Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, might also be introduced as their chief iconoclast and contrarian. In these latter roles he regularly challenges the optimistic consensus on the basis of facts and analyses that tend to be ignored as the herd embraces a new trend. For example, while numerous analysts confidently hold that asset-based (rather than income-based) consumption can continue to power the US economy, Roach has been raising doubts about this for years. As America's housing bubble slides and leaves a swathe of consumers stuck with exorbitant mortgage payments, their “propensity to consume” is falling and Roach is looking prescient (again). The American housing bubble is only beginning to slide, but this may be one reason that growth in consumption has recently slipped to 1.5% after recording a robust 4% for the past decade.

This contribution by the novelist Tawada Yoko is the second in an occasional series reflecting on East and West, on the geography and imaginative geography of Asia and the Pacific in global perspective. See Uradyn E. Bulag, Where is East Asia? Central Asian and Inner Asian Perspectives on Regionalism Find the article here: Kyoto Journal: Perspectives on Asia

Tahara Soichiro's Nihon no sengo (Japan's postwar), a recent work of Japanese popular history from one of the country's best-selling and most widely read journalists, bears the provocative subtitle “Were we mistaken?” [1] This question, asked of the entire postwar period, is representative of a significant current in contemporary Japanese thought - the idea that Japan has strayed from the “correct” path and failed to live up to international “norms”. In recent years, Japanese debates about war and peace, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been influenced by this view. Conservatives play up the idea that the Japanese constitution, which explicitly forbids participation in armed conflict and the maintenance of military forces, means that the nation has not been able to play a role in world affairs appropriate to its economic might. Progressives criticize the Japanese government's failure to adequately apologize and compensate the victims of colonialism and war for aggression and atrocities. In both views, Japan is abnormal, and incapable of living up to “universals” - either the “universal” right to self-defense and duty to participate in international conflicts like the “war on terror”, or the necessity to inculcate the view that “war is wrong” and the idea that past crimes must be dealt with honestly in the public sphere.

The Nanjing Massacre remains a touchstone of China-Japan conflict nearly seven decades after the event. Now Chinese plans to honor John Rabe, a Germany citizen in Nanjing, for his efforts to protect Chinese citizens from slaughter have inflamed tensions with Japan over war and rare memory. The Chinese plan offers a rare example in the annals of warfare in general, and China in particular, of recognizing in a public and prominent way the achievements of a foreign national in a world that is dominated by nationalist icons.

The media discourse of ‘winners and losers’ is spreading. Yet in everyday conversation, people rarely describe themselves as ‘winners’. Often it is nothing but the subject of a joke. We should reserve judgment about the extent to which this perspective has been internalised. It is difficult to apply the ‘win-lose’ vocabulary. To begin with, this new ideology of ‘competition’ and ‘win-lose’ is a choice by elimination due to the lack of an alternative. It is forced on people by the impact of globalisation and international competition. It criticises past ideology, but it has not been embraced on the basis of conviction. Hence it remains somewhat strange and unfamiliar to us.

Hayashi Kyoko, born in Nagasaki in 1930, spent much of her childhood in wartime Shanghai. Returning to Nagasaki in March 1945, she attended Nagasaki Girls High School and was a student-worker in a munitions plant in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing on August 9.

Hayashi made her literary debut with the Akutagawa Prize-winning “Ritual of Death”, which records her exodus from the area of devastation and eventual reunion with her family. Her atomic bomb novella, “Masks of Whatchamacallit” (Nanjamonja no men) appeared the following year, followed shortly by a sequence of twelve short stories called Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Giyaman biidoro, 1978). These works established her as an important chronicler of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the lives of hibakusha in the wake of the bomb, themes she would elaborate in future work. A recent work “From Trinity to Trinity” (Torinitii kara Torinitii e) records her trip to Los Alamos New Mexico, the site of the first atomic bomb experiment, the source of her fifty-five years of experience of living with the bomb.

East Timor's 924,000 citizens are finding that the truth does not set them free and that justice and reconciliation are elusive. A recent report published by East Timor's Commission of Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR is the commonly used Portuguese acronym), estimates that the tiny island nation suffered a minimum of 102,800 conflict-related deaths during Indonesia's brutal occupation between 1975 and 1999. Responsibility for this carnage is laid largely with the Indonesian military. But the report offers a telling critique of many others including the United States, Britain, France, Australia, the United Nations and the Vatican.

The overwhelming attention accorded the North Korean nuclear issue seems to have precluded a close examination of the U.S. - South Korean relationship as it enters a profound transitional period. [1] Current internal trends and dynamics in South Korean politics will require a fundamental reassessment of that relation. A major change in the character of the alliance, especially its military dimensions, is in the offing. However, such a change need not be seen as detrimental to the U.S.

Coastal defenses in Western Japan were threatened in late August by a ferocious storm, typhoon no. 16, that happened to coincide with the highest tide of the year. At the same time, a remarkable judgment, more startling and possibly more devastating than the typhoon, emerged from a court in Saga in Kyushu. The tide of Japan's civil society protest against the corruption, waste, and destruction wrought in the name of “public works” has long been rising. It is here that flotillas of hundreds of fishing boats have from time to time blockaded the government's reclamation works at Isahaya Bay, drums beating and flags flying as in the righteous uprisings of feudal times, till now always beaten back by the authorities. This unexpected judicial intervention had the potential to raise the tide to the point of threatening, or even breaching, the dikes surrounding Japan's infamous construction state (or doken kokka).

