Nagai Eishun is part of a dying breed, a man who would rather have his life ruined than stand to attention for a flag and anthem he despises. “Not so long ago, everyone I knew thought the same as me but times have changed a lot,” says the 56-year-old Tokyo highschool teacher. “Our numbers are dwindling, but we have to keep fighting. Educational freedom in Japan depends on it.”

In other countries, standing for the national anthem is a source of pride but in Japan the anthem is the Kimigayo (His Majesty's Reign), the same dirge that rang in the ears of millions of Imperial troops who went off to kill in the name of the Emperor in Asia during World War II. Since 1999, the playing of the anthem and the flying of the Hinomaru (Rising Sun) flag, have been compulsory at Japanese school ceremonies, but some teachers refuse to toe the line. Invariably, controversy erupts every year in March when the flag flutters at graduation ceremonies across the country.

Japan is stuck between lots of rocks and several hard places. It confronts the escalating costs of the world's most rapid pace of ageing with a low and declining birthrate and virtually no support for mass immigration. Moreover, the country faces these costs while severely handicapped by a public debt 1.5 times its GDP plus dramatic declines in the high rate of savings that has hitherto financed it. In addition to all this, the poorly performing economy is in its fourth year of deflation with little hope of producing a recovery in tax revenues. Indeed, deflation and minimal economic growth have eroded national income- tax revenues to their lowest level since the collapse of the bubble economy.

Japan Focus introduction: In late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a “hundred head contest” in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline during the Japanese capture and occupation of the city that has come to be known variously as the Nanjing Massacre, the Rape of Nanjing, or simply the Nanjing Incident. The event belongs to a long list of 20th century atrocities, and is emblematic of Chinese suffering at the hands of a barbarous Japanese military as well as of Japanese predations across wartime Asia and the Pacific.

The images and references to Pearl Harbor seem to be all around us as the anniversary of the attack looms. They are instantly recognizable. But what do they mean?

The analogies came easily after September 11, 2001, when newspaper headlines picked up the cry of “Infamy!” and President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary that “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” As historians who focus on popular memory have insisted, we experience the present through the lens of the past – and we shape our understanding of the past through the lens of the present.

On 2 March 2003 some 6,000 people from Hiroshima gathered on an empty space one kilometer from ground zero, where the first nuclear weapon killed hundreds of thousands and devastated the city, to form a message with their bodies, which read from the sky as NO WAR, NO DU!

Our warning was against war and the use of nuclear weapons by USA-UK forces. Our fear was based on the fact that the US has used illegal nuclear munitions and weapons containing Depleted Uranium (DU) and plutonium five times since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed on 6 and 9 August 1945.

When I tell people that ten years ago the death penalty in Japan was re-instated, most people probably would respond, “What? Haven't we been applying the death penalty all this time?”

The United Nations General Assembly passed the “International Agreement to Abolish the Death Penalty” resolution in December, 1989. Because of such world-wide social pressure, Japan had already suspended the death penalty in November of that year. On February 26, 1993, however, three people were executed under orders of Gotoda Masaharu, the Minister of Justice. This was only three years and four months after suspension of the death penalty in Japan. Since then, in the last ten years, the Ministry of Justice has applied the death penalty almost once every six months.