Bangkok - Seared into Southeast Asia's collective memory is the iconic image of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, where International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Michel Camdessus towered with crossed arms over a bent-down Indonesian President Suharto as he signed a sovereignty-eroding bailout agreement for his distressed economy.

Immediately following the ruling by the Osaka District Court on the Okinawa Mass Suicides Suit (March 28, 2008), I was being interviewed by a correspondent from a foreign newspaper, while the plaintiffs were already engaged in the appeals process. Almost by way of greeting, I was asked by the correspondent, “What has this trial meant to your life?” I replied by saying, “If I have spent half my life writing essays and novels, then I have spent the other half of it reading books, or more precisely, focusing my reading on certain topics continuously for three year periods. During the two and a half years of this suit, my job has been to read the preparatory documents submitted by both the plaintiffs and defendants as well as the books named in those documents. This part of my life, trying as it was, was spent reading the works of distinguished writers whom I never would have had the chance to know otherwise.”

As the most pressing resource, water holds the strategic key to peace, public health and prosperity. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look more real than in Asia.

“We believe that the remarks of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as recently told to an Israeli newspaper could serve as the basis for immediately starting a new set of realistic negotiations aimed at achieving a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

The town of Suifenhe, a former Russian imperial outpost on the Trans-Siberian Railway, has belonged to China since the nineteen-forties, and occupies a broad valley in northern Manchuria. From a distance, its homes and factories appear to cling to a rail yard, with tracks fanning out into a vast latticework of iron as they emerge from the Russian border. Suifenhe is a place of singular purpose. Nearly every train from Russia brings in just one commodity: wood—oak, ash, linden, and other high-value species. There is also poplar, aspen, and larch, and occasionally great trunks of Korean pine, a species that was logged by the Soviets until there was almost none left to cut down. In a year, more than five billion pounds of wood cross over from Primorski Krai, the neighboring province in the Russian Far East. Hundreds of railcars enter Suifenhe every day, many loaded beyond capacity with logs. The wood is shuttled between mills by hand, often six men to a log. Other workers, many of whom are migrants from elsewhere in China, operate cranes to empty the rail carriages, and at sundown they bring the machinery to rest, with beams pointing upward, like arms outstretched, waiting for the rush of timber that will arrive the following day.

The five-day Russo-Georgian War in the Caucasus brought into sharp focus many conflicts rooted in the region's history and in aggressive US-NATO policies since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notable among these were the military encirclement of Russia and attempts to control energy resources in areas long dominated by the Soviet Union. The net effect was to hasten a dangerous new era of rivalry between the world's two most powerful nuclear weapons states, one which will be shaped hereafter by the current global recession and the changes it is bringing about in the economic practices of all states.

Okinawa is simultaneously Japan's periphery and its centre. It is peripheral for obvious geographical reasons, being much closer to the China coast and Taiwan than to Tokyo, but it is also peripheral in the historical sense that its links with the main Japanese islands, and eventually with the modern Japanese state, have been thin, fraught, and relatively recent. Only belatedly incorporated as a prefecture in the Japanese state in the late 19th century, it was then excised from it between 1945 and 1972, and only half restored to it in 1972, since the US bases remained intact. It has continued since then to be governed as if the US-Japan Security Treaty mattered more than the Japanese peace constitution, half-in and half-out of the country, so to speak. Though thus peripheral, Okinawa is also “central” in that it constitutes the fulcrum on which the key security relationship between the US and Japan rests.

A succession of weak Japanese Prime Ministers, the drama of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the current global financial crisis once again have returned the subject of Japanese security policy to a position of relative political marginality. Throughout the Cold War, the analysis of Japanese security was a topic largely overlooked by both American students of Japan and by students of national security. Japan, after all, was the country that had adopted a Peace Constitution with its famous Article 9 interpreted as legally banning the use of armed force in the defense of national objectives. Its professional military had little public standing and was under the thumb of civilians. And Japan's grand strategy aimed at gaining power and prestige and sought to leverage its economic prowess to a position of regional and perhaps global leadership that would complement rather than rival that of the United States. At the same time Japan relied on the continued protection by the U.S. military. To be sure, since the late 1970s the U.S. government persistently pressed Japan to play a larger regional role in Asia and to spend more of its rapidly growing GDP on national defense. But Japan made no more than marginal concessions. On security issues it kept a low regional profile, and since the late 1980s Japanese defense spending consistently stayed below one percent of GDP. Writing on problems of Japanese national security, thus, was left to policy specialists issuing regular conference reports on the ups and downs of the U.S.–Japan bilateral defense relationship. Theoretically informed scholarship was conspicuous by its absence.

