The emerging India-Japan relationship has been met with extreme reactions - from enthusiasm and protests in India and Japan, to concern in China. This new “strategic partnership,” and particularly the nuclear cooperation under negotiation, does not portend well for Asia. P K Sundaram, a strong advocate of better relations between the people of India and Japan, tells us why.

Two years after the start of Japan's nuclear disaster, parents fear for their children's future.

Like most fathers, Fujimoto Yoji frets about the health of his young children. In addition to normal parental concerns about the food they eat, the air they breathe and the environment they will inherit, however, he must add one more: the radioactive fallout from a major nuclear disaster.

The Asia-Pacific Journal presents excerpts from Sarah Bird's newly published novel, Above the East China Sea together with her conversation with Steve Rabson, who served in the army on Okinawa in 1968 en route to becoming a leading translator of Okinawan literature. Bird's novel engages the theme of suicide and death from the Battle of Okinawa to the present, interweaving the fate of Okinawans and American occupying forces. As Robert Leleux observed in a review of the novel, “In the heightened metaphysical reality of Bird's novel, humans and ghosts walk among each other, and mortality proves no hindrance to resolving family dramas. In fact, Okinawans’ relationship to death, at least as presented by Bird, seems somewhat offhand, as though the great cosmic divide is actually a very thin veil between our world and the next … reminiscent of Faulkner's great line, ‘The past is never dead. It's not even past.’“ This issue of APJ couples the novel with the recollections of compulsory mass suicide in the Battle of Okinawa in which 16-year old Kinjo Shigeaki killed his mother and two younger siblings.

Morita Seiya wrote this book chapter in May 2013 during a campaign by People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence (PAPS) against an exhibition of works by Aida Makoto at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. As described in two earlier articles published by Japan Focus in 2013, the Museum attracted criticism for promoting art with misogynistic, paedophilic and anti-disability values. PAPS members met with Museum directors to discuss their concerns, but the meeting achieved no resolution to the issue.

This is the text of an interview with Kinjo Shigeaki (85) about his experience as a survivor of the compulsory mass suicides which occurred on Tokashiki Island, Okinawa in late March 1945. The interview took place on April 23rd 2014.

I am from the Kerama Islands, about 30 km off the coast of Naha, the capital of Okinawa. There are about 10 islands in the group.