Aso Mining Company had been producing coal to fuel Japan's modernization for nearly 70 years by the time Aso Taro, Japan's current foreign minister, was born in 1940. Faced with a severe heavy labor shortage as the China war gave way to the Pacific War, Japanese industry increasingly turned to Korean, Allied POW and Chinese forced labor. Some 10,000 Korean forced laborers toiled under miserable conditions for Aso Mining. In addition, it is now emerging that 300 Allied prisoners of war performed forced labor at Fukuoka POW Branch Camp No. 26, better known as the Aso Yoshikuma coal mine. Two-thirds of the prisoners were Australian; one-third was British; two were Dutch.

[China and East Asia are experiencing a harbour construction boom as the region gains a position of ascendance in global trade. Nazery Khalid - Research Fellow, Center for Economic Studies and Ocean Industries. Maritime Institute of Malaysia - reports that 7 of the world's 20 busiest terminals are in China. The port to watch is Shanghai, which is poised to overtake its main rivals (Hong Kong and Singapore). In 2005, Shanghai handled 443 million tons of cargo in total and 18.09 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containers, an increase of 24.2 percent compared with the previous year (Hong Kong handled 23.2 million TEUs and Singapore 22.43 TEUs). The Shanghai region is expected to handle 35 million TEUs of container traffic by 2010. This is because the port of Ningbo will continue its own frenetic expansion of capacity as well as install the world's longest bridge (the US$ 1.4 billion Hangzhou Bay Bridge) to cut the travel time to Shanghai to two hours. In addition, Shanghai is adding a deepwater facility in nearby Yangshan and working out deals with other North China ports to provide international service for them.

[Since the publication of Tanaka Sakai's February report on the US road to war with Iran, vigorous international debate has been touched off by allegations of a critically important Israel lobby in US politics and the making of US policy in the Middle East. Tanaka offers an independent critical Japanese perspective on the forces driving US policy toward Iran, one that goes beyond discussion of the Israel lobby to consider the interaction between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam that has been driving the region and world toward Armageddon. But Sakai looks beyond the US-Islamic clash to examine the doctrinal roots of the Shia-Sunni divisions within Islam and their implications for the future of Iran and the region. In particular, he considers whether divisions internal to Islam will trump the deepening divide between Islamic and Christian fundamentalists. In either event, the prospects for Iran and the Middle East remain dark. MS]

First, it is wrong to translate “globalism” as world-ization (sekaika) or internationalization (kokusaika). They say 300 trillion dollars are currently linked to the IT industry. Globalization means creating a sanctioned hunting preserve so that big money, made when profit produces profit, can circle the world. Under the Koizumi administration, this system has been thoroughly accommodated.

Now, Koizumi's “structural reform” is generating the next set of “structural reform problems.”

Through mid-April and into May, the already tense relations between Seoul and Tokyo moved closer to the breaking point when Japan began to implement its plan to conduct a maritime survey around the islets of Dokdo/Takeshima, which are controlled by South Korea and are claimed as sovereign territory by both states.

In response to the dispatch of Japanese research vessels, Seoul sent twenty gunboats to Dokdo/Takeshima in order to prevent the survey. As the two sides edged toward confrontation, rhetoric escalated and nationalist public opinion was mobilized, particularly in South Korea. A round of diplomacy resulted in a temporary stand-down, but the patchwork agreement was followed by a hardening of positions that does not bode well for a permanent solution to the dispute.

While the debate about the use of children in war is relatively new, the practice is ages old. Long before education became a right rather than a privilege it was common for boys to be recruited into the military in roles that saw them face death at the front line. Joining the army or navy was the accepted fate of many young lads from poorer backgrounds, and in that respect, the boys who carried armor for Spartan hoplites or stood watch on a juggernaut at Jutland had much in common. Nowadays, insurgents and pro-government militia groups throughout the world use brutal coercion to recruit children. Boys and girls are forced to carry supplies, act as spies, messengers or lookouts, and in extreme cases, even to serve as human mine detectors or to take part in suicide missions. In addition to those who volunteered at a young age, ending up as drummer boys at Waterloo or Gettysburg, and the contemporary boy soldiers compelled to fight by their masters in Sierra Leone, East Timor or Angola, there is a third category, a group caught up in a whirlwind of nationalist fervor, “willingly” answering the call to face an invading enemy portrayed by propaganda as being bent on total destruction.

[By most standards, Japan is now the world's number two naval power. This article, and the accompanying Asahi Shimbun series on Japan's four year Maritime Self Defense Force deployment to the Indian Ocean, reveals how far Japan's military reach now extends within the framework of US-Japan alliance. See the five-part Asahi Shinbun report, Japans New Blue Water Navy: A Four-Year Indian Ocean Mission Recasts the Constitution and the US- Japan Alliance

By drawing attention to Iraq and the obvious role oil plays in US policy today, the George W Bush-Dick Cheney administration has done just that: it has drawn the world's energy-deficit powers’ attention firmly to the strategic battle over energy, and especially oil.

