In the wake of the 2011 tsunami, the Japanese government is forgoing an opportunity to sustainably protect its coastline and is instead building towering concrete seawalls and other defenses that environmentalists say will inflict serious damage on coastal ecosystems.

This is a revised and expanded version of an article originally published by Yale Environment 360 <link>

While all eyes have been focused on China's dramatic recasting of the global solar PV industry, and the trade disputes engendered with the US and EU, there is another solar frontier now emerging, involving grid-connected concentrating solar power (CSP) plants. China is committed to developing capacity of 3 GW by 2015 (more than doubling cumulative world capacity) and 10 GW by 2020, which would make it by far the world's CSP leader, with consequent dramatic impact on cost reductions, driving the diffusion of CSP around the world as key challenger and alternative to nuclear and fossil power.

More than six decades from the San Francisco Treaty that purportedly resolved the Asia-Pacific War and created a system of peace, East Asia in 2013 remains troubled by the question of sovereignty over a group of tiny, uninhabited islands. The governments of Japan, China, and Taiwan all covet and claim sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

These tiny islands, together with other scattered outcroppings across the Western Pacific, assume today some of the weight that attached almost a century ago to the vast domain of Northeast China (“Manchuria”), with comparable potential to plunge the region into conflict. If the countries of the region are to transcend the 19th and 20th century eras of Japanese imperialism and US Cold War hegemony and construct a 21st century of peace, cooperation, and prosperity, the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue must somehow first be addressed.

In July 1969, a leak of chemical weapons on Okinawa sickened more than 20 U.S. soldiers and laid bare one of the Pentagon's biggest Cold War secrets: the storage of toxic munitions outside of the continental United States.

Public outrage following the Okinawa accident forced the White House to launch Operation Red Hat — codename for a mission to remove the chemicals from the island.

This article summarizes relevant historical developments involving Taiwan and Okinawa in Asia-Pacific multilateral relations over the longue durée, and suggests future prospects.

1. Both Taiwan and the Ryukyus are within the Kuroshio (Black Tide) Current Civilization Zone (from approximately the beginning of the 3rd Century): At that time, crops such as cassava and yams traveled northbound with the Kuroshio Currents, which ran from the Philippines to Taiwan and the Ryukyus to Kyushu, while crops such as millet in northern parts of South East Asia traveled to Taiwan via the South Sea and further traveled to the Ryukyus and Kyushu. Together with the path of rice from south of China's Yangtze River via Korea to Kyushu, Japan these were two important sea-borne cultural exchange paths in the Asia-Pacific. However, by the 3rd Century, the direct route from south of the Yangzi to central Japan, as well as the Silk Road from Chang'an in Northwest China to Central Asia, and the shipping route from Guangzhou to India superseded the aforesaid routes. As a result, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands became isolated on the international stage for about one thousand years (Ts'ao, 1988).