The History of Hokkaido, compiled and published by the Hokkaido regional authority in 1918, explains why the Hokkaido frontier was “opened” (kaitaku) by the Japanese (wajin) rather than by the Ainu:

The issue of nuclear war and nuclear disarmament have repeatedly been submerged in recent years by issues of terrorist attack and wars such as those in the Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza. But as former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans recently pointed out at the October meeting of the Australia-Japan International Conference on Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, “The truth of the matter is that there are at the moment, depending on how you calculate these things, somewhere between 13,000 and 16,000 nuclear warheads actively deployed, a great many of them still on hair-trigger alert even though the Cold War has been long over. And between them having a phenomenal destructive capability. The reality also is that we are on the brink - after years and years of containing rather well the emergence of new nuclear weapon states, with all the risks of either deliberate or accidental use of nuclear weapons that flows from the existence of nuclear weapons or nuclear arms proliferation …”

Against this background, and with a new administration taking office in Washington, there have been important but little noted developments in the world anti-nuclear movement. The present article examines the basis for the reemergence of Japan to leadership in the movement to halt proliferation and eliminate nuclear weapons. Japan Focus

In late October 2007 an odd story appeared in the press. A Japanese-owned chemical tanker called the Golden Nori was hijacked off the coast of Somalia. There were no Japanese nationals on board, but the East Asian nation had become entangled, quite unusually, in an East African affair. Unforeseen at that time was that this curious incident would eventually become one of the top foreign policy issues in Tokyo: Somali piracy has emerged as a potential turning point for Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, and is significant for other reasons as well. The following essay reviews the record of Japanese encounters with Somali pirates and explores the motives and political pressures driving the Maritime Self-Defense Forces (MSDF) toward a proactive role in suppressing East African piracy.

Prime Minister Aso Taro's admission that his family company employed prisoner-of-war labor during the final months of World War II may one day be seen as a milestone in Japan's struggle to contend with its own national history. In response to persistent questioning by an opposition lawmaker on the floor of the national parliament on January 6, Aso acknowledged the truth of recent disclosures of POW work at the Aso Mining Company in 1945.

The above statement made by Eric Holder during his confirmation hearing for Attorney General marked a clean break from the policy of the Bush administration on waterboarding, the interrogation technique used by the CIA on at least three Al-Qaida suspects, and on the general issue of the use of torture in US interrogation.

Most media attention to Okinawa concentrates on the bases, and rightly so since they do indeed affect everything. Here, however, author Urashima shifts the primary focus to development politics and nature, in the context of a plan conceived at the height of Japan's “bubble” in the mid- 1980s to “landfill” one of Japan's most fertile, bio-diverse and extraordinary natural resources, the Awase Tidal Wetlands of Okinawa. Okinawa City, the administrative unit in which the wetlands are located, is also home to the largest US Air Force base in East Asia, Kadena, and the authorities decided to compensate it by creating new land for the city to expand. It would be a resort, a “Future City,” etc, in keeping with the grandiloquent public works mentality of the time. Typically, it would involve substituting an artificial beach for the existing natural one.

Chiri Yukie (1903-1922) was born in Horobetsu, Hokkaidō, to Chiri Takakichi and Nami. Nami was the daughter of an Hokkaido Ainu grandsire, Kan'nari. Yukie was the older sister of the linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-1961). When she was five and six years of age, she lived in Horobetsu with her grandmother, the great bard Monasinouk. Yukie grew up listening to recitations in the oral tradition as narrated by Monasinouk and later also by her adoptive mother Kan'nari Matsu, Nami's sister. Starting in 1909, she and Monasinouk lived with Matsu at the Episcopal Church compound in Chikabumi in the suburbs of Asahikawa. After a total of seven years of normal and higher normal school education, she attended Asahikawa Girls Vocational School for three years, graduating in 1910.

The high occurrence of pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia has prompted an increase in the number of nations planning to send naval units to fight them. In the Asian continent, India has become the first to sink a pirate vessel, South Korea has announced the deployment early in spring of the 5,000 ton-class KDX-II destroyer Gang Gam-chan, and China is sending two destroyers and a supply vessel.

While these three countries have shown no qualms about deploying their navies in the Gulf of Aden, Japan has once more embarked on a painful debate on the legality of such a move, with the government looking for a legal basis on which MSDF units might be deployed and a number of commentators doubting this would be possible without either a constitutional amendment (or of the official government interpretation of the Constitution's warrenouncing Article Nine) or the passage of new legislation.