On a gentle hillside on Jeju, a communal graveyard has a unique name and history. Surrounded by the reed fields that abound on this beautiful island near the southern maritime border of Korea, the gravesite consists of a large stone-walled compound, where one hundred and thirty-two modest, well-tended grave mounds lie in neat lines, and a tall stone-made memorial stands in the middle of the compound. Visitors can easily recognize that it is no ordinary graveyard. The site is distinct from the stone-walled individual or family tombs familiar to the island population, or from the traditional family ancestral graves commonly found on the hills of mainland Korea. There are simply too many graves concentrated in one place in this graveyard, and moreover, none is marked by the usual gravestone or a stone tablet, where visiting relatives can place offerings of food and alcohol for the dead according to the traditional custom of commemoration. The graves here are nameless, and they stand in a strangely ordered fashion, in tidily organized rows—an organization that people would expect to see in a military cemetery, not in a village graveyard.

In the summer of 1950, at the start of the Korean conflict, the government of Syngman Rhee in the South ordered the massive execution of over one hundred thousand (perhaps two hundred thousand) civilians simply suspected of being communist sympathizers. This war crime by any standard, civilized and uncivilized, has only been unveiled recently and officially by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea http://www.jinsil.go.kr/English/Commission/index.asp.

It is 63 years since mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age. The attacks on the two cities are now solemnly commemorated on 6 and 9 August, when the two city mayors issue their messages calling on the world to disarm, messages as necessary as they are certain to be ignored by the powers.

When the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) was concluded in 1965, the two countries shelved their territorial claims to the Takeshima islets, which are called Tokto in South Korea.

But they never got over their differences concerning the rocky outcrops in the Sea of Japan. In fact, the issue continues to bother both sides, as if a bone was stuck in their respective throats.

On the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we present once again the Peace Declarations of the two cities. They call on all nations, and particularly the nuclear powers, to honor their commitments as signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, noting that precisely the opposite has been the tendency of recent years. Both also outline citizen-based approaches to ending nuclear war and abolishing nuclear weapons.

The United States government has landed itself in the middle of a major territorial dispute between Japan and Korea.

On July 25, with astonishing lack of knowledge, an obscure branch of the American government called the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) reversed fifty years of officially orchestrated avoidance concerning an ongoing battle between Japan and Korea. It decided that the United States would henceforth consider some tiny islands in the sea between them of “undesignated sovereignty.”

In tough bargaining, the United States has stopped North Korea from producing more plutonium for nuclear weapons. It has induced the North to disable its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, making them more difficult and time-consuming to restart. Washington has also persuaded Pyongyang to declare how much nuclear material it has and the equipment and components it has acquired to make more – a necessary step to negotiating their elimination in the next phase of the ongoing six-party talks. Instead of applauding these real gains for US security, however, opponents would slow the disablement and declaration of North Korea's nuclear programs in the hopes of extracting a full accounting of the North's nuclear assistance to Syria. In essence, these critics want to put the North Koreans on trial, insisting they tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them God. Yet they surely know that all states lie – some more than others.

With the regional and global spike in food prices it is naturally imperative that East Timor corner crucial sources of food, joining a queue of food deficit countries from the Philippines to Singapore. But how and why has East Timor – a land of subsistence agriculturalists and one of the world's poorest nations- been turned into a net food importer? And what is the future of East Timor's agriculture? The answers are complex but we are reminded of the “Timor problem” described Dutch geographer F.J. Ormeling in the mid-1950s in a book of the same name, a reference to Timor's delicate environmental niche including highly invariant rainfall, that always threatens to breach self-sufficiency. Apparently the food security “problem” was not understood by the World Bank which, from 1999 to 2002, prioritized irrigated rice development over and above East Timor's traditional basket of staples of which corn was dominant. Indonesian rule after the 1975 invasion did extend wet-field rice, but they also left the rice paddies abandoned in 1999. With the crisis apparent, FAO in East Timor has only belatedly acknowledged the need to address non-rice agriculture. The “problem” today, as addressed by Douglas Kammen, is that East Timor faces down the curse of other states drawing upon hydrocarbon rents for quick fixes, namely that it is cheaper to import just about everything – food included – and that agriculture – the life and blood of the country for millennium - is left to the market or to wither. But as Kammen also stresses, problems of overcoming cronyism and corruption at the interface of state and market are central to East Timor's future. This is the third in a continuing series on the world food crisis. See Walden Bello, How to manufacture a global food crisis: The destruction of agriculture in developing countries; C. Peter Timmer, Japan and a Solution to the World Rice Crisis Japan Focus

The past is haunting Northeast Asia. The China-Japan-Korea triad has been on a repeated collision course over how each perceives the shared past. Bound by dense memory webs, cultural affinity and geographical proximity, each of the three nations has made conflicting historical claims against the other, giving rise to conflict throughout the region and beyond.

