On the eve of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro's second visit to North Korea in eighteen months, Japan Focus presents Wada Haruki's analysis of the larger stakes in the Japan-North Korea negotiations. Setting off the emotional issues of the kidnapping of Japanese against the record of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Wada examines the prospects for negotiating an agreement that could become the basis for defusing the range of contentious issues that continue to swirl around a nuclear North Korea facing acute problems of starvation and isolated from its powerful neighbor and historic antagonist, Japan. Wada Haruki is Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo. A specialist in Russian and Korean history and politics, he is the author of the monumental Complete History of the Korean War (Chosen senso zenshi). This article appeared in Sekai (World), January 2004.

From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The total volume translates into 7,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs detonated at the pace of 11 a week. In particular, the hydrogen bomb tested in Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, named Bravo, had an explosive force equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

Niigata. The Niigata District Court ordered the state and a Japanese company Friday to pay 88 million yen ($760,000) in compensation to Chinese who served as slave-laborers in Japan during World War II.

It is the first time for a Japanese court to order both the state and a firm to pay compensation for wartime slave labor. A Fukuoka District Court ruling in 2002 did uphold a compensation claim, though it only ordered the defendant firm to provide redress.

On July 1, 1946, less than a year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States resumed nuclear testing in the Pacific. In March, 1954 the US forced the 166 inhabitants of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, part of the United Nations Trust Territory that was among the spoils of victory in world War II, to leave their home island. On July 1, 1954 it conducted the first full-scale test of a Hydrogen Bomb at Bikini. The blast is estimated at 15 megatons, that is the equivalent of 15 million tons of TNT, one thousand times as powerful as the bomb exploded at Hiroshima. The Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon No. 5, sailing well beyond the zone demarcated by US authorities for the test, was covered with white ashes, later recognized as radioactive coral dust. The next day all 23 crew members suffered from headache, nausea, diarrhea and other symptoms from exposure to radioactivity. The symptoms were more acute among inhabitants of Longelap Atoll, 180 kilometers East of Bikini and other atolls. On September 23, the Lucky Dragon's chief radio operator died of jaundice, diagnosed as having been complicated by radioactivity. In Japan, the incident sparked a national petition campaign to ban nuclear weapons led by a women's group in Suginami Ward, Tokyo. The twenty million signatures that it collected within months provided a springboard for a national and international anti-nuclear movement. In August 1955 the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs convened in Hiroshima, the first in a series of annual meetings that became the center of the antinuclear movement. This series of articles, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bikini test, records the fate of the crew members, the fishing communities that were their homes, and their impact on the subsequent treatment of atomic victims in Japan.