions of and official policies toward Asia. Whereas McCarthyite censure had largely silenced criticism of the U.S. government by more senior scholars in the field (lest one appear to be “un-American”), this group argued against an unexamined acceptance of American benevolence as being at the heart of American intervention across Asia since the end of World War II.

Tensions between Japan and the United States are rising over U.S. bases on Okinawa, notably with respect to plans approved by the two powers in 1999 to move the Futenma air station from densely populated Ginowan to the pristine Henoko Bay, home of the threatened dugong, a large sea mammal. The following Yomiuri shimbun opinion piece examines the continued discussions at the highest levels of the military of the two countries. Here we note that the conflict is simultaneously being played out on the ground in Okinawa. Okinawan opposition to American bases crescendoed in August 2004 when a US helicopter based at Futenma crashed in Ginowan at the university. This accelerated pressure for the base transfer, but in Henoko, local resistance, now in its eight year, is manifest in a sit-in that has passed its 300th day at the port where activists in sea kayaks and fishing trawlers have prevented Defense Agency and other vessels from beginning to drill. Other calls throughout the prefecture demand that the nearly 7,000 Marines presently stationed in Iraq not be returned to Okinawa where women's groups in particular fear violent crimes by returning soldiers. Meanwhile, a Stars & Stripes article of February 24, 2004 makes clear that the Marines, who have made Okinawa their most important Pacific base for sixty years, are settling in for the long haul. For example, at Camp Foster, two nine-story apartment towers with 136 three and four bedroom units are nearing completion, following the recent completion of 194 townhouse units. Camps Hansen and Schwab are building new minimalls and food courts. For its part, the US has expressed willingness to consider other sites for the Futenama base than Henoko, but insists that the base must be located in Okinawa. Japan Focus editors.

When Oe Kenzaburo was 28, and already a cult writer for Japan's postwar youth, his first child was born in 1963 with a herniated brain pushing out of his skull, the “two-headed monster baby” of Oe's later fiction. Corrective surgery threatened brain damage, and for a while the father longed for the infant's death -a “disgraceful” time, he later wrote in a fictionalised memoir, that “no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash out of my life”. Yet a visit to Hiroshima to report on a peace congress, and encounters with atomic-bomb survivors, convinced Oe beyond doubt that his child must live. “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son,” he says.

This May, the United Nations will be holding a review conference on the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), a key nuclear arms control and disarmament agreement to which 188 countries are now parties.

Originally proposed by the U.S. and Soviet governments, the NPT was signed at the United Nations in 1968 and went into force in 1970. Under its provisions, non-nuclear nations agreed to renounce the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed nations agreed to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons through good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament. In this fashion, nations on both sides of the Cold War divide signaled their intention to halt the nuclear arms race and move toward a nuclear-free world.

TOKYO – When are a few sea-swept, uninhabited rocky islets more than a bunch of rocks? When they involve lucrative fisheries and emotional issues that hark back to the days of the Japanese Empire.

The two tiny, rocky islets surrounded by 33 smaller rocks also represent sovereignty and national pride for both Japan and South Korea - though Seoul controls them now and the lucrative fishing in the area. The disputes over the islands – called Tokdo by Koreans and Takeshima by Japanese – threaten the recent rapprochement between the two neighbors and represent a significant political and economic setback. The South Korean public is so incensed that hundreds have poured into the streets to protest and the united front against North Korea's nuclear ambitions is cracking.

A presidential election will be held in South Korea at the end of next year to choose a successor to Roh Moo Hyun, leader of the Uri Party, who is due to step down in February 2008.

While it is rather early to talk about his replacement, I recently led a Japan National Press Club mission to South Korea to observe the situation and to meet with the leading contenders for the presidency.

Tadao Ando, one of Japan's greatest living
architects, likes to tell the
story of the stray dog, a stately akita, that
wandered into his studio in
Osaka some 20 years ago, and decided to stay.
“First, I thought I would
call her Kenzo Tange; but then I realised I
couldn't kick Kenzo Tange
around. So I called her Le Corbusier instead.”

