Below is a translation of the transcript of an interview with Iha Yoichi, Mayor of Okinawa's Ginowan City, broadcast on Nihon TV's “News 24” on December 11, 2009. Ginowan City is the reluctant host of the controversial Futenma Marine Air Station, and this interview took place shortly after Iha had made a series of presentations on the so-called “Futenma Base transfer” issue to senior figures in the Hatoyama government including the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense. Iha and his staff, based on exhaustive research into U.S. documents, have concluded that the Pentagon is planning to move most of the Marine Corps units and personnel from Okinawa to Guam. Central to US regional military reorganization plans is a recent Guam Environmental Impact Statement pointing to the large scale move of the Marines from Okinawa. This finding is at odds with the widely-held understanding by the Japanese government and media that the majority of the Marines in Okinawa, as many as 10,000, will remain even after the relocation of 8,000 Marines and 9,000 family members to Guam under the May 2006 Japan-U.S. “Roadmap Agreement” that sealed the U.S.-Japan agreement.

In 1931, on his way to the London Round Table Conference, Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a Reuters correspondent what his program was. He responded by writing out a brief, vivid sketch of “the India of my dreams”. Such an India, he said, would be free, would belong to all its people, would have no high and low classes, no discrimination against women, no intoxicants and, “the smallest army imaginable.” (2)

It was 1951 and Rozella Switzer, post-mistress of McPherson, Kansas, a prosperous, conservative, nearly all-white oil town of 9,000 people on the Eastern edge of the wheat belt, had not seen the Nigerians coming. That Fall, seven African students, all male, in their early- and mid-20's, had arrived in the area to attend McPherson College and Central College. The accomplished young men, who counted among themselves a one-time math teacher, a surveyor, an accountant, a pharmacist and a railway telegrapher, had come with high professional aspirations to acquire training in agriculture, engineering and medicine; within months, they were treated to a fairly typical round of Jim Crow hospitality, from half-wages at the local laundry to the segregated upper-balcony of the local movie house. While at least one of the men had been warned by his father that Christians “‘don't practice what they preach’,” the students were apparently unprepared for the Midwest's less metaphorical chill; with the arrival of winter, officials at McPherson College telephoned around town to gather warm clothes for the men, which is how they came to Switzer's restless and expansive attention. A widow in her 40's Switzer, according to Time, “smokes Pall Malls, drinks an occasional bourbon & coke, likes politics and people.” She was also “curious about the African students” and invited them to her home for coffee, music and talk.

TOKYO - With the world economy's center of gravity shifting from the West to the East, led by China's rising economic and corresponding political power, the year 2010 may witness a series of epoch-making events in Asia.