This essay proposes looking back at a story which is one of the most unusual winners of Japan's best-known literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. Kara Juro's Letters from Sagawa (Sagawa-kun kara no tegami) first appeared in November 1982 in the journal Bungei; it was announced co-winner of the 88th Akutagawa Prize in January 1983, and subsequently reprinted that March in the official prize-confirmation section of the quality monthly which hosts the award, Bungei Shunju. Kara's publisher Kawade Shobo Shinsha had already published a slim single-volume version the preceding January.

At 9:18 p.m. on Sept. 18 of this year, I was standing in front of the Sept. 18 History Museum in Shenyang, China. It was raining. A siren went off. It sounded like the wailing of a fire engine.

On this day each year, Shenyang holds a ceremony to mark the anniversary of a military crackdown against the city's unsuspecting citizens by the Imperial Japanese Army. This year was the 76th anniversary of that event.

Japanese forces swiftly overran a vast area of northeastern China. The annual ceremony seeks to keep this memory alive. It is also serves as a prayer for peace.

In this three part series, we introduce historical museums in Japan and their role in public education. Following this introduction to peace museums, Ms. Nishino Rumiko, a founder of the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), introduces WAM's activities and the 2000 Citizens Tribunal on the ‘comfort women’. The final article is by Mr. Kim Yeonghwan, the former associate director of Grassroots House Peace Museum who describes the peace and reconciliation programs that the Museum sponsors.

The picture on this page was taken by a People's Pictorial photographer in 1953. The sixty-year-old Mao Zedong had just finished writing a calligraphic inscription that read “Celebrate the successful completion of the Guanting Reservoir Project.” The man sitting next to him was my father-in-law, Wang Sen, the project manager for the dam.

The photograph was probably published in some newspaper or other around that time. Even if I'd seen it, I wouldn't have paid any attention to it. I certainly never imagined that fifteen years later I'd marry the project manager's son, Wang Dejia, thereby becoming the daughter-in-law of a man once shown relaxing on the bank of the dam, chatting and laughing with the “Great Leader.”

What is the nature of Japanese Culture? Japan Focus published Douglas Lummis's critique of Ruth Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword, arguably the most influential work ever written on Japanese culture.

Below find a response from Toru Uno and Lummis's rejoinder. Japan Focus welcomes further contributions to this debate.

Ruth Fulton Benedict's intellectual presence is still being felt in the field of comparative cultures and beyond, even though almost six decades have elapsed since her passing. We have come to see her epistemological orientation as our own as much as uniquely hers. So much so that we are no longer conscious of our indebtedness to her pioneering work today. In observing a culture different from our own, we try, almost instinctively now, to elicit a discernable pattern while being mindful of its own internal logic. This disciplined perspective toward a foreign culture seems even more relevant and indispensable in the often emotional “kulture kampf” debates we encounter in the post 9/11 world.

A crop of new movies released to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre is set to again dredge up the controversy about one of the 20th Century's most notorious events. How will Japan react?

One way to learn what happened in one of history's most noxious but disputed episodes is to ask Mizushima Satoru. After what he calls “exhaustive research” on the seizure of the then Chinese capital by Japanese troops in 1937, estimated to have cost anywhere from 20,000 to 300,000 lives, Mizushima offers a very precise figure for the number of illegal deaths: zero.

Japan Focus introduction: Once the closest U.S. ally on North Korean issues, Japan is now feeling alone and isolated. The Bush administration has reversed its stance toward Pyongyang and appears to be on the verge of removing the country from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. China and South Korea are racing to invest money into North Korea. Russia backs both inter-Korean engagement and North Korea's integration into the global economy.

Still Japan holds back. Tokyo has expressed considerable displeasure over Washington's decision on the terrorism list, as the abduction issue continues to cast a heavy shadow over policymaking in Japan. Tokyo went so far as to send a delegation to Washington to plead its case in November.

Lhamo Thondup was born on July 6, 1935 in Taktster, a small village in the Amdo region of northeast Tibet. But neither his parents — farmers who grew barley, buckwheat and potatoes — nor his three elder brothers and one elder sister (a younger sister and brother came later) were to discover his true identity until a few years later.

