In 1967, Astroboy, the Japanese animation and comic book icon, died protecting a North Vietnamese village from American bombers.

Biggs and Horie have written a thoughtful report on the recent rise in numbers of the homeless in Japan. Its value lies in the links it draws to a serious crisis in the Japanese system of social insurance and welfare support.

It is clear from this report—as also described in Toru Shinoda's recent essay on the New Years Dispatch Workers Village—that the plight of those recently labeled as the “working poor” in Japan is worsening rapidly. Where much other reporting on this problem has tended to focus on the younger homeless who spend their nights in internet cafes or rental video rooms, this report goes beyond that to look at older as well as younger workers, including those in the Airin district of Osaka.

Japan's Ogasawara (or Bonin) Islands (Ogasawara shotou), dubbed ‘the ‘Galapagos of the East’, are a group of oceanic islands situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Many of their numerous indigenous fauna and flora are at the brink of extinction, mainly caused by human settlement and construction during the last half century. Among those destructive factors, a plan to build a commercial airport was the most controversial and divided the community. Although the airport plan was withdrawn by the Tokyo Municipal Government in 2001, the native species are still facing various dangers.

Any serious observer of the Japanese economy follows the work of Richard Katz. In two closely argued, well-documented books, Japan: The System that Soured (M.E. Sharpe, 1998)and Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (M.E. Sharpe, 2003), Katz set out the view for which he is best known: that Japan once had an economic system that worked brilliantly but no longer does. Katz continues to elaborate this thesis in his writing for The Oriental Economist where he serves as Senior Editor. Katz argues that Japan's failure to overhaul its political economy has led to the emergence of “two Japans” – a hyper-efficient export sector and an inefficient, backwards set of companies that primarily serve Japan's domestic market. He maintains that it was these companies, protected by rigid, obsolete political arrangements, that pulled the entire country down into a trough of stagnation and keep it from fulfilling its potential.