Introduction

The large monetary awards to the family members of eight men executed in 1974 as members of the “People's Revolutionary Party” have no precedent, and mark another milestone in South Korea's remarkable record of historical reckoning and reconciliation. The twin pillars of this are the reconciliation with North Korea ongoing since Kim Dae Jung was elected president, and the 1995 trials of former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo for treason in carrying out their serial coup d'etat in 1979-80, which involved the bloody suppression of the Kwangju Rebellion. (Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to life in prison, but President Kim pardoned both of them so they could sit fidgeting on the podium while he was inaugurated in February 1998). Few other countries with long histories of dictatorship have managed democratization with the same measure of justice and magnanimity. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission comes to mind, and it was indeed a model for both Kim Dae Jung and his successor, Roh Moo-hyun.

The internet has become an increasingly influential medium throughout East Asia. In this article we examine the case of Kenkanryu (‘“Hating ‘The Korean Wave’“), a manga published in 2005 in hard copy, but available online as a web comic for many months prior to print publication. We argue that the content, while nationalist, xenophobic, and ‘toxic’ is only one of a number of other, media-related reasons for the sales success of this comic in Japan. Other factors are the influence of online chat groups, the web as a means of communicating and selling ideas and products, and the internet-savvy way in which supporters of the views expressed in the comic communicated with online readers. In the context of increasing fears that Japanese youth are becoming more ‘nationalistic’ we argue that it is important to examine the medium as much as the message in assessing whether we are witnessing the emergence of a significant and dangerous social movement, or something rather different.

As everyone now knows, the current financial market turmoil spreading across the Atlantic economy and beyond started with rising defaults in the United States mortgage market. How did the US come to experience a gigantic house-price bubble?

The explanation starts with US trade deficits and their financing. The US has been running an increasing trade (or more accurately, current-account) deficit since the early 1980s, with only one short interruption. The excess of imports over exports is paid for by newly printed dollars or Treasury bonds.

Despite his recently failed third attempt to become prime minister, Aso Taro remains one of Japan's best-known and most influential politicians. The former foreign minister still aspires to the top post and in two books published earlier this year he has sketched a road map for the nation.

Japan the Tremendous, a bestseller written in a populist tone, highlights the peaceful nature of postwar Japan and calls the country a “fount of moral lessons” for Asia. Arc of Freedom and Prosperity: Japan's Expanding Diplomatic Horizons expatiates on Asos tenure as foreign minister from October 2005 to August 2007.

The leaders of South and North Korea have met. The meeting had been formally delayed since the summer because of serious flooding in the North – but in fact both sides had to wait six years for this opportunity.

The two Korean heads of state met for the first time in June 2000 in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il, leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), was supposed to reciprocate by visiting Seoul, but he never did. Now he has succeeded in having a South Korean president visit his capital again.

Many observers have recently argued that the newly forged Indo-U.S. alliance will work against its “intended aims of Chinese encirclement.” Although India denies its part in any attempt at “Chinese containment” to the publicly acknowledged satisfaction of China, the theory nevertheless persists. China's response to the Indo-U.S. alliance is, however, quite creative. Instead of reacting with alarm, Beijing has gone on a charm offensive to draw New Delhi into a triangular entente among China, India and Russia. India, which has languished under foreign subjugation for centuries, has a visceral aversion to strategic alliances with world powers. Since its independence in 1947, it has followed what could be described as the “Third Way” in world diplomacy, which manifested itself in the birth of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) in the 1950s. China is now building bridges to India based in part on the latter's instinctive wariness of foreign influences, which is evident in India's homegrown opposition to its nuclear deal with the U.S.

The southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago has been a source of contention between Japan and China since 2004, when Chinese officials started to refer to it as “rocks” not as an “island.” In international law, rocks cannot be a basis for claiming an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). After the Chinese challenge to its territorial right over Okinotorishima, Japanese officials reacted vigorously, notably Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, within whose jurisdiction Okinotorishima falls. Ishihara ordered installation of a 330 million yen radar system for surveillance and set up an address plate at the “island.” The two countries continue to dispute the issue.

Duane Schattle doesn't mince words. “The cities are the problem,” he says. A retired Marine infantry lieutenant colonel who worked on urban warfare issues at the Pentagon in the late 1990s, he now serves as director of the Joint Urban Operations Office at U.S. Joint Forces Command. He sees the war in the streets of Iraq's cities as the prototype for tomorrow's battlespace. “This is the next fight,” he warns. “The future of warfare is what we see now.”

