This is in response to Charles Hayford's piece, “Samurai Baseball vs. Baseball in Japan.” In his interesting and well-written essay, Hayford calls Bushido the invention of twentieth-century Japanese Nitobe Inazo. He quotes William Kelly, who says that “Samurai Baseball” was “shaped by important elements of the nation in the early 20th century—education, industry, middle class life, the government, and above all the national project.” And he also quotes Ruth Benedict, who called Bushido “a publicist's inspiration,” But surely, he must be aware of the antecedents—the various forms of budo, as well as the seventeenth century version of Bushido as described by Yamaga—which were already there, be they invented tradition or otherwise.

Prisoners of conscience, communists, antiwar activists, martyrs for Japan's tottering pacifist constitution: Obora Toshiyuki, Onishi Nobuhiro and Takada Sachimi have been called many things since February 2004.

In the world of right-wing bloggers, they represent the dying strains of a 60-year-old refrain: no matter how the world changes, Japan must stay out of international conflict and remain true to a yellowing document written under US occupation in 1947. For others, including supporters who contributed 3-4 million yen to their legal fees, they are the stubborn keepers of the antiwar flame, the personification of pacifist ideals in the face of huge odds.

How “free trade” is destroying Third World agriculture-and who's fighting back.

The global rise in food prices is not only a consequence of using food crops to produce biofuels, but of the “free trade” policies promoted by international financial institutions. Now peasant organisations are leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture.