These drawings and paintings by Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb were created more than a quarter century after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. They are provided courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and form part of a much larger archive of more than 2,000 images and annotations. Posted at Japan Focus on April 27, 2005.

Give the ceremonies back to the students.

We do not believe the board's methods will help nurture true affection for the flag and anthem in the minds of youngsters.

For the second year running, the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education took disciplinary action against staff members of public schools for not rising during graduation ceremonies when the “Kimigayo” national anthem was sung.

[For forty years, beginning with a desert test visible from the Sky Bar at Las Vegas’ Desert Inn, 928 nuclear devices were exploded at the Nevada test site, many of them above ground. In March 2005, the 8,000 square foot Atomic Testing Museum opened its doors near the Las Vegas strip. As Greg Mitchell records in the following piece, the museum is as notable for what goes unmentioned as for the events it depicts: these include the victims of the first atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the plight of the “downwinders”, more than 12,000 of whom have filed claims in relationship to cancer and other illnesses that may be linked to the nuclear tests or uranium mining.]

TOKYO - With Japan experiencing strained diplomatic relationship with China and South Korea, the opportunity exists to set the tone in balance-of-power politics and economic integration with another neighbor. That is Russia, and the overarching, issue that continues to divide Japan and Russia is sovereignty over the four Russian-held Kuril Islands. Recently, some Japanese experts on Russia have been calling for greater flexibility and compromise by Tokyo, which has always demanded the return of all four islands. There's no sign yet of official acceptance, but pressures are building for Japan to strike a deal and accept a “two islands plus alpha” solution - still to be hammered out. In this perspective, Japan would give up its demands for the return of all four islands and instead accept the two smaller islands and a portion of the two larger ones.

This article introduces the concept of “Insider minorities”, those whose difference is of a sort that currently does not deny their Japanese-ness in the eyes of other Japanese, as opposed to outsider minorities, who are considered foreign despite their long, even multigenerational, residence within Japan. Most surveys of minorities in Japan have focused on ethnic minorities, including Koreans and Chinese, as well as the indigenous Ainu and Okinawans. The Burakumin ends up being the only non-ethnic group to be included (see De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995; Weiner, 1997; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1998). Such a focus on ethnic and racial minorities, however, fails to recognize the extent of difference that exists in Japan. Indeed, ethnic minorities in Japan, together with the Burakumin, account for only 4 to 6% of the Japanese population (De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995, p.272), making it easy for many Japanese, most notably former Prime Minister Nakasone, to claim ethnic and racial homogeneity in contrast to other countries such as the U.S. (Creighton, 1997).

From the Taiwan Strait to the Strait of Malacca, security concerns are growing around the South China Sea. While the Bush Administration sees a resurgent Chinese military threat across the Taiwan Strait and a terrorist threat in the Strait of Malacca, many countries between the Straits are more concerned about security for their maritime resources from the threats of competitors, traffickers, poachers, and pirates.

As the United States gears up for an attack on Iran, one thing is certain: the Bush administration will never mention oil as a reason for going to war. As in the case of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be cited as the principal justification for an American assault. “We will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon [by Iran],” is the way President Bush put it in a much-quoted 2003 statement. But just as the failure to discover illicit weapons in Iraq undermined the administration's use of WMD as the paramount reason for its invasion, so its claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism. More important, any serious assessment of Iran's strategic importance to the United States should focus on its role in the global energy equation.

As the United States gears up for an attack on Iran, one thing is certain: the Bush administration will never mention oil as a reason for going to war. As in the case of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be cited as the principal justification for an American assault. “We will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon [by Iran],” is the way President Bush put it in a much-quoted 2003 statement. But just as the failure to discover illicit weapons in Iraq undermined the administration’s use of WMD as the paramount reason for its invasion, so its claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism. More important, any serious assessment of Iran’s strategic importance to the United States should focus on its role in the global energy equation.

Escalating tension with China, violently illustrated by renewed anti-Japanese protests in Shanghai and other big cities at the weekend, is increasing pressure on Tokyo to expand its military capabilities and back a deepening strategic alliance with the US reaching from East Asia to the Gulf.

