[We present a two part series on Angkor Wat and Asian tourism. See Geoffrey Gunn, “Angkor and Beyond: the Asian tourism phenomenon”]

SIEM REAP, Cambodia–Tourism is becoming the lifeblood of this land that survived the “killing fields” and a civil war. There are many signs of progress in the 13 years since United Nations-sponsored elections brought peace.

TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States has informally asked Japan to suspend its plans to develop an Iranian oil field as part of world efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, a Japanese newspaper said on Thursday.

Resource-poor Japan has been planning to develop Iran's Azadegan oil field, estimated to hold the world's second-biggest single oil reserve, despite objections from Washington.

[This is an updated report on the attempt to secure redress for Chinese wartime forced labor following the March 29 verdict issued by the Fukuoka District Court.]

Chinese forced laborers have been waiting for a verdict for sixty years. They received it on March 29. The Fukuoka District Court judge announced the ruling-all claims rejected—and left the packed courtroom in less than one minute. Forty-five Chinese survivors of forced labor in wartime Japan, ranging in age from 74 to 91, had been seeking individual compensation of around $200,000 and a published apology from the Japanese government, Mitsubishi Materials Corp. and Mitsui Mining Corp.

Just when Japan's Imperial House was on the verge of an historic reform that would have marked an enormous step towards making it a more gender equal institution, the legislation permitting an Empress to reign was suddenly shelved. The immediate cause of the abrupt turnaround was the surprise announcement that 39-year-old Princess Kiko, the Emperor's daughter-in-law, was pregnant. The announcement led Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro to promptly abandon his reform plans, handing victory to ultra-conservatives who bitterly opposed the proposals.

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, “Look at that structure!” I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. “It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan,” he says, “the newest carrier in the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country's seventh largest city.”

Two regions have emerged as the most likely sources of great power conflict in the 21st century. The first is the Middle East, which is the focal point for the U.S.-led war on terrorism. The region is important both as part of a global ideological struggle against Islamist extremism and in the quest for oil and gas resources. The second is Asia, as the rise of China presents competition for both intangible and material resources on the world stage.

In January the leaders of two great automobile companies made separate appearances before the media of their respective countries to demonstrate how Japanese- and American-style capitalism continue to differ.

In the United States, Bill Ford, the chairman and chief executive of the automobile company that bears his family name, announced that his firm is embarking on a recovery plan that involves laying off 30,000 workers over the next six years, many of them in the next twelve months. The latest cuts bring the total announced job cuts of the Big Three auto firms over the past five years to 140,000-one-third of their former workforce.

When U.S. President George W. Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro took a friendly stroll through the quiet grounds of Kyoto's Imperial Palace last November, it was easy to assume that things just couldn't have been better between the two countries. Yes, there was the issue of U.S. beef, which Japan had banned in 2003 after mad-cow disease was discovered in U.S. cattle. But bilateral trade issues have always taken a back seat to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and it was clear Bush and Koizumi were in Kyoto to celebrate an agreement, signed in October, that would be the first major realignment of U.S. forces in Japan since the end of the Cold War.

Yasukuni Shrine, home for a century and a half to the spirits of Japan's fallen soldiers, has fueled controversy in every decade of my academic career. When I arrived in Tokyo as the 1970s were about to dawn, great numbers of students and young radicals across the nation were working in concert with writers, professors, and Christian theologians of all ages in opposition to the state's ties to the Shinto institution. In the mid-1980s, I attended a dinner at which Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro sought (and received) the support of several prominent American scholars for his much-criticized visits to Yasukuni as prime minister. While I was visiting Beijing several years ago, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro made one of his periodic visits to the shrine, touching off a level of anger that I could only grasp by being in China. And today, as I write this from Tokyo, the Chinese assert that they will judge Japan's next political leader by one issue above all others: whether he visits Yasukuni.

Japan's unique “buy Asian and African” drive has shifted into high gear as part of its broader diplomatic effort to help the poorest among the developing countries.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) last month kicked off the drive, officially dubbed the One Village, One Product (OVOP) campaign, which is an expansion of a late-1970s domestic program that is being extended to developing countries.

In her January 18, 2006 speech at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attracted attention by arguing that U.S. foreign policy would henceforth be shaped by a “transformational diplomacy … rooted in partnership, not paternalism.” Her address was taken by some observers to mean that the neoconservative policy assumptions which have condemned the United States to the tragedy in Iraq and elsewhere were being replaced by a realist perspective taking American policy back to the more constructive days of the partnerships George Marshall and Dean Acheson (whom she singled out for praise in her question-and-answer session), formed with Western Europe and Japan. These partnerships aimed to institutionalize both the rebuilding of those war-devastated partners and the containment of the Soviet Union.

