Contrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America's national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented development that most US policy-makers have recklessly disregarded, as evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-Communist Russia during the past fifteen years.

Japan's expat rebel with many causes blends music and a wider world view

Former Japanese pop heart-throb and musical pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto talks to David McNeill about music, the state of the planet –and why he still reluctantly lives in New York City.

[The following dialogue reads rather like the classic dispute between the Pacifist and the Realist (“To protect the peace, prepare for war”; “But one mustn't …”) carried to a higher level. But quantity becomes quality: when you are talking about nuclear weapons, the conversation is no longer the same as when you are talking about swords or even firearms. This is what Emmanuel Todd doesn't seem to grasp, while Yoshibumi Takamiya (at least partly) does.

The Pacific Project exposed U.S. sailors to biowarfare and chemical agents. Forty years later, some of these sickened warriors are still ‘lost’ at sea.

Mention that you're a biologist at a party, and half the people in the room will begin to yawn. The other half will be intrigued, and someone will say that they always wanted to be Jacques Cousteau. Go on to tell them that you study seabirds on tropical isles, and visions of paradise will dance in their heads. The mystique, if not the money, holds a strong allure.

The October release of the Bush administration's new National Space Policy marked an important step forward in a long-fought campaign by right-wing hawks to extend their agenda toward the stars. The advance of the space hawks was also evident in the annual report of the U.S.-China Commission, which in its recently released annual report warned that measures were need to halt the alleged effort by the Chinese to challenge U.S. space supremacy.

There is nothing wrong or unusual about the food at Ang's Chinese restaurant. In fact, the roast duck served there is excellent, and the Lonely Planet's guidebook assures you that its hot-and-sour soup is special. It's just the way the place looks. The yard is surrounded by high walls with razor wire and surveillance cameras. Two security guards watch the entrance and open the sliding gate only if customers, in their vehicle, appear to be genuinely wanting to have just a meal. Having satisfied the guards and parked the car inside the gate, lunch or dinner guests are met by another steel door guarded by more watchmen. They will not only shut the door but lock it once the guests are in the actual restaurant building. They guests may enjoy Ang's oriental fare in peace.

There's been much discussion of constitutional revision in Japan. In November 2005, celebrating the 50th anniversary of its formation, the Liberal-Democratic Party published its “Draft of a New Constitution.” In this rapidly changing world, it's quite risky for a developed country to make a constitution with an eye to the 21st century. Why? Because this is an age in which the nation-states that shape the modern era are changing dramatically, and because we still can't see what lies ahead.

History, like the cinema, can often be a matter of perspective. That's why Clint Eastwood's decision to narrate the Battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and the Japanese point of view is not really new; it had been done before in Tora Tora Tora (1970), for instance. But by dividing these perspectives in different films directed at Japanese and international audiences, Eastwood makes history not merely an issue of which side you are on, but of how to look at history itself.

In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military,” whom New York Times' columnist William Safire soon branded “creeps”–a line that few in the press had reason to challenge.

[The following article presents a critical responses to the proposed changes in national educational policy by Japan's new prime minister, Abe Shinzo. It is one of many appearing in Japanese newspapers and magazines in the past six weeks. The centerpiece of the Abe administration's domestic strategy is revision of the Fundamental Law of Education (also known as the “Charter of Education” (Kyoiku Kensho) or the “Education Constitution” (Kyoiku Kempo)—the basis of post-war Japanese education. This law, passed in 1947 and intact subsequently, mandated the current national educational standards, and was the centerpiece of efforts to eliminate pre-war nationalism and militarism from the curriculum. At a time of mounting discontent with Japanese education, and with a neonationalist drive to revise the Constitution to weaken or eliminate the pacifist provisions of Article 9, the Abe administration has made the Fundamental Law of Education its first target in an effort to exorcise the ghosts of Japan's World War II defeat.

TOKYO - Japan is revving up its drive toward free-trade agreements (FTAs), a move largely fueled by an intensifying rivalry with China over leadership in regional economic integration and increasingly tough global competition for oil, gas and other resources.