This is already having consequences for the global economy in terms of US$75-a-barrel crude-oil price levels. Now it is taking on the dimension of what one former US defense secretary rightly calls a “geopolitical nightmare” for the United States.

Relations between China and India have long been marked by an ambivalence that has led some observers to describe them as “neither friends nor foes.” In the late 1940s, when China and India won freedom from imperial powers and established new governments, their relations were warm. From the late 1950s, however, relations deteriorated, notably from the Dalai Lama's 1959 flight from Tibet and his refuge in India. This was followed by a succession of events - the1962 border war, Beijing's nuclear tests in 1964, Indian nuclear tests in 1974, Sino-Pakistan defense cooperation from the 1970s, Indian nuclear tests in 1998 again - that further strained their ties. Since the 1980s and 1990s, when China and India respectively embarked upon economic reforms, their strategic competition was intensified by a scramble for economic and energy resources.

TOKYO - Japan's population is shrinking and graying, at a rate probably unprecedented in history, and there is no sign the trend will stop soon: the nation's birth-rate figures for 2005, due to be released shortly, are expected to hit a new record low. Not only is Japan's birth rate already among the lowest in the industrialized world, but its pace of decline is the fastest, raising grave concerns about a possible erosion of the economy's international competitiveness as the population thins out.

In response, a number of Japanese firms have started to improve their child- and elderly parent-care programs, driven not only by concerns about a possible labor shortage after the baby-boomer generation starts retiring next year but also by growing awareness of the need to secure qualified workers, especially women, over the long term amid the dwindling working population. Some electrical appliance manufacturers have even introduced programs granting their employees leave to receive fertility treatment.

For 60 years the world has faced no greater threat than nuclear weapons. Yet nuclear politics, in principle the most urgent for human survival, has been in practice the most ridden with hypocrisy.

Mohammed ElBaradei, Director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has described as “unworkable” the way of thinking that it is “morally reprehensible for some counties to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.” [1] While he did not spell out particular countries, the nuclear superpowers plainly fill the category of countries that “rely on.., refine…, postulate plans for” use of nuclear weapons, while they undoubtedly see as “morally reprehensible” the attempt of other countries, notably North Korea and Iran, to do likewise. While plainly hypocritical, the former is the position of the United States (and its allies, such as Japan).

[The long-simmering global whaling debate is entering a new phase as Japan is poised on eliminating international strictures on whaling and Green Peace intensifies its Southern Oceans campaign to halt Japanese and other whaling. Japan Focus presents two articles on whaling, one focusing on the view from Japan, the other on the changing international climate as Japan lobbies successfully to assure that whaling will continue.]

Many studies of postwar Japan have emphasized that an ideology of ethnic homogeneity has been an important element in Japanese society since 1945. Oguma and others have argued that this ideology contrasts with the view of a multi-ethnic empire that was prevalent prior to 1945. It has been widely proposed, we believe correctly, that this ideology of ethnic homogeneity —the idea of the tan'itsu minzoku —has been used by political and business elites to weaken class unity and to exacerbate other divisions among working people. The term “cultural nationalism” probably best encapsulates this ideology. A vast pseudo-scientific literature known as Nihonjinron (literally “theories of Japanese(ness)”) has grown up in support of this cultural nationalism and has in turn been widely critiqued, both in Japanese and in English.

“The most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority.” Henrik Ibsen, “An Enemy of the People.”

As public spaces in Japan go, Minamata's Eco Park is quite pleasant. Unlike the “Designed by local elders and built by a yakuza-linked construction firm now under indictment” concrete monstrosities that often pass for “parks” in Japan, one can actually relax in Eco Park and enjoy a stroll along the waterfront of Minamata bay and the Shiranui Sea off Kyushu in western Japan.

Since when have retrogressive “masturbatory views of history,” represented by the “liberal view of history,” come to dominate bookstore shelves? They became noticeable to the eye around the time of the Gulf War. In fact, Fujioka Nobukatsu, the leading proponent of the “liberal-view-of-history” [jiyûshugi shikan], begins both of his books—Reforming Modern History Education (1996) and A Modern History of Shame (1996)—with prologues describing the impact of the Gulf War. He observes that “many Japanese, relying on the idealism of article nine in the constitution, were able to steep themselves completely in sentimental pacifism.” Furthermore, “the Gulf War was a shocking event that demonstrated that the ideal of ‘pacifism’ contained within article nine, and upon which ‘peace education’ was based, failed in the face of the reality of international politics.” In short, according to Fujioka's reminiscences, the Gulf War was a sensational event that exposed the defects of Japan's “postwar democracy.”