On July 9, 2011 another irrational colonial border that demarcated Sudan was consigned to history when South Sudan achieved independence. In the process an often seemingly irrevocable principle of decolonisation, that boundaries inherited from colonial entities should remain sacrosanct, has been challenged once again. Indeed, a cautious trend in international relations has been to support greater self-determination for ‘nations’ without awarding full statehood. Yet Kosovo is another state whose recent independence has been recognised by most major players in the international community. In West Papua's case, the territory's small but growing elite had been preparing for independence from the Netherlands in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Dutch plans envisaged full independence by 1970. However, in 1962 Cold War realpolitik intervened and the United States engineered a transfer of sovereignty to Indonesia under the auspices of the United Nations. To Indonesian nationalists their revolution became complete since West New Guinea had previously been part of the larger colonial unit of the Netherlands East Indies, which had realised its independence as Indonesia in 1949. In West New Guinea, most Papuans felt betrayed by the international community and have been campaigning for a proper referendum on independence ever since.

As the drum rolls sound once again for those who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Roger Pulvers has provided a poignant reminder of those other, far more numerous, victims the United States has left in the wake of its wars overseas. In particular, the victims of the dioxin-contaminated herbicide Agent Orange, whose suffering continues decades after the Vietnam War ended.

This summer, I participated for the seventeenth time in the “Pilgrimage for Peace,” traveling to Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a group that included seventeen American students led by Professor Peter Kuznick of American University, seven international students from across Asia, and sixteen students from Japan. During our eleven days together, we had many discussions on the topic of “How to Understand the Relation between the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Hiroshima/Nagasaki.” Our Canadian coordinator and interpreter Norimatsu Satoko and two students from Fukushima introduced by Gotō Nobuyo made a special contribution to these discussions.

11 September 2011 marks ten years since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC. However, I would also like to call attention to the date, 20 September, which marks ten years since the United States entered its present condition of perpetual war. It was on 20 September 2001 that then U.S. President George W. Bush declared the opening of the “war on terror.”

On August 19th, 2011, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement in response to recent media coverage about the US military's use and storage of defoliants (including Agent Orange) on Okinawa during the Vietnam War. MOFA announced that, although it had requested the US Department of Defense to investigate these allegations, Washington had replied that it was unable to find any evidence from the period in question. As a result, Tokyo asked the US government to re-check its records in more detail. This was the first time that the Japanese government had asked the US about military defoliants since 2007 - and its refusal to accept the Pentagon's stock denial was rare. The current announcement arose after two weeks of unprecedented press reports which alleged that these chemicals had been widely used on Okinawa during the 1960s and ‘70s.