A friend of mine who lives in the picturesque port city of Otaru, western Hokkaido, is a fish-hunter. He loves to dive, and hunts for fish with a spear gun – seafood is his manna from heaven.

The story of how Japan gained, and then lost, the development rights to one of the richest oil fields in the world has been treated rather casually in the international media despite the fact that it will strongly affect Japan's relations with Iran and other countries for many years to come. The issue of the Japanese involvement in the Azadegan oil field was divisive from the start, but became more and more so as the political situation in the Persian Gulf deteriorated after September 11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This essay traces the development of the Japan-Iran partnership in Azadegan from its inception in November 2000 to its effective dissolution in October 2006.

In Japan, China, the United States and beyond, arguably no Japanese wartime atrocity against China is more widely known than the Nanjing Massacre. Whatever the significance of mere name recognition, however, the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre are profoundly complex. Indeed, even the phrase “Nanjing Massacre” (hereafter NM) remains contested, and to this day there are circles within which the words cannot be spoken without stirring deep feeling and disagreement.

There was a meeting on the weekend of December 9-10 in Cochabamba in Bolivia of major South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn't read that wire service report, I'll read a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

This conversation is adapted from a longer roundtable discussion on the social responsibility of poetry that appeared in the September issue of the literary monthly Shi to Shiso (Poetry and Thought). It features an analysis of the Abe administration's then–proposed “reforms” to the Education Law (Kyoiku Kihonho) by University of Chiba professor Miyake Shoko, with commentary from high school teacher and poet Yoshida Yoshiteru and poet Yamamoto Seiko. The chair is Shi to Shiso editor Nakamura Fujio. Miyake sees the “reforms”, which focus on the “hearts” of schoolchildren, as drastically changing the relationship between the state and education. With the latter essentially becoming the tool of the former, her fears echo those stated by noted University of Tokyo professor Tachibana Takashi in November in both the Asahi Shimbun and the Tokyo Shimbun: “To shoot the general, first shoot his horse” (i.e., the educational “reforms” are a prelude to gutting the Constitution).

Ines de Jesus was a young girl during World War II when she was forced to become a sex slave, or “comfort woman,” for Japanese troops in the then Portuguese colony of East Timor.

By day, de Jesus carried out various kinds of menial labor, and each night was raped by between four to eight Japanese soldiers at a so-called comfort station in Oat village in the western province of Bobonaro.

Christmas brings to mind many wonderful memories for most of us. But history has bequeathed to some a most awful little twoword phrase blackening those memories like a stain. That phrase is “Christmas bombing.”

From Dec. 18 until Dec. 30 in 1972, the United States conducted a campaign of intensive aerial bombing, using massive B-52s, over North Vietnam. In the approximately 4,000 sorties flown in what was termed Operation Linebacker II, American pilots concentrated on the major cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. The missions executed so-called area bombing, never precise or pinpoint. Their goal: To kill as many civilians as possible.

When Abe Shinzo was installed as prime minister in September 2006, there was some concern that he would push into high gear the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's proposal (announced in November 2005) to revise Japan's constitution and gut the no-war provisions of Article 9. He is, after all, known as a strong supporter of revision and often boasts that he inherited the DNA of his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke, who began pushing for revision of the constitution in the early 1950s. Kishi created a constitution review commission in the Diet (which proved fruitless) while he himself became prime minister later in that decade. Abe is eager to bring his grandfather's, and the LDP's, dream to fruition.

Three national newspapers and Nihon Keizai Shimbun headlined the death of playwright and preeminent Shakespeare translator Kinoshita Junji on December 1, 2006. This article considers the fate of his classic play Yuzuru (Twilight Crane), once condemned as “one-sided” (or “ideologically biased”) and inappropriate as teaching material, only to be resurrected a generation later. The article was published in Shukan Kinyobi on December 15, 2006, the same day that the Education Reform Bill passed the Upper House of the Diet.