On Oct 25, 2005 a three-judge panel of the Tokyo District Court upheld a lawsuit filed by 25 leprosy (Hansen's disease) patients from Taiwan claiming compensation from the Japanese government for being forcibly segregated during Japanese colonial rule. On the same day, another panel of judges ruled against 117 South Korean leprosy patients seeking compensation who had also been quarantined during the colonial era.

As Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has adopted its draft of a new constitution that would clear the way for a greater role in international security, many people here and abroad will question:

Every two weeks one of the world's estimated 6,000 languages dies. It appears inevitable to many that the number of languages spoken throughout the world will have drastically diminished by the end of the 21st century. Pessimistic estimations consider that as many as 80% of the languages currently used will by then have vanished. The danger of such loss does not go unnoticed. Many speakers of indigenous minority languages around the world struggle to retain their mother tongues. This holds also true for the Ryukyu Islands, located between Kyushu and Taiwan. In the course of the nation building process since the Meiji era, a language regime was established throughout Japan in which the language of Tokyo came to serve as the means of interregional communication throughout Japan, including the Ryukyu Islands. The spread of Standard Japanese led to re-negotiations of the language-identity nexus in the Ryukyu Islands. As a matter of fact, so strong proved the idea of one unitary Japanese national language to be in Japan that the Ryukyuan languages are seriously endangered today and conscious efforts of language revitalization are necessary to ensure their future use. This is an account of how the Ryukyuan languages came to be endangered and of current efforts for their revitalization.

When Professor Sodei Rinjiro submitted his book on caricaturist and illustrator Arthur Szyk to his Hosei University publishers, he received an apologetic but unequivocal rejection: “It is well written, nothing wrong with the content, but we can't print the pictures.” The problem was several war-time caricatures of the late Emperor Hirohito that Sodei had provided from his personal collection. “I am sure they were afraid of right-wingers.”

As Randolph Bourne discerned as far back as 1917, a state waging war is readily able to obtain support for its undertaking from sizable numbers of intellectuals. Such factors as jingoism, combative egos, power worship, or considerations of profit and prestige ensure that numerous academics, journalists, writers, and critics will pronounce eloquently in favor of the warring state and exhort their compatriots to back it without question. Although a uniformly pro-war consensus is seldom attained, hawkish intellectuals play an important role in engineering consent and discrediting opposition to official policies. Appreciative of the services rendered by its intellectual myrmidons, the state rewards them, directly or indirectly.

[Drawing on the metaphor of Richard Nixon's 1972 China visit, an October 21 article in The Globalist has drawn attention to the forthcoming Bush visit to Kyoto as a potentially agenda-setting event. Scholar-activist Ira Straus proposes that George Bush use his forthcoming visit to Kyoto to become a world leader in environmentalism. Bush is due to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi in Kyoto on November 15-16, in a stop-over on his way to the APEC meeting in Busan and then later to China. There has been no indication that the environment will form a significant part of the two leaders’ agenda, even though they will meet in the city where the world's first global warming treaty was hammered out. It would indeed surprise many if Bush, whose administration torpedoed the Kyoto protocol, were to use his visit to launch a major environmental protection initiative.

[We present two articles on a critical moment in the history of Japanese imperialism on Taiwan, the nature of the impact of colonialism on indigenous people, and contemporary ramifications of that history. In the first of these, “Whither East Asia? Reflections in Light of the Japanese Colonial Experience on Taiwan,” Robert Eskildsen reflects on the broader issues of Japanese colonialism for contemporary East Asia in light of the 1874 Taiwan expedition and contemporary assessments of it. The second is Nishida Masaru's report on a commemoration of the expedition involving Japanese NGOs and villagers at the site of the Mudan Incident toward framing a people's reconciliation. Japan Focus]

The 2004 government announcement that it was considering joining the US in the production of a missile defence system was deeply troubling to Japanese and Asians concerned about Japan's expansive military posture in tandem with the US. Over the years, Japan has created a high tech non-nuclear military force. But it has steadfastly maintained an official ban on weapons exports. Many feared that the move heralded the end of Japan's nearly 40-year-old ban on arms exports.

The Sept. 11 Lower House election resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Liberal Democratic Party. Now the prospect that two great parties will alternate administrations in the manner of the prewar Seiyukai (Friends of Constitutional Government Party) and Minseito (Constitutional Democratic Party) is more distant than ever. How has this come about?

Of course, the single-seat constituencies systematically favor the large parties. Even if the LDP loses some votes, the party does not lose Diet seats. Even if the Social Democratic Party gains some votes, it does not gain Diet seats.

The phrase ‘sixty years of the post-war’ is often used to mean ‘60 years since the end of the war’ or ‘these past sixty years’. However, the term ‘post-war’ itself is premised on a ‘pre-war’ and a ‘wartime’. In other words, prior to the sixty years of post-war, there is the disjuncture between ‘post-war’, on the one hand, and ‘pre-war’ and ‘wartime’ on the other. For me, it is this experience of disjuncture that is the starting point of ‘post-war’.

Confronted with strong opposition from disarmament groups and from Congress, the Bush administration has abandoned its plan to develop a nuclear “bunker buster.”

This new weapon, formally known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, became the symbol of the Bush administration's plan to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal and wage nuclear war. The administration alleged that the bunker buster was necessary to destroy deeply buried and hardened enemy targets, and that—thanks to the fact that it would explode underground—it would produce minimal collateral damage. But critics charged that, with more than 70 times the destructive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, a single bunker buster might kill millions of people. This contention was reinforced by an April 2005 report from a National Academy of Sciences panel, which claimed that such a device, exploded underground, would likely cause the same number of casualties as a weapon of comparable power exploded on the earth's surface.