Then, when the little boy was 4, a party of senior Buddhist monks and officials from the distant capital of Lhasa arrived in the village searching for the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama – the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, whose title means “ocean of wisdom.” The party was led by Kewtsang Rinpoche, a respected monk who had chosen to head northeast as that was the direction in which the face of the embalmed 13th Dalai Lama (known as “the Great 13th”), who died on Dec. 17, 1933 was said to have mysteriously pointed.

For 60 years the world has faced no greater threat than nuclear weapons. Japan, as a nuclear victim country, with “three non-nuclear principles” (non-production, non-possession, and non-introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan) and its “Peace Constitution,” had unique credentials to play a positive role in helping the world find a solution, yet its record has been consistently pro-nuclear, that is to say, pro-nuclear energy, pro-the nuclear cycle, and, pro-nuclear weapons. This paper elaborates on Japan's aspiration to become a nuclear state, arguing that attention should be paid to Rokkasho, Tsuruga, and Hamaoka, the places at the heart of Japan's present and future nuclear plans, no less than to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose names represent the horror of its nuclear past.

This is the third article of a three part series introducing historical museums in Japan and their role in public education on issues of war, peace, war crimes and reconciliation. The first article is Takashi Yoshida's “Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern Japanese History.” The second article is Rumiko Nishino's “The Women's Active Museum on War and Peace.”

This is the second article of a three part series introducing historical museums in Japan and their role in public education on issues of war, peace, war crimes and reconciliation. The first article is Takashi Yoshida's “Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern Japanese History.” The final article is by Mr. Kim Yeonghwan, the former associate director of Grassroots House Peace Museum who describes the peace and reconciliation programs that the Museum sponsors.

By some accounts, the location of America's capital was decided at a secret dinner party that Thomas Jefferson held in 1790 at his New York City residence. There, through the age-old practice of logrolling, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton hatched a plan to build the nation's capital in Virginia. “Madison agreed to permit the core provision of Hamilton's fiscal program to pass; and in return, Hamilton agreed to use his influence to assure that the permanent residence of the national capital would be on the Potomac River” (Ellis 2001, 49).

We present two articles on the market response to North Korean famine.

Pak Hyun-yong was, by North Korean standards, an entrepreneur. Too much of an entrepreneur. During the famine that ravaged the country in the late 1990s, Mr Pak watched his family die of starvation – first his younger brother, then his older sister's children. Then, eventually, his sister too.

Somehow he pulled through this period, dubbed by the regime as “the arduous march”, and was spurred into taking some very noncommunist, almost subversive action. He began selling noodles.

China's rapid economic expansion has impressed the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century China has become the third largest importing as well as exporting country, the fourth largest economy in the world (after the United States, Japan and Germany), and one of the top three destinations of foreign direct investment. The figures of its increasing world export market share in the period of 1985 to 2000 show that China has profited more from globalization than any other country. China achieved an average annual export growth of 4.5 percent, while the second and third country on this list achieved no more than 1.8 percent (the United States) and 1.1 percent (Korea). Its annual growth of real GDP from 1980 to 2000 was even more spectacular with an average of 10 percent. Over this period developing countries on average only grew 3 percent, and the average growth of the rest of Asia was 4.5 percent (UNCTAD, 2005b, 2004, 2003, 2002b).

Foreign ministers are busy people - especially energetic, creative diplomats like Russia's Sergei Lavrov and Iran's Manouchehr Mottaki, representing capitals that by tradition place great store on international diplomacy.

Therefore, the very fact that Lavrov and Mottaki have met no less than four times in as many months suggests a great deal about the high importance attached by the two capitals to their mutual understanding at the bilateral and regional level.

In 2006, close to 400,000 people in Japan participated in voluntary activities and more than 30,000 volunteer associations received a nationally certified status as non-profit organizations (NPOs). In 1985, only about 100,000 people counted as volunteers. These figures indicate not only a quantitative but also a qualitative change. Japan today is moving toward a borantia shakai or volunteer-oriented civil society, with particularly high rates of NPO activitity in urban regions. Why has this change occurred?