The latest numbers out of Iraq are some 11,000 Americans wounded in action and some 1,500 dead. The most conservative estimate of noncombatant Iraqis killed is about 15,700. This is happening because the war was sold to the U.S. Congress on the basis of false and misleading intelligence. So it's important to keep these numbers in mind in coping with the barrage of intelligence leaks we are getting about North Korea, in particular about the suspected uranium enrichment program that we'll be focusing on today. The people who put out the intelligence on Iraq don't think of themselves as liars. They operate according to an ideological, black and white view of the world in which there are good guys and bad guys and with bad guys you have to assume the worst.

WASHINGTON. The United States plans to launch “trilateral military cooperation” with Japan and South Korea to deal not only with North Korea but also with China and terrorist threats in Asia, Adm. William Fallon, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, said Tuesday.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Fallon said the United States has been working to transform its bilateral defense alliances with the two nations to deal with regional and global issues and develop them into a stronger trilateral initiative.

The Japanese government is working on several fronts to enhance energy security and reduce the country's reliance on oil from the Middle East.

But that dependency is unlikely to change much anytime soon, said analyst Hosoe Tomoko in a January report by Fesharaki Associates Consulting & Technical Services Inc. (FACTS Inc.), Honolulu.

Once a synonym for war and revolutionary terror, we wonder at the rebirth of Cambodia as tourist destination of choice. We wonder at the market forces that privilege an approach to travel keyed to providing the costly facilities and infrastructure required to enable large numbers of rich international tourists to descend upon places that were utterly inaccessible only a decade ago. We wonder, too, at the ability of the market to adjust to risk calculation as dramatized by the Asian tsunami of 2004 and the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005.

KAWASAKI, Japan - The shrill voice of one old woman with humped shoulders still leaves a distant but lasting memory. When I was an elementary and junior-high-school student in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, I frequently visited my ethnic-Korean friends after school. One day, on the way to a Korean friend's house, an old woman just down the way suddenly snarled at me, saying, “Ilbon ka!” I was stunned. Later I found that what she meant by those few words was something like “Hey, Japanese!” or “Are you Japanese?” (Ilbon means “Japan” in Korean, and ka is an interrogative in Japanese.) She had expressed her deep distrust of all Japanese nationals, even of a boy like me. I was definitely intimidated. As can be readily understood, the older the Koreans, the more distrustful they were. Today I understand why.

PALO ALTO, Calif. – The European Union is showing a new independent stance on foreign-policy issues as the logic of its industrial and economic integration plays out in the international arena.

Already the EU has taken a distinct and independent approach to both the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the nuclear crisis in Iran. Now it has broken ranks over the Korean Peninsula, fed up and concerned with the failure to resolve the ongoing crisis over North Korea's development of nuclear arms.

On October 4, 2002, the United States suddenly confronted North Korea with a damning accusation: that it was secretly developing a program to enrich uranium to weapons grade, in violation of the 1994 agreement that Pyongyang had signed with Washington to freeze its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Since North Korea had cheated, the Bush administration declared, the United States was no longer bound by its side of the deal. Accordingly, on November 14, 2002, the United States and its allies suspended the oil shipments they had been providing North Korea under the 1994 agreement.

BEIJING - With floods of cash and a new policy of patience and friendly support, China has quietly penetrated the thick wall surrounding North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's regime - gaining significant leverage for the first time in one of the world's most closed societies. Chinese leaders have gained Mr. Kim's ear, sources say, with a message that the North can revitalize its economy while still holding tight political control.

In the past year, with Washington preoccupied, Beijing has bypassed US hopes that it would squeeze Kim and force him to drop his nuclear ambitions. Indeed, the once-heady “six-party process,” started in 2003 to denuclearize Korea, appears defunct. Instead, Beijing pumped up investment to some $2 billion last year, and is helping to rebuild ports, create factories, and modernize energy sectors in what one US diplomat calls a “massive carrotgiving operation.” Yet Beijing is not using such aid as a means to end the North's nuclear program.