Part of a continuing series on the impact of the financial and economic crisis on the Asia Pacific.

Back in June 2006 Indonesian environment watchdog Walhi urged the government to shutdown and investigate PT Lapindo Brantas' gas prospecting operation in East Java after a botched drilling operation that caused hot toxic mud to flood surrounding land and to poison local villagers. By mid-2008 some 50,000 people had fled their homes. An international team of scientists who studied the phenomenon is convinced that the mudflow is an “unnatural disaster.” Lapindo, as the article mentions, was then part of the conglomerate owned by Indonesian billionaire and member of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's cabinet, Aburizal Bakrie. Sale of Lapindo in 2006 was widely viewed in Indonesia as an attempt by Bakrie to reduce his financial exposure.

It is by now commonplace to observe that Japanese imperial ideology, or tennōsei, whose roots can be traced to the Meiji state, subjugated individuals in the name of the progress of the nation-state. One element of tennōsei, as is also now well known, was the notion of kokutai, literally “the national body,” the idea of Japan as functioning as an organic, even human, body. What has been examined less frequently, however, is the character of the oppression faced by residents of Japan's colonies, particularly Korea. The Japanese empire not only took over the governance of the Korean peninsula but obliterated the very bodies of Korean imperial subjects by subsuming them into the larger body of the empire. Or, I would argue, this is how we should understand the catchphrase naisen ittai, or Japan and Korea as one body.

An impression is being created that there is a “rift” between the United States and Britain regarding the reconciliation track involving the Taliban. The plain truth is that the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are in this murky game together.

Pio d'Emilia, Far East correspondent for Sky TG24 Italy and a veteran contributor to the daily Il Manifesto has just returned from Georgia, where he was “embedded” with the Russian army. The experience gave him a very different perspective on the way the conflict between the Russian Army and a Western-backed ally was reported by the Western and Japanese press. Japan Focus posts his account of the assignment and a short interview on why he thinks much of the media got it wrong on Georgia.

Signs abound of China's emergence as a significant status quo power in the international order in step with its emergence as a major world economy. In its leading role in the 6-Party talks on North Korea, in its opening to ASEAN and to Africa, in its pivotal role in the Shanghai group of nations, China's geopolitical reach has expanded. So, too, in its economic and financial reach as China, with Japan, prop up the US dollar through their massive purchase of US securities at a time of financial crisis, and China extends its search for resources globally. In the following overview of six decades, Pang Zhongying speaks to international concerns about the nation's growing international presence and highlights distinctive features of China's approach to diplomacy including its prioritization of UN-sanctioned roles as reflected in its growing participation in UN peacekeeping and relief missions, and its criticism of unilateral intervention. The author emphasizes the importance of an expanded Chinese global role at a time of declining US power and envisages Chinese participation in an international order that is not simply dominated by the US. Pang places heavy emphasis on environmental issues, noting China's developmental dilemma, its rise to a position as the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases as well as recent efforts to address environmental issues. But like the nostrums of other powers, it is difficult to discern in China's policies anything approaching the steps that will be required to avert ecological disaster in the coming years. The author calls for major changes including progress toward democratization in China and in that nation's international policy while also spelling out the need for change in Western approaches to China. MS

The easiest way to compare dietary commonalities or peculiarities of individual nations is to check the food balance sheets that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (headquartered in Rome) prepares for virtually all of the world's countries (FAO 2008). These accounts are based on the best available national statistics of food production and trade and on the estimates of plant and animal harvests diverted to animal feeding, seed and other non-food uses or lost during storage and industrial processing. Their final tallies show per capita annual consumption of individual foodstuffs (in kilograms) and daily intakes of food energy (in kilocalories) and dietary proteins and fats (both in grams). Perhaps the most obvious measure of dietary affluence is the average consumption of animal foods eaten for their special tastes and distinguished in nutritional terms particularly because of their relatively high content of perfect protein.

