The rapid and spectacular rise of Shanghai as a global city has, regrettably brought back to life a series of arguments that overemphasize intercity competition and leave out the growing importance of networked inter-city systems and dynamics. The scales of such networked systems vary; they can be global, regional, subnational. There is competition, and as a city like Shanghai gains power, others such as Tokyo and Taipei lose some power-investment, prestige, and perhaps more than anything else, clout. But inter-city competition is only half the story, and overemphasizing it leads to misunderstandings of how the global economy actually functions. Overemphasizing competition also leads to missed opportunities for cities, such as developing parallel networked inter-city policy initiatives centered on the growing economic importance of intercity networks for firms and markets.

[Tsuneishi Keiichi of Kanagawa University had already been unearthing secrets about Japan's biological warfare (BW) program for a quarter century when he made a vital discovery about Unit 731 in summer 2005. The two memoranda he discovered from July 1947 were written by Brig. Gen. Charles Willoughby, head of GHQ's intelligence unit during the American Occupation, and found in the U.S. National Archives. The documents shed new light on GHQ's carrot-and-stick method of obtaining BW data at the outset of the Cold War as the arms race against the Soviet Union heated up. The Americans offered the Japanese scientists far more carrots—in the form of cash payments and other rewards as well as immunity from prosecution—than was previously understood.

ULSAN, South Korea — Led by fast-growing China and India, Asia is going nuclear in a big way to feed its ravenous appetite for energy.

The strains of economic growth are already showing. Energy shortages have forced Chinese factories to scale back production, and farmers in India often have power for only half the day. Both countries say their future growth is at risk unless they diversify their energy mix.

By now it has surely dawned on Japan's political establishment, eager for issues of Japanese war accountability to fade away, that appointing Aso Taro to the post of foreign minister last fall was a major mistake. While Aso's provocative comments about Japanese imperialism and war conduct predated his tenure as the nation's top diplomat, the historical record of forced labor in Japan by Asians and Allied POWs is being newly thrust into the media spotlight.

Thousands of Korean labor conscripts were exploited for dangerous work in the northern Kyushu coalfields owned by Aso Mining Company between 1939 and 1945. Most Korean forced laborers never received the wages they earned; the money was deposited in the national treasury after the war and remains there today. The Aso family's coal profits helped bankroll the rise of the dominant political figure in early postwar Japan, Yoshida Shigeru, who was prime minister when Aso Mining and scores of other Japanese corporations quietly deposited the unpaid wages of some 700,000 Korean labor conscripts. Yoshida was also Aso Taro's grandfather.

The development of the China-ASEAN relationship began from a very low base. It has improved compared with what it was 15 or 10 years ago, but compared with ASEAN's relations with other extra-regional powers, it is far from transforming the regional strategic balance. While China has gained influence in Southeast Asia in recent years, ASEAN's relations with other extra-regional major powers remain robust. For the foreseeable future, China will lack the economic, social and strategic bases to tip the balance. Should China's goals remain modest, its relations with ASEAN are likely to remain vigorous. If it seeks to press too hard, however, it risks a strong backlash from not only ASEAN countries but also extra-regional powers. This essay explores China's strengths and weaknesses and the challenges that confront its ASEAN policy.

“We have heard that in March of Showa 21 [1946], the directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [MOFA] compiled such an investigative record. However, it was thought that if the documents were used for war crimes prosecutions they would cause trouble to a great many people. Therefore, all of the documents were burned and MOFA does not now possess even a portion of the documents”

The new disaster epic “Nippon Chinbotsu” (The Sinking of Japan) exploits one of those simple but brilliant ideas that has hacks everywhere slapping their foreheads with envy. The kernel - - Japan is mortally threatened by a powerful force seemingly beyond human control – is that of dozens of monster and disaster pics, but in his eponymous 1973 novel, Sakyo Komatsu took it one step further: He imagined Japan, not stomped by giant lizards, but literally sinking as a collision of two tectonic plates causes the one supporting the archipelago to buckle under. The result is not only new oceanfront property, but a hellbroth of earthquakes and volcanos that kill millions and force the evacuation of the entire country.