On June 24, 2007, two US Navy minesweepers entered the small Sonai port in Yonaguni island, the westernmost Japanese island near Taiwan, on a ‘good-will visit and crew R and R’. Okinawa prefectural governor Mr. Nakaima had stated that the ‘US Navy warships should use the designated ports such as White Beach and Naha Military Port and should not use civilian ports’. He asked the Commander, US Naval Forces, Japan to voluntarily refrain from entry into Sonai port; Mr. Hokama, the mayor of Yonaguni town and its residents had also expressed opposition, but they were ignored. According to the Division Chief, North American Affairs Bureau, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who visited the Yonaguni town office prior to the vessels' visit, ‘due to the provisions of the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), the heads of local public bodies have no right to reject the US minesweepers’ visit to their ports. There is no choice other than to accepti their entry into the port.'

A geopolitical convulsion measuring six points on the Richter scale is bound to produce aftershocks. The reverberations of the conflict in the Caucasus are beginning to be felt. We may be unwittingly bidding farewell to the “war on terror”. In any case, the international community has lost interest in Osama bin Laden.

On a scorching July 7, 2008, officers of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces visited Nanjing for an artillery demonstration, a visit barely mentioned in the Chinese media even though it was the first time Japanese soldiers had returned to the scene of the crime since Japan surrendered in 1945. Unlike in recent years, there were no special commemoration rites on this anniversary of the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident. This reflected the Chinese leadership's decision to turn down the heat on history in the wake of President Hu Jintao's spring 2008 visit to Japan and the subsequent inking of an agreement on gas field development in disputed maritime territory near the contested Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands.

Foiled in their attempts to change the Constitution and Article Nine in particular by the cumbersome democratic process of public consensus, the militant nationalist wing of the political establishment has set its sights on education by creating a document operationalizing changes to the Basic Law in Education. The Curricular Guidelines issued last February are a set of policy directives of unclear legal status created by the government's General Council for Education based on suggestions from the advisory Education Rebuilding Council.

In recent years, the mayors of cities hosting American bases in Japan, and particularly in Okinawa, propelled by powerful citizen movements, have resisted American plans for base reorganization that would expand the US military presence in their communities. In many cases, powerful pressure from Tokyo, in the form of threats to cut off development aid to local communities, and offers to buy off local opposition, have succeeded in dividing local communities and forcing local officials to yield to the power of the center. The Hiroshima-based Chugoku Shinbun here examines realignments involving Atsugi Air Base, Iwakuni Marine Base and Yokosuka Naval Base, three locales experiencing major upgrading of U.S. military power and changes in the structuring of U.S. forces in Japan. ms

Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro seems an unlikely champion of a multicultural Japan. His brief term of office is, after all, perhaps best remembered for the furore he evoked by a speech in which he described Japan as a “Divine Nation headed by the Emperor”. This echo of prewar nationalism stirred fears at home and abroad that senior Japanese politicians still subscribed to Shinto myths of a unique and racially superior Japan. Yet Mori today is an active participant in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's “Diet Members' League for Promoting Exchanges of Foreign Human Resources” (Gaikoku Jinzai Koryu Suishin Giin Renmei), an awkwardly-named body whose mission is to promote mass immigration by making Japan a magnet for skilled workers from around the world. (Akashi and Ogawa 2008, 69)

From Suva. Fiji is living in fear. Many of those who used to speak openly about social, political and racial injustice in this once idyllic archipelago are still silently waiting for the situation to improve and for the wave of fright to subside. The military coup which took place on 5 December 2006 was hardly one of history's bloodiest, but again it managed to plant seeds of uncertainty in troubled Fijian soil. On that day, Commodore Josaia (Frank) Voreqe Bainimarama overthrew the elected government of Laisenia Qarase in Fiji's fourth coup d'état in just two decades.

As major floods have coursed through the middle Mekong across Southeast Asia this August in what some describe the greatest flooding in one hundred years, governments have announced plans to step up flood control work. At the same time, many are asking whether China is responsible for the heavy damage, especially as its cascade of dams has in the past been blamed for holding back the natural flow of water and intensifying the historic patterns of flooding. Certainly greater transparency on China's part would make for increased understanding of the issues. Yet transparency is in short supply all round if we consider the way that decisions are made in the downstream riparian countries, namely the Lao PDR and the Kingdom of Cambodia, especially the way that NGOs are given short shrift and where even armies are deeply involved in illegal logging and other nefarious ventures. For that matter, the current political crisis in the Kingdom of Thailand in part turns upon the lack of financial transparency that bedeviled the ousted Thaksin Shinwatra regime.

The Republic of Korea is a county like most others in that it has no or insufficient fossil fuel reserves of its own and depends on imports of oil, gas and coal for various vital purposes, including electric energy production, heating, and fuel for its transportation system. Like many other countries it now feels the pinch of high prices for oil and other raw materials, and like most others it is affected by the downturn in global stock markets and the failure of major banks in the aftermath of the subprime crisis in the United States. This interdependency in good and in bad times is the price of globalization.