He isn't alone. “We think urban is the future,” says James Lasswell, a retired colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. “Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment.” And Wayne Michael Hall, a retired Army brigadier general and the senior intelligence advisor in Schattle's operation, has a similar assessment. “We will be fighting in urban terrain for the next hundred years.”

Fueled by perennial controversies over official Japanese regulation of textbooks, Western media and academics thrive on claims of a peculiar Japanese “forgetfulness” of wartime atrocities. But the postwar record of Japanese discussions of wartime biological warfare experiments reveals an impressive level of public exposure that, in some ways, surpasses American discussions of its own wartime past. To stress Japanese “forgetfulness” tells only half the story and obscures the tale of postwar political polarization that has greatly facilitated exposure of war crimes in Japan.

Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China — Hundreds of feet below ground, the primary water source for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running dry. The underground water table is sinking about four feet a year. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater.

Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city's water table.

Translator's Introduction: On 17 July, 2006, The Asahi Shinbun began a daily feature entitled Shashin ga Kataru Senso (The war as photos tell it) based on photos taken during World War II by the newspaper's cameramen. Stored in an Osaka warehouse during the Occupation, the photos are now being catalogued and stored digitally. Accompanying the introductory article was an explanatory statement: “The collection of 70,000 prints leaves behind an immediate (nama-namashiku nokosarete-iru) record of the lives of individuals at the front in China, in the colonies, and in areas occupied by the Imperial Army.” The first prints shown – soldiers and nurses at the front in China, anti-atrocity graffiti in Nanjing, kindergarten students in Jakarta raising Boys' Day carp banners, grass-skirted girls in a Yap Island primary school, a child laborer in a Korean silk factory wearing a “Rising Sun” headband among others –demonstrate the intended scope of the feature.

This essay explores representations of Japanese imperialism and war in museums of the People's Republic of China. With the post-Mao reforms, there has been a general trend in such representations toward an emphasis on atrocity and victimization and away from the narratives of heroic resistance that dominated in the Mao era. Yet, the museum curators in these museums must negotiate between these two representations in trying to make the war relevant to a young audience generally more attracted to the pleasures of popular culture than history museums.

Araki Nobuyoshi, Japan's most infamous photographer, talks to David McNeill about age, sex and his unflagging work

If Araki Nobuyoshi likes you, he will take you to the cramped bar he owns in the Kabukicho red-light district of Tokyo.

This is the nighttime lair of perhaps the planet's most prolific photographer of the female form, a man dubbed a misogynist, a porn-and-bondage-merchant and a genius, so you expect the outré and Araki doesn't disappoint. The bar is wallpapered with Polaroid snaps of women: young, older, ripened by years in the water trade, some pigeon-toed and shy; others spread-eagled or violently hogtied, thrust up like Sunday roasts and skewered by his camera.

This report consists of two related articles. Jeff Kingston reports on Japan's Kashiwazaki nuclear disaster and Japanese plans to sell nuclear power technology to Indonesia. This is followed by Tom Hyland's report on Indonesian plans to build nuclear power plants.

In Japan, Kashiwazaki has come to mean “close call”. On July 16 a 6.8 magnitude trembler jolted beneath the world's largest nuclear power complex in a place that was not supposed to have a fault. This earthquake serves as a vivid reminder of the risks generated by nuclear power, especially in zones of seismic risk like Indonesia.

In 2004, then Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi, in response to a request from the United States, sent a contingent of 600 Self-Defense Force troops to Samawa, Iraq, for the purpose of humanitarian relief and reconstruction. Given that Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution eschews the use of military force in the resolution of conflict, this was an enormously controversial step, going further than previous SDF engagements as part of UN peacekeeping operations, which themselves had been criticized by opposition forces as an intensification of the incremental watering-down of the “no-war clause” from as early as the 1950s.

While the Western press branded the Caspian summit a failure for its inability to agree on how to divide the Caspian or to endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal that no pipelines be built in the region in the absence of approval by all nations bordering the sea, Iranian analyst Kaveh L Afrasiabi points to the summit's achievement for Iran and Russia and the setback for the United States bent on isolating Iran. Japan Focus

This article is slightly adapted from a chapter by the late Fujiwara Akira, an emeritus professor at Hitotsubashi University until his death in 2003, which first appeared in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38: Complicating the Picture (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2007). Fujiwara wrote one of two introductory chapters to this volume about the Nanking Massacre, the seventieth anniversary of which will be observed in December.