In September of 2012, Dr. Calin Georgescu, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and waste, submitted his report on the legacy of the nuclear weapon testing program of the United States in the Marshall Islands to the Human Rights Council of the UN. This long overdue report offers a harsh assessment of the history of American nuclear testing in the Pacific and the subsequent underplaying of both the health and welfare of the Marshallese, and the radiological contamination wrought by the 67 nuclear weapon tests (atmospheric and underwater) conducted there between 1946 and 1958.

Margaret Mehl poses some penetrating questions about the changing role of relief work over time as she introduces her experience of volunteering in a relatively remote section of Iwate sixteen months after the 3.11 disasters. She provides an unusual glimpse of the on-going relief effort and the challenges that both volunteers and relief groups face in the redefinition of their priorities and practices as local needs on the ground move away from immediate survival relief and beyond the digging out of mud and debris. Through reflexive questioning of her own volunteer activities, she forces us to rethink the role and motivations of NPOs and of volunteers where the line between relief work and “disaster tourism” begins to blur. Mehl asks if some sort of volunteering, including some of what she herself was doing, are in fact little more than “just amateuring in another guise,” a part of a “lifestyle feature” focused more on the self-fulfillment of volunteers than on making a difference to the local areas. If indeed that is the case, what are we to make of it, both positive and negative, in terms of efficacy and ethics? For many people who have spent days, months and even years volunteering in Tohoku and other places, some of these questions may be unsettling—perhaps one reason that they have rarely been asked in the 3.11 aftermath. But we believe that they are important questions and their exploration through first hand accounts of actual volunteers may be the best way to address them. The Asia-Pacific Journal has published numerous accounts of volunteer efforts in the wake of 3.11, and these are referenced at the end of the article.

“If the Nazi activities represented a kind of apex to an age of inhumanity, American atrocities in Laos are clearly of a different order. Not so much inhuman as ahuman. The people of Na Nga and Nong Sa were not the object of anyone's passion. They simply weren't considered. What is most striking about American bombing in Laos is the lack of animosity felt by the killers to their victims. Most of the Americans involved have little if any knowledge of Laos or its people. Those who do rather like them.” - Fred Branfman, Liberation, 1971.

This article assesses the political economy risk of the return of Japan's nuclear village. The December 16 general election campaign and its aftermath may see the nuclear village and its allies seize even greater momentum in key central-government agencies. With a welter of parties and their confusing positions on energy policy, an election seems hardly likely to lead to coherence. The general political and policymaking chaos of the present indeed invites comparison with Japan's early postwar years. The upshot could lead to a gradual return to the concentration on nuclear power that was written into the June 2010 basic energy policy and remains the de jure energy policy, notwithstanding the March 11, 2011 Fukushima Shock and all that has happened since.