The nationwide uprising of June 1987 put an end to the tyrannical rule of Chun Du-hwan's regime and opened a new chapter in South Korea's contemporary history. True, it has had its background in the April 19th Student Revolution of 1960, the Pusan-Masan Uprising of 1979 and the May Democratic Struggle of Kwangju 1980.

Japan Focus introduction. China's share in international trade more than tripled from less than 2% in 1985 to about 7% in 2005. By 2004, China was the world's third largest exporter and it is expected to become the leader by the beginning of the next decade. Gaulier, Lemoine and Ünal-Kesenci provide new perspective on China's surge and its repercussions for the restructuring of Asian and world economy and trade.

The look on Nakamae Akira's face said it all. In the somber press conference that followed the end of the 2007 International Whaling Commission conference in Anchorage, the deputy director of Japan's Fisheries Agency was as impassive as an Alaskan iceberg. Japan's silk-smooth spokesman Morishita Joji as always did most of the talking. When Nakamae did eventually answer a single question after spending the bulk of the press conference staring out the window of the Hotel Captain Cook, he was brutally direct: “Why should we leave the IWC, we're not the problem.”

This article examines the role of military, emperor and government in the enshrinement of Japan's war dead from 1868 to 2007. Below also find an Asahi Shimbun editorial reflecting on the constitutional and political issues of enshrinement.

In the past few years, an increasing number of Private Security Companies (PSCs—sometimes also referred to as Private Military Companies, PMCs [1]) have emerged and are offering and conducting maritime security services in Southeast Asia. These companies offer services in addition to security provided by Southeast Asian states and their government agencies. This paper explores the role of private companies in securing vessels, ports, offshore energy installations and fishing grounds across Southeast Asia, and discusses whether PSCs are an alternative or viable supplement to government efforts to protect national waters, shipping lanes and other maritime assets.

In the past few years, an increasing number of Private Security Companies (PSCs—sometimes also referred to as Private Military Companies, PMCs [1]) have emerged and are offering and conducting maritime security services in Southeast Asia. These companies offer services in addition to security provided by Southeast Asian states and their government agencies. This paper explores the role of private companies in securing vessels, ports, offshore energy installations and fishing grounds across Southeast Asia, and discusses whether PSCs are an alternative or viable supplement to government efforts to protect national waters, shipping lanes and other maritime assets.

New York. Over the past several years, much attention has focused on the role of China's trade surplus in creating today's global financial imbalances. But too little attention has been paid to the role of Japan's policy of near-zero interest rates in contributing to these imbalances. As global financial uncertainty rises, it is time for Japan to change course.

This is the third article by John McGlynn in a series that meticulously dissects US charges of North Korean criminality, notably the forgery of US currency and money laundering, the significance of the legal instruments it has imposed on North Korea through Banco Delta Asia, and the significance of US actions for the resolution of the interrelated issues of North Korean nuclear weapons and the normalization of US-North Korean relations.

Blinded by imperial hubris, the author vividly shows how Australian and American forces received a bitter lesson in guerrilla warfare and the uses of technology from the NLF.

In 1967 the commander of First Australian Task Force (1ATF), Brigadier Stuart Graham ordered the construction of an 11 kilometre ‘barrier fence and minefield’ in Phuoc Tuy Province, southern Vietnam. This ‘barrier’, which ran for some 11 kilometres through the southern Phuoc Tuy, would constitute the biggest blunder in Australian military history since the Second World War. It would also constitute a story of strategic self-destruction that epitomised both Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and the wider Australian imperial tradition of sending expeditions to farflung wars.

