TOKYO - Japan rolled out the red carpet for Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar when, at Tokyo's invitation, he arrived on Monday for a five-day visit for talks with Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and a luncheon hosted by Emperor Akihito in his honor at the Imperial Palace.

It is over forty years since the Shinkansen (‘bullet train‘) began operating between Tokyo and Osaka. Since then the network has expanded, but other countries, most notably France and Germany, have been developing their own high speed railways, too. As other countries, mainly in Asia, look to develop high speed railways, the battle over which country will win the lucrative contracts for them is on. It is not only a matter of railway technology. Political, economic & cultural influences are also at stake. This paper will look at these various aspects in relation to the export of the Shinkansen to China in light of previous Japanese attempts to export the Shinkansen and the situation in Taiwan.

On March 1, 2007, Japan's Prime Minister Abe Shinzo denied the comfort women. Technically, Abe denied Japanese governmental responsibility for the forced coercion of women and girls into the system of sexual slavery that involved an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 victims from throughout Asia, particularly Korea and China. Looked at in starkest relief, the democratically elected leader of the world's second richest nation — one that currently aspires to international leadership in the UN Security Council — committed an act of open violence. He denied the few remaining survivors of a well-documented history the right to claim the dignity that has come as a result of telling their story since 1993 when the Government of Japan first publicly accepted responsibility.

[At a moment when the “comfort women” controversy is dominating the growing global discussion about Japanese war responsibility, the Japan Supreme Court is set to permanently foreclose the possibility of redress for Chinese war victims within the Japanese court system. Japan's top court will hold a special hearing on March 16 in a compensation lawsuit brought by Chinese forced labor survivors against Nishimatsu Construction Corp. and the Japanese government. If, as expected, the Supreme Court rules that the victims' right to file the claim has been extinguished by state treaties, it will ensure final defeat for all lawsuits by Chinese victims filed in Japanese courts.

Southeast Asia, long known as an intermediate zone between the ancient civilisations of China and India, is also an area that scholars have long portrayed as historically subject to influences coming from its west, beginning with Indianisation, then islamisation and finally westernisation. However, this article argues that it would be far more insightful, and historically more accurate for the last several centuries at least, to treat Southeast Asia and southern China as part of one region, in the same way that Fernand Braudel approached the history of the Mediterranean.

BANGKOK - If all goes to plan, China will for the first time ever in July host joint military exercises with troops from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the strongest indication yet that Beijing's recent economic charm offensive toward the region is starting to pay real strategic dividends.

In August 2000, the German Foundation Act established a fund to compensate tens of thousands of survivors of Nazi slave labour. The 5.1 billion Euro fund was financed jointly by the German government and companies which had been involved in the use of wartime slave labour, and by 2005, over 70,000 claims for compensation had been recognized.

The zanryu fujin (stranded war wives) [1] are former Japanese emigrants to Manchukuo who remained in China at the end of the Second World War. They were long among the forgotten legacies of Japan's imperialist past. [2] The reasons why these women did not undergo repatriation during the years up to 1958, when large numbers of former colonial emigrants returned to Japan, are varied but in many cases, the ‘Chinese’ families that adopted them, or into which they married, played a part. [3] The stories of survival during the period immediately after the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War on 9 August 1945, the civil war that followed, and throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, are testament to their strength. At the same time, the history of how the zanryu fujin came to be in China is useful for understanding the Japanese government's colonial policies, its wartime attitudes toward women, and its post war handling of inconvenient war legacies.

Since the Six Party Beijing Agreement on North Korea of 13 February 2007, optimism has spread on all fronts save one – Japan. For the Abe government, nuclear weapons constitute only part of the North Korea problem. Indeed, as Wada Haruki notes below, for the Japanese government it is not nuclear weapons but the abduction problem that constitutes “the most important problem our country faces.”

Two recent libel cases have led to concerns that the freedom of Japanese journalists to investigate and, if necessary criticize the powerful is under attack. Both involve marginal publications that make a living tackling “taboo” subjects and which have suffered serious legal repercussions as a result. The mainstream media in Japan has so far declined to discuss the issues, still less to offer any expressions of solidarity for their plight. The cases coincide with the publication of a report by Reporters Without Borders, which called the “steady erosion” of press freedom in Japan “alarming” and again criticized the stifling role of press clubs on reporting in the world's second-largest economy.

This year's March First Day speech by South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun was reported on in Japan, as well. In Japan, the day was marked by a serious set of events surrounding a rally by Chongryun, or Chosen Soren, the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. The group's commemoration of Korea's March First, 1919 Independence Movement against Japanese colonization was to have been held in an outdoor theater in Hibiya Park on March 3. But the government of Tokyo, which had given the group a permit on January 25, suddenly changed its mind and revoked the permit on February 16. The reason it gave was that right-wing groups registered protests about the planned celebration with the government, saying that Tokyo should not grant permission to a group associated with North Korea to hold a public assembly when North Korea has abducted Japanese citizens. Supposedly, the authorities were worried about an opposing protest and could not guarantee the safety of participants.