The Assessment of Park Chung Hee, the brutal dictator who many credit with launching South Korea's accelerated economic development, is central to debates on Korean democracy, development and independence. Paik Nak-chung, distinguished literary critic and a leading Korean public intellectual, delivered this keynote address to the International Korean Studies Conference on ‘The Park Era: A Reassessment After Twenty-five Years’ at University of Wollongong.

On December 8, 2005 Prime Minister Koizumi announced that Japan's Self-Defense Forces would remain for another year in Samawa in support of the US war in Iraq. Their mission: to provide “reconstruction and humanitarian assistance”. What has the 500 person SDF mission accomplished and at what cost? How have local people responded to its presence?

Koizumi's Japan enjoys the warmest of relationships with Bush's US, for the very good reason that Koizumi has proved himself willing, even enthusiastic, to deliver what Washington requires – uncritical support in general, continuing provision of facilities for the US military in Japan, and Japanese boots on the ground to support the American mission in Iraq. On one significant issue, however, Koizumi has failed to deliver: the 1996 promise to replace the antiquated and inconvenient facilities of Futenma Marine Air Station, that now sits uncomfortably in the middle of the bustling township of Ginowan in the middle of Okinawa island, with a new facility in Northern Okinawa, to be built on the coral reef offshore from the fishing village of Henoko, in the township of Nago. It was a relatively remote and backward area, and Tokyo assumed it could rely on persuasion and financial inducements to overcome local opposition. It got rid of the Governor, the stubborn scholar and constitutionalist, Ota Masahide, in 2000, installing in his place a conservative figure expected to be more pliable, and poured in money to soften up the local opposition. Despite everything, however, it has not prevailed. In October 2005, the plan to construct the base on the reef had to be abandoned. Koizumi admitted the opposition had been too great. The Japanese state had, in effect, been defeated, by a coalition of fishermen, local residents, and citizens. One of the most remarkable events in recent Japanese history passed without notice by the media and the pundits.

Angry protests in Busan, South Korea during an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference there in November have alarmed Hong Kong police preparing for a mid-December World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Hong Kong police fear that the some of the groups who showed up to protest APEC may also bring strident street protests to Hong Kong. This article examines some of the trajectories of protest apparent at the APEC events by looking more closely at the national and international dynamics of Korean activism, revealing growing coordination between workers, farmers and anti-war activists, and the implications for the Hong Kong meeting.

This is the keynote address by Judge A. Wallace Tashima, United States Justice for the Ninth Circuit Court, at a conference reviewing the judicial issues concerning the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and subsequent legal challenges to the key verdicts which remain the law of the land. Papers from the conference are gathered in “Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered: Examining the Japanese American Civil Liberties Cases on Their Sixtieth Anniversary,” a symposium issue of the interdisciplinary journal Law and Contemporary Problems. Tashima, who was himself interned as a schoolboy, ranges widely from the constitutional and human rights issues of the internment to contemporary issues posed by Guantanamo and American uses of torture of prisoners in the Bush administration's post 9/11 arsenal in the “war on terror”.

On December 15, 2005 the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) inaugurated an oil pipeline running from Kazakhstan to northwest China. The pipeline will undercut the geopolitical significance of the Washington- backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)oil pipeline which opened this past summer amid big fanfare and support from Washington.

India and China, the most aggressive shoppers for oil and gas assets in the world, and normally archrivals in the race for overseas oilfields, have finally come together to pursue their energy security in the global arena.

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), the two largest oil companies in the respective countries, announced on December 20 that they had jointly won a bid to acquire 37% of Petro-Canada's stake in

Partha Chatterjee is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies editorial group and Director, Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University. A leading specialist on empire, nation, and social movements, his most recent book is The Politics of Government: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. In the present article, he defines the imperial prerogative as the power to declare the colonial exception, that is to make and break the rules of the game. This article appeared in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, Number 4, 2005. For the article click here

The Asia-Pacific region has not only emerged as one of the primary engines of the world economy, it has also taken global centre-stage in developments pertaining to nuclear weapons, in efforts to acquire a capability to make them, and in nuclear conflicts among regional powers as well as with the United States. At present, Iran and North Korea, two of the original U.S.-designated “axis of evil” powers are in the scope of U.S. efforts to prevent an adversary to obtain nuclear weapons, or, even to develop nuclear power capability. At the same time, the U.S. offers support for India's nuclear program and is publicly silent on Japanese steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons capacity.

The focus of international efforts in North Korea used to be on food aid. With the announcement of a policy change by the North Korean government this fall, sending home humanitarian NGO's and reinforcing the Public Distribution System for food, attention has shifted to developmental assistance. However, the basic question remains the same: Will international support improve the situation in North Korea, or will it just prop up the regime? It will probably do both, not only because “North Korea” and “the regime” are two categories that are not easily separable. But are there any visible developments that would justify taking the pain of further engagement?