Kitakyushu is home to just under one million residents, making it the 11th most populous city in Japan. It is roughly equidistant to Shanghai and Tokyo, and actually closer to Seoul and Pyongyang than the Japanese capital. As the largest Japanese port west of Osaka-Kobe, it positions itself as a commercial gateway to Asia. Over the last thirty years the city has also worked tirelessly to shed its image as a rust belt steel town, rebranding itself as Eco-Model City Kitakyushu, a centre for environmental technology and protection measures. This hard work threatens to be undone by decisions being taken right now.

“We'd like to cut down the trees with nature in mind.” So declared Suzuki Takehiko, director of the Shōsenkyō Kankō Kyōkai (Shōsen Gorge Tourism Association), in August 2008. Part of Japan's Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park, Shōsen Gorge has for decades been labeled the country's “most beautiful valley.” Years of deforesting meant that when the park was founded in 1950, little stood between tourists and the majestic rock formations for which the gorge is most famous. But by the turn of the twenty-first century visitors were frustrated that trees were now blocking much of the view. The park's laissez-faire approach to the valley's vegetation did not threaten its ecosystems—trees are hardly invasive species there. But this economically disadvantaged part of Japan depended on a steady stream of tourists who wanted to see cliffs, not trees; some even claimed that the trees were depriving the valley of its beauty. So Suzuki argued that “trees” (part of nature) should be felled so that people could have a better view of “nature” (the gorge). Despite Suzuki's appeal, most of the trees still stand and in fact are highlighted in the park's promotional materials. The Shōsen Gorge Tourism Association's website features images of colorful trees growing beside, and out of, majestic crags; in some pictures trees effectively obscure the cliffs. A banner running near the top of the website declares Shōsen Gorge the most beautiful in Japan, full of the [many] wonders of nature (Nihon ichi no keikokubi o hokoru “Shōsenkyō” wa shizen no subarashisa ga ippai desu).

Japan and China started direct trading of their currencies, the yen and the yuan, on the interbank foreign exchange markets in Tokyo and Shanghai on June 1 in an apparent bid to strengthen bilateral trade and investment between the world's third- and second-largest economies.

Direct yen-yuan trades also aim to hedge the risk of the dollar's fall in the long run as the world's key settlement currency and as the main reserve currency in Asia, the world's economic growth center in the 21st century. By skipping the dollar in transactions, the region's two biggest economies indicate their intention to reduce their dependence on dollar risk and US monetary authorities’ leeway and prowess on the Asian economy. The move aids China's goal of undercutting US influence in the region while strengthening China-Japan financial ties.

“Adding insult to injury” sounds like a lawyerly phrase compared to its painfully evocative Japanese equivalent 泣面に蜂 nakitsura ni hachi – literally “a bee to a crying face”. But even that stinging proverb fails to convey what Japan has been through during the recent past. In March 2011 its economy, slowly recovering from the worst global post-World War II downturn, was hit by a powerful earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. That twin disaster disrupted many supply chains of Japan's important manufacturing sector and caused a catastrophic failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant; the ensuing fears led to the eventual shut-down of all of the country's nuclear generating stations, limited electricity supply, increased imports of fossil energies and the first annual foreign trade deficit in a generation.

This paper is an expanded and updated version of “Social Media in Disaster Japan,” in Jeff Kingston, ed., Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan's 3/11 (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies).

Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan's 3/11 (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies) by Jeff Kingston

On 31 May 2012, Professor Mizukami Tetsuo (Institute for Peace and Community Studies, Rikkyo University) hosted two lectures on the problems associated with reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. The speakers were Professor Frank von Hippel (Princeton University), former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology and co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), and Professor Gordon MacKerron, Director and Head of SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research) at the University of Sussex.