East Timor is an ill-starred land that has endured more than its share of violence, neglect and deprivation. Since February 2007 there has been a renewed surge in violence, initially due to gang turf battles and increasingly aggressive clashes between gangs and international peacekeepers. After the Australian police shot three protesting IDPs (internally displaced people) near the airport on February 23rd, killing two of them, street confrontations and demonstrations grew more menacing. At the request of President Xanana Gusmao, on March 4th Australian troops surrounded and tried to capture a renegade soldier, Major Alfredo Reinado, killing five of his troops but failing to capture the fugitive who had escaped from prison last summer. Subsequently, death threats were made against the president, his relatives had their houses attacked and ransacked, and anti-Australian sentiments have surged. With the prospects for a restoration of peace uncertain, international peacekeepers, once warmly welcomed, are now the target of violent elements. It is hard to imagine a less promising environment for the upcoming presidential elections.

The 2006 stalemate at the six-party talks, coming after North Korea's missile tests and its first nuclear detonation, was a sign that U.S. policy was failing. Hamstrung by bureaucratic bickering, unable to build a cohesive multilateral coalition in support of its efforts, and unwilling to engage in serious negotiations with Pyongyang, Washington faced the real prospect of a North Korea armed with a small but growing nuclear deterrent. The Bush administration said that it would never accept a nuclear North Korea, but because of its policies, it seemed to have no choice.

As the slow and difficult negotiations on North Korean denuclearisation unfold, one small group of a hundred people or so in Japan are watching proceedings with a unique personal interest. Some are Japanese, others ethnic Koreans. All are survivors of one of the modern world's most bizarre, tragic and utterly forgotten “humanitarian” projects.

In the early morning of February 11, around 4 a.m., a devastating fire swept through the locked cells of a migrant worker detention center in the South Korean city of Yeosu, killing 10 detainees and wounding many others. The center staff tried to put out the flames by spraying fire extinguishers through the bars of the cells, but in an act that can only be described as barbaric, did not unlock the cell doors to free those trapped inside, out of fear that they would escape. Migrant workers behind the locked doors and barred windows were forced to breath in the toxic fumes emitted from burning mattresses. These fumes were the cause of most of the deaths and injuries. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but the reality is that the roots of the tragedy lie with the Korean government's inhumane policy towards migrant workers.

In 1993 Professor Yamamuro Shin'ichi of Kyoto University published Kimera: Manshukoku no shozo (Chimera: A Portrait of Manzhouguo). He sent me a copy at that time—we have been friends since the mid-1980s—and I glanced it over and thought how nice it would be to read, as soon as I had some of that most precious of commodities: spare time. Unlike the countless other books collecting dust, which I continue to promise myself I will someday get to, I actually had an opportunity to read this one during 1996-97 while I was a visiting professor at the Research Institute in the Humanities at Kyoto University.

When Prime Ministers Abe Shinzo and John Howard signed Japan's first comprehensive security agreement in half a century, and its only one apart from the treaty with the United States, the two countries raised five crucial foreign policy signals, and fundamentally securitised the relationship between the two countries.

A recent event making headlines worldwide was the publication of GAIJIN HANZAI URA FAIRU (The Underground Files of Gaijin Crime). This magazine, which went on sale at major Japanese bookstores and convenience stores nationwide, depicts foreigners as “dangerous” and “evil”. Despite Japan's lack of a legal framework, or a civil society capable of curbing hate speech, activists managed to have the magazine removed from stores and put out of circulation. This report shows how non-Japanese residents in Japan (a disparate group with few things in common–not even a language) successfully pushed for their rights in a case ignored by the Japanese media. Utilizing the power of the Internet to organize a boycott of magazine outlets, “Newcomer” residents and immigrants demonstrated their strength as a consumer bloc for what is probably the first time in Japan's history. This is the report of a participant observer.

Three concerns – oil, China and the war on terror – are pushing the United States toward greater involvement in Africa.

The new United States defence budget involves a substantial increase in spending and a redirection of many military programmes towards counterinsurgency and responding to asymmetric warfare (see “The costs of America's long war”, 8 March 2007). It also entails a relatively little-noticed change in the orientation of the US military towards Africa, announced on 9 February 2007: the planned establishment of Africa Command (Africom).

China's coastal regions have received impressive financial and organizational resources through overseas Chinese networks and international capital generally. China's land borders are also linked to transnational communities, thanks to the networks of ethnic minorities who live there. This article introduces the mobilization of the Korean minority's transnational ethnicities in the service of local economic development. China's well-established structure for the utilization of overseas Chinese resources serves as a frame of reference. The analysis focuses on foreign investment, donations, and remittances—resources that are widely regarded as the most important development input provided by the overseas Chinese. The regional focus is on Yanbian, a Korean autonomous prefecture in Jilin Province in Northeast China, which has enjoyed a measure of success in attracting Korean investment in step with burgeoning China-South Korea economic and political ties. But it has also faced significant challenges.