As the US public is dimly aware, things are not going very well in Afghanistan.

The United Nation situation map for Afghanistan issued September 3 (the most recent available) paints a grim picture: The large swaths shaded with the purple diagonal lines are places where things are getting worse. This includes the entire area surrounding Kandahar on the Pakistan border in the south, as well as areas on the Pakistan-Tajikstan border in the Northeast and other areas on the Turkmenistan border to the Northwest.

This paper analyzes Japan's concerns, as well as its prioritization and leverage points, in multilateral negotiations on North Korea's nuclear programme within the Six-Party Talks. It argues that Japan has deliberately taken an obstructionist stance in multilateral negotiations and that three issues are relevant to understanding Japan's actions: Japan's close relations with the US, its preference for economic rather than political diplomacy, and the dominance of single-issue politics influenced by domestic political considerations. In the Six-Party Talks, Japan has played a largely circumstantial role in the practical sense while being a powerful spoiler in broader, strategic terms. Tokyo wants a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and a stable neighbour, but a Six-Party Talks solution – which would enhance China's standing – is in itself not a priority. Moreover, Pyongyang provides a welcome justification to the Japanese government for the enhancement of its security capabilities. Japanese interests are well served by retaining the status quo, which explains why Tokyo consciously adopted the role of spoiler. After the Bush administration removed North Korea from its list of terrorism sponsoring states, this position appears no longer sustainable.

Something big may be going on in North Korea. In early October, the official North Korean media may have started to reveal who will be the next leader of their country after the family dynasty ends. But they have not yet done so directly. Therefore, some contextualization is needed before arriving at still speculative conclusions.

The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America's troubles. Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.” But asking Asia's business and governing elites to repress shivers of pleasure at the meltdown of the American financial system is probably demanding more than flesh and blood can bear. The spectacle of the politicians, pundits and academics of Washington and Chicago thrashing about in attempts to justify the vast amounts of money being shoveled at their, um, cronies on Wall Street is just a little too rich. Particularly since much of the money will have to be borrowed from the very people who a decade ago at the time of the so-called Asian Financial Crisis were being pooh-poohed for their “crony capitalism,” “opaque” banking systems, “incestuous” government-business relations, not to mention their supposed absence of transparent financial reporting, good corporate governance, or accountable executives and regulators.

Will Japan ever overcome its distrust of foreigners? This question has been forcefully posed in various guises, most notably perhaps by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights Doudou Diene. In 2005 he concluded after a nine-day investigation in Japan that the authorities were not doing enough to tackle what he called Japan's “deep and profound racism” and xenophobia, particularly against its former colonial subjects. The report appeared to vindicate the work of campaigners such as naturalized Japanese Arudou Debito, who argue that Japan needs, among other things, an antidiscrimination law.

This article, and the subsequent exchange with Major Nathan C. Hurst, originated in a symposium on the US global military posture that appeared at Mother Jones. As the article was being posted, we learned that on the night of October 24 another US plane, this time a small Cessna 172 had crashed in Okinawa after clipping high-voltage wires, and burst into flames. The four US airmen on board were reportedly members of a private flying club at Kadena Air Base, “the hub of US airpower in the Pacific”. Kadena is home to 18,000 US airmen and 4,000 Japanese employees. US authorities stated that the plane was government owned. Local firefighters put out the blaze and escorted the four to a nearby hospital. As in the story that follows, the crash perfectly illustrates the conflict over jurisdiction under the Status of Forces Agreement as US authorities denied Japanese official attempts to investigate the plane in order to determine the cause of the accident. The Okinawa Times showed a huge crane loading the plane's wreckage onto a US military truck. US authorities stated that there is a special criminal law appended to SOFA which denies the Japanese authorities to take possession of US military property without US military permission. The Japanese authorities are awaiting a response to their request to examine the flight recorder. The fact that the crash occurred near Nago, where opponents have been fighting US plans to build a new Marine Air Station, is certain to strengthen calls to halt plans for construction. Fuji TV's video of the crashed plane shows local firefighters putting out the blaze and interviews boys who were playing baseball in a nearby field.. For a discussion of the incident and commentary on Okinawan anti-base sentiment among US service personnel and others, see the Okinawa Japan Forum.