When the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) released its list of the world's top ten rivers at risk in late March, attention in Australia naturally focused on the fact that the Murray-Darling River system was one of those listed. Very little attention was given in the Australian media to the other nine rivers so identified, which included the two longest rivers in the Southeast Asian region, the Mekong and the Salween. Both these rivers rise in the Himalayas in Chinese territory before flowing into Southeast Asia, and play a vital role for the populations in their basin areas; for the 60-70 million in the Mekong's basin of nearly 800,000 square kilometres, and for the 6-7 million in the Salween's basin of 272,000 square kilometres. The WWF's claims about the risks facing the rivers it lists as ‘in danger’ are bound to generate controversy, with proponents of hydroelectricity sourced from dams bound to express scepticism. Nevertheless, current and future developments associated with both the Mekong and the Salween are certainly worthy of examination. For there is irrefutable evidence of the problems that can be caused by the construction of large-scale dams on previously free-flowing rivers. Moreover, a review of current developments associated with the Salween and the Mekong rivers is desirable at a time when environmental issues are increasingly a concern internationally. Such issues have particular relevance in Southeast Asia, both within individual countries and in terms of relations between individual Southeast Asian countries and their great neighbour, China.

KOODANKULAM, Tamil Nadu—Even as the Indian government gropes in the dark for a coherent policy on energy and the environment, it is pressing hard for a highly unpopular nuclear power project here, close to the peninsula's southern tip.

The project, which involves building six Russian-designed reactors of 1,000 Megawatt (Mw) capacity each, will be India's biggest nuclear power station.

Winter 1697: After four days and nights aboard a junk crossing the treacherous waters of the Taiwan Strait, Chinese traveler Yu Yonghe excitedly spotted the peaks of Taiwan's mountains on the horizon. In sight at last was the frontier island that he had longed to see since the Chinese conquest of Taiwan fourteen years earlier. As Yu wrote in his travel diary:

What happened in My Lai in March 1968 is remembered in the outside world as one of the most tragic episodes of the Vietnam War. However this was not an isolated event and should be considered in relation to other similar incidents of mass civilian killings. This essay investigates the Vietnam War's history of village massacres, including those by US forces and South Korean forces, and how these catastrophic events are remembered in the affected communities.

I have been thinking about this sort of thing often.

On a Sunday morning, after my night work, before coming home to sleep, I go out to a nearby shopping center and find a father who is about my age, who seems to be enjoying shopping with his wife and child. With men past age thirty, a marriage rush seems to begin like an angry wave. My friends from the past are deciding to marry one by one.

A longer version of this essay appeared in a volume (Thompson and Traphagen 2006) on recent scholarship about Tohoku, Japan's archetypal rural region, and the puzzle that intrigued me as I wrote it was why mine was to be the only chapter on agriculture. There are chapters about young women working and old people dying, about lacquer ware and Deer Dances and enka, and about internationalization and administrative amalgamation. But where were the farmers and what happened to agriculture, even in Tohoku?

When, in mid-2005, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia's “history wars” – the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for Japan's 20th century military expansion in Asia.

Japan Focus introduction. Below are the first two in a twenty-one part series published by the Asahi Shimbun and International Herald Tribune on May 23, 2007 that seeks to chart Japan's role in shaping the world's future. The Asahi editors target the twin dangers of militarism, particularly nuclear weapons and global warming, at the center of their effort to frame an appropriate role for Japan in the coming decades. These are indeed two of the most intractable issues facing the Asia Pacific and the world. Yet the series nowhere confronts the central obstacles to an expanded Japanese contribution toward peaceful resolution of global problems: that is Japan's subordination within a US-Japan security relationship. Nor, in reaffirming Article 9, does it address the implications of the US-Japan relationship or Japan's contemporary drive for a more powerful, expansive, and constitutionally mandated military role. It remains, in short, at the level of rhetorical commitment to “peace” without engaging the intractable geostrategic issues that challenge peaceful outcomes, above all the nature of US global power and Japan's subordination to it. The point was made clearly by Terashima Jitsuo, President of the Japan Research Institute (Nihon Sogo Kenkyujo). Responding to questions from an Asahi editorial staff member about the value of a China-Japan-US meeting, Terashima commented, “So long as Japan is viewed both by the US and China as a peripheral country attached to the US, then materialization of a China-Japan-US meeting is far off.”

On the 23rd and 24th of April the first round of negotiations for the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) was held in Canberra, the Australian capital. This is the first negotiation since the telephone conversation four months ago between Prime Ministers Abe Shinzo and John Howard, in which a decision was made to begin negotiations. To avoid negative political repercussions the negotiations were scheduled to follow the Japanese General Election and were held in Australia.