It is said that the number of demonstrations against government mismanagement and corruption in China is rising. Since late last year, the media in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe, Japan, and the United States has frequently reported protests erupting at city offices and other public sites across the country.

Nearly four years after he was first elected Prime Minister, promising to “reform” Japan even if it meant destroying his own party, the LDP, Koizumi did the unthinkable: he secured an even bigger majority by promising again to do more-or-less the same, having failed ignominiously in the meantime to advance a reform agenda. Though head of government, he won a resounding triumph by presenting himself as leader of a crusading force of reformers.

[The contest between the superpower and the mini-state is now well into its sixth, stalemated decade. What changes, however, is the degree of active involvement on the part of neighbor states to try to bring the U.S. and North Korea to reason. In the series of Six-Party talks that began in Beijing in August 2003, while North Korea stuck firmly to its declaration of readiness to give up nuclear programs in return for “normalization” and an end to the state of war, the U.S. position steadily shifted under that pressure - from a refusal to talk to the North Koreans about anything other than the terms of their nuclear climb-down to a series of formulas implying recognition, denying any aggressive intent, and agreeing in general terms to a parallel and synchronous formula towards resolution of the problems perceived by both sides.

Tokyo - In defiance of mounting pressure to fully liberalize imports of foreign leather products, including footwear, Japan is digging in its heels to safeguard its internationally uncompetitive industry.

At first glance, the import restrictions may look like typical protectionist trade measures that can be seen elsewhere in the world. But lying beneath the surface of the current issue is the bitter legacy of a feudal hierarchy and an historical pattern of discrimination. Under the WTO, international pressure has grown for Japan to take drastic measures to further liberalize its imports of foreign leather products, as well as agricultural ones.

It seems ironic that the two international relations concepts of the 1990s that most captured the imagination of the world's intellectuals were the “clash of civilizations” and “soft power.” At first sight, they could hardly be more different despite the similar backgrounds of their authors as professors at Harvard and consultants for the Defense Department. Samuel Huntington's 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, rejected root and branch the idea of cross-cultural understanding and called on the West to circle its wagons against the Muslims and the Confucians. By contrast, Joseph Nye's notion of “soft power,” first suggested in 1990 and developed more recently in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), suggests that American attractiveness in the world can be as important as its carrots and sticks in inducing international compliance. While Huntington viewed cultural contact as the tectonic friction between geologic plates of civilization, Nye sees the encouragement of international exchanges and the better marketing of American foreign policy as necessary accessories to guns and money.

[Leuren Moret is an internationally recognized geoscientist and critic of nuclear power who has maintained a long interest in Japan's nuclear power program. As she points out in this article, Japan is the world's 3rd largest nuclear producer, with 52 reactors (versus 72 in France and 118 in the United States). Japan's reactors produce about 30 percent of the country's electricity. Japan is also one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, with a multiplicity of active fault zones. In persuasive detail spelled out in a map, Moret shows that Japan's nuclear industry has generally neglected the earthquake threat and built its reactors close to fault zones. She shows that Japanese government and industry has no serious emergency planning in the event of a disaster. For example, Japan's most seismically dangerous nuclear plant - the Hamaoka reactor in Shizuoka Prefecture - has Emergency Response Centres (ERCs) equipped with tiny decontamination showers that would be of little avail in the event of a serious emergency. In fact, planning for a very serious nuclear emergency is in many respects not possible. According to Moret, the scale of the disaster would be of such magnitude as to render any conceivable emergency response totally inadequate and ineffective. She shows why the only adequate response ultimately is to prevent accidents by turning away from nuclear energy.

[We present two articles on a critical moment in the history of Japanese imperialism on Taiwan, the nature of the impact of colonialism on indigenous people, and contemporary ramifications of that history. In the first of these, Robert Eskildsen reflects on the broader issues of Japanese colonialism for contemporary East Asia in light of the 1874 Taiwan expedition and contemporary assessments of it. The second is Nishida Masaru's report on a commemoration of the expedition involving Japanese NGOs and villagers at the site of the Mudan Incident toward framing a people's reconciliation: “Japan, the Ryukyus and the Taiwan Expedition of 1874: toward reconciliation after 130 years.” Japan Focus]

Known as a black-belt judoist, Russian President Vladimir Putin has scored wazaari, if not ippon, in his diplomatic bout with Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro.

Putin ended a three-day official visit to Japan on Tuesday (Nov.22), his first in more than five years, after meeting with Koizumi and signing a dozen documents on expanding business cooperation and technological issues. But as widely expected, the two leaders failed to achieve a breakthrough on the long-standing territorial dispute. Even worse, the gulf between the two sides over the islands row had grown so wide that no joint political statement on the dispute was issued, dealing a significant setback to Tokyo. It is quite unusual that no political statement is issued when top leaders of Japan and Russia make official visits to each other's capitals.

George and Junichiro, two great buddies (if the Japanese media is to be believed) meet again, on 15 and 16 November, in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto. Since Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro is one of the dwindling band of ever-faithful Bush supporters, and since officials on both sides have been working hard to clear away all possible obstacles from the negotiating table between them, the mood may be expected to be warm: Japanese troops will remain in Iraq till September 2006; the ban on US beef imports, till recently cause of great congressional anger, is about to be lifted; the Japanese Post Office, sitting on the world's largest pool of funds, is about to be privatized; and, perhaps most important, a deal has just been done on the re-organization of US forces in Japan. The ground should therefore be clear for an untroubled meeting, plenty of windy rhetoric about the world's “closest and most important” relationship, some photo-ops, and perhaps some quiet tippling under the red and yellow-hued autumn foliage of the old Kyoto palace.