[Amid booming stock markets, record corporate profits, and talk of a Japanese economic recovery, it is easy to forget that the world economy is delicately poised atop twin peaks of debt. US public sector debt is now approaching the size of its GDP while Japan's is well over one and a half times and heading towards double its GDP. This means mountains of debt of about equal size on both sides of the Pacific, roughly 7 to 8 trillion dollars each. Viewed from one angle, the Japanese debt is more chronic not only because of its smaller population and larger share of GDP, but because population decline carries with it a shrinking labor force and greater welfare costs. From another perspective, however, the American debt is more serious because it is owed to foreigners, rather than to US individuals and institutions. Paradoxically, a great deal of it is owed to Japan. Only the most carefully calibrated manipulation of interest rates (for many years, close to zero interest in Japan) makes it possible to keep up the necessary flow of funds to lubricate this system, while the two virtually bankupt countries nervously prop each other up.

In July 2005, the United Nations special rapporteur on discrimination and racism, Doudou Diene, went on a nine-day tour of Japan and talked to minority groups, antidiscrimination campaigners and government and police officials around the country. After releasing his preliminary findings to the press last year, Diene handed the completed 23-page report based on his research to the UN Commission on Human Rights in January. [Doudou Diene Report]

Worried for years about a water shortage, the vast Tokyo metropolitan area is now overflowing in the stuff.

Water-saving appliances, bottled drinking water and good old-fashioned conservation have helped the average Tokyo household in fiscal 2004 use 6 percent less tap water than six years earlier.

The building that houses the Ghibli Museum would be unusual anywhere, but in greater Tokyo, where architectural exuberance usually takes an angular, modernist form-black glass cubes, busy geometries of neon-it is particularly so. From the outside, the museum resembles an oversized adobe house, with slightly melted edges; its exterior walls are painted in saltwater-taffy shades of pink, green, and yellow. Inside, the museum looks like a child's fantasy of Old Europe submitted to a rigorous Arts and Crafts sensibility. The floors are dark polished wood; stained-glass windows cast candy-colored light on whitewashed walls; a spiral stairway climbs-inside what looks like a giant Victorian birdcage-to a rooftop garden of world grasses, over which a hammered-metal robot soldier stands guard. In the central hall, beneath a high ceiling, a web of balconies and bridges suggests a dream vision of a nineteenth-century factory. Wrought-iron railings contain balls of colored glass, and leaded-glass lanterns are attached to the walls by wrought-iron vines. In the entryway, a fresco on the ceiling depicts a sky of Fra Angelico blue and a smiling sun wreathed in fruits and vegetables.

[Japan Focus has previously introduced the cases of Chinese and Korean World War II forced laborers, and of comfort women from many Asian nations filed against the Japanese government and corporations. Here Kinue Tokudome reviews the claims filed in U.S. courts against Japanese corporations by American POWs who worked as forced laborers more than sixty years ago. In all of the above-mentioned cases, the outcomes pertain not only to justice for victims, but also to transcending animosities associated with the war and paving the way for reconciliation. The issues are particularly salient at a time when Japan is embroiled in conflicts over war, colonialism and historical memory with its Chinese and Korean neighbors.]

[Stephen Roach, chief economist of Morgan Stanley, has written extensively on the “global labor arbitrage” and its increasing impact on politics and economics across the developed and developing worlds. The arbitrage is the result of two increasingly salient facts. First, a rapidly growing supply of skilled service-sector and technological workers is available, at low cost, in the emerging economies, most notably in China and India. And second, the internet and other information technologies are constantly reducing the transaction costs of employing these workers for firms headquartered in Europe and North America. The consequent spread of outsourcing in the service and technological innovation sectors of the developed economies is a hitherto unforeseen and destabilizing new feature of globalization.

[Intended to console the souls of victims and usher in the busy “Year of Minamata 2006,” a taiko drum concert was held on New Year's Eve on land reclaimed from Minamata Bay, atop the tons of mercury-contaminated sludge and sealed containers of poisoned fish now entombed in concrete. May 1 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the official discovery of Minamata disease, the horrific neurological disorder caused by the organic mercury that Chisso Corp. discharged into the bay until 1968. The commemorative logo and posters were chosen through public design competitions, and there will be new books, museum exhibits and international forums. The emphasis is on education and healing, as this is supposed to be the year that Minamata and the nation finally put the industrial pollution disaster behind them.

[Jimmy Carter's critique of the US-India nuclear deal points to major flaws in Bush-administration policies destructive of the nonproliferation regime. Directed toward building US Congressional and public opposition to the nuclear deal, it ignores other critical elements at stake. The central point elided here is the failure of the US above all, but all other nuclear powers as well, to honor their own part of the NPT agreement: this requires that they move expeditiously to reduce and ultimately eliminate all nuclear weapons. Instead, the US is embarked on building and testing a new generation of nuclear weapons and extending its nuclear reach to outer space. MS]

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence has troubled US planners since the second world war. The concerns have only risen as the “tripolar order” - Europe, North America and Asia - has continued to evolve. Every day Latin America, too, is becoming more independent. Now Asia and the Americas are strengthening their ties while the reigning superpower, the odd man out, consumes itself in misadventures in the Middle East.