[Rarely does a documentary film, many months in production, appears as timely as the nightly news when it's released. But the premiere in Tokyo on April 23 of “Japan's Peace Constitution” (Japanese title: “Eiga Nihon-koku Kempo”), directed by Japan Focus associate John Junkerman, comes at a moment when tensions with China and Korea over Japan's war past are at their highest levels in decades. The film, produced by the Tokyo independent production house Siglo, shows that the drive to revise the Japanese Constitution cannot be divorced from an understanding of that history or from the impact revision will have on Japan's relations with its neighboring countries.

On 14 April, the 61st session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting, adopted a resolution drafted and submitted jointly by Japan and the EU on the situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). It called on North Korea to immediately return Japanese abductees and on the UN General Assembly to take up the question of North Korean human rights violations in general.

The No 1 abductee whose return is sought by Japan is Yokota Megumi, abducted from the Japan Sea coast in Niigata prefecture on 15 November 1977, when the 13-year old schoolgirl was returning home from a badminton match. She would be, if indeed still alive today, a woman in her early 40s.[2]

Although a U.S. fact-finding mission sent to Iraq concluded in October 2004 that the country possessed no weapons of mass destruction, why did the United States continue to insist that such weapons existed?

An independent nonpartisan commission established by U.S. President George W. Bush to examine that issue reported last Thursday, after a year-long probe, that the country's intelligence agencies did a terrible job. In fact, they passed on unfounded data to the top levels of the U.S. government.

In his interviews and writings over the past decade, Osama bin Laden has repeatedly talked about America's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He believes (incorrectly) that it was the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender – and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on America that will shock us into retreating from the Middle East.

Sino-Japanese relations sunk to a new low on the weekend of April 9-10 when an estimated 10-20,000 Chinese protestors surrounded the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, pelting it with missiles and shouting “Japanese pigs come out” and “Be ashamed of distorting history.” Thousands more vented their rage in other parts of the capital and in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and elsewhere.

The protests, demanding a boycott of Japanese goods, followed Tokyo’s authorization of textbooks that many in China condemn for whitewashing Japan’s brutal fifteen-year invasion (1931-45). The result is to rock the already troubled partnership between Asia’s stagnating economic leader and its rising power, bringing China-Japan relations to their lowest point since reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1972.

NEW YORK – The Japanese-American who waited 40 years for justice is dead.

Fred Korematsu, hailed by many as the Rosa Parks (a heroine of the African American civil rights movement) of World War II, passed away Wednesday in the northern California community of Larkspur. He was 86.

If East Asia was the site of the most costly wars of the era of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 no major war has torn the region asunder. In recent years, however, territorial disputes whose roots lie in the era of empire and war, and which have been largely dormant, have erupted. Japan Focus has taken up recent disputes involving Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands, and Japan and South Korea over Takeshima/Tokdo Islands as issues of security, resources, and nationalism erupt on Japan's borders. The present article locates Japan-Russian conflicts over the Northern Territories/Kurils within the broader parameters of shifting regional and global relations.

[As China-Japan relations entered their tensest period since the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1972, Japan's Asahi Shimbun appraised the situation in an article by its China bureau chief and an editorial. Noting the role of the Chinese government in fueling the current wave of protests and of the police in failing to curb violence directed against the Japanese embassy, the newspaper called on it to rein in nationalist actions that could jeopardize the flourishing economic relations between the two nations. The Asahi locates the protests in the context of Chinese responses to Japan's textbook controversy and its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. It warns the governments of both countries that the genie of nationalism, once out of the bottle, may be difficult to curb, a warning with deep historical roots in the China-Japan relationship. The Asahi texts make no mention, however, of rising nationalism in Japan, nor do they specify ways in which Japanese government and people might contribute to easing the tensions that threaten the relationship between Asia's most powerful nations. Japan Focus]

George W. Bush might have kicked his alcohol and drug habits, but he still appears to have at least one serious addiction – to nuclear weapons.

Last year, Congress refused to fund the administration's ambitious proposal for new nuclear weapons, largely because both Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed that the world would be a safer place with fewer – rather than more – nuclear explosives in existence.