“… the only government in the world today that can be identified as being actively involved in directing crime as a central part of its national economic strategy and foreign policy. … In essence, North Korea has become a ‘soprano state’ - a government guided by a Worker's Party leadership whose actions, attitudes, and affiliations increasingly resemble those of an organized crime family more than a normal nation.

From September 2005, the US shifted the primary focus of its North Korea attention from nuclear weapons to crime and human rights, denouncing North Korea as a “criminal state” or “soprano state.” This paper reflects on why it might have done this and considers the implications.

The essence of the “Korea Problem” lies not in the threat of North Korean development of atomic weapons, nor in the existence of a rogue regime in North Korea, as the international press and some American presidents would have it. The central problem is the division of the Korean peninsula, an outcome of half a century of Japanese colonial rule and a legacy of the incomplete character of independence resulting from US-Soviet division of Korea and the Korean War that has now continued in various forms for more than six decades. This article reflects on Korea within an Asia-Pacific and global framework. It also examines possible steps toward resolving the core conflicts, solutions that can only succeed if they find regional and global support. Korea is the most dangerous legacy of the US-Soviet division of Asia, a war without end that continues in the form of military standoff that threatens the peace of Northeast Asia.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was the Pacific counterpart of the first Nuremberg trial. A panel of eleven judges, one each from the victor nations and from the Philippines and India (neither gained independence until after the war), heard evidence against twenty-eight Japanese prominent during the period 1928-1945, sixteen of them generals and admirals. The trial lasted two and a half years. The verdicts: seven death sentences, sixteen life sentences, and two shorter sentences. Unlike Nuremberg, the Tokyo tribunal found no defendants innocent (two defendants had died, and one—the ideologue Dr. Okawa Shumei, whom Takeyama mentions in passing—had been declared insane.)

In 1965, Japanese journalist Magoroku Ide accepted an invitation from the government of the People's Republic of China to visit the country. Still seven years before the resumption of diplomatic relations between Japan and China, travel to China was restricted to those officially invited and even they were subject to state surveillance. Among the places he and his fellow Japanese journalists visited was the city of Anshan in northeast China. Having boarded the train to return to Beijing at the conclusion of their visit, they heard the clear voice of a woman saying, “Please take care of yourselves, good bye,” in Japanese. Not visible from their train window in the crowd of Chinese who came to bid farewell, Ide and his colleagues were stunned to hear the voice of a Japanese woman. Although they wondered whether it was possible that Japanese were living in Anshan in 1965, they could not make the connection between her and the approximately 10,000 Japanese who were then living in northeast China, much less to the Japanese imperial past (Ide 1993).

[The National Security Archive has released an important series of documents revealing the reversal of several decades of efforts to make available for public scrutiny the numbers of US nuclear missiles during the early decades of the atomic era.

The complete report, and the supporting documents revealing both the numbers of weapons and their deployment, including the deployment of nuclear weapons in Asia and the Pacific, as well as evidence of recent policy shifts designed to suppress already available public information, are available.

The increasingly fierce competition between Japan and China over energy and political influence is spilling over into Africa.

Following in the footsteps of Beijing, Tokyo has recently begun to turn to the continent as a new source of oil. Meanwhile, the leaders of the two Asian neighbors have recently made whirlwind tours of Africa.

[As Japan and South Korea strengthen and expand the scope of their subordinate security relations with the United States, in China's shadow other moves are afoot across the Asia Pacific. Here Paul Kelly assesses the deepening Japan-Australia security bond that grows in part from their engagement in support of US war aims in Iraq.]

John Howard has long said Japan is Australia's most important relationship in Asia, so Alexander Downer's initiative for an Australia Japan security agreement possesses a political logic that seals a new history.

‘Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.’ Ernest Renan

In 2002, the Japanese government built the “Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims” within the Hiroshima Peace Park. It is located less than two hundred meters from the A-Bomb Peace Museum operated by the Hiroshima City Council. This new Memorial Hall, funded and run by the Japanese government, includes the following message on one of the wall panels:

At one point in the 20th century, Japan walked the path of war. Then, on December 8, 1941, Japan initiated hostilities against the U.S., Great Britain and others, plunging into what came to be known as the Pacific War.