BRUSSELS – In a vital move toward securing greater stability, North Korea announced last week it would return to the six-party talks in Beijing with the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to try to resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula. The breakdown in negotiations had been triggered most recently by U.S. claims that North Korea had a secret enriched-uranium program to produce nuclear weapons.

For nearly 60 years many Japanese have been struggling honorably to come to terms with the China War and the Pacific War, and indeed their entire imperialist past. But their struggles never take place in a vacuum. Trends in history, politics, international relations, and even culture, shape them. During the occupation years (1945 to 1952) neonationalists who rejected the Tokyo Trial and justified the lost war seldom spoke out. At that time, Japanese who sought to grasp the war experience, end the era of irresponsibility, and develop a critical historiography went virtually unchallenged.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Shimoda, the pact that established diplomatic relatins between Japan and Russia.

2005 also marks the 100th anniversary of the Portsmouth Treaty, which ended the Russo- Japanese War.

At those historic moments, Russia and Japan were two unique civilizations at different stages of national development: Russia was at the apex of its eastward expansion and Japan was at the end of more than two centuries of self- imposed isolation. By concluding those treaties, the leaders of the two countries taught us an important lesson: Success in bilateral relations was made possible by extraordinary political leaders who were able to overcome cultural differences and forge a peaceful relationship beyond the immediate consequences of imperialism and war.

[A] conference of historians, psychoanalysts, and artists, gathered to reflect on the relation of education to the Holocaust, watched the videotaped testimony of the woman in an attempt to better understand the era. A lively debate ensued. The testimony was not accurate, historians claimed. The number of chimneys was misrepresented. Historically, only one chimney was blown up, not all four. Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fallible, one could not accept–nor give credence to–her account of the events. It was utterly important to remain accurate, [lest] the revisionists in history discredit everything. A psychoanalyst … profoundly disagreed. “The woman was testifying,” he insisted, “not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence.”

–Dori Laub[1]

In the standard U.S. image, North Korea is a monolithic, Stalin-style dictatorship controlled by one man, Kim Jong Il. But the key reason for North Korean intransigence in the nuclear crisis with the United States is that Kim does not have unchallenged control over foreign and defense policy. The North Korean power structure is deeply divided between pragmatists who favor a nuclear deal with the United States and increasingly assertive hardliners who argue that a tough posture is needed to stop the Bush administration from pursuing “regime change” in Pyongyang.

On 13 June 2005, the doors of the White House Oval Office opened to admit a young (37 year- old) Korean man named Kang Chol-Hwan, a refugee from North Korea and perhaps the first person from North Korea for the president to meet. Kang was slightly overwhelmed by the warmth of his welcome, not only from President George W. Bush but also Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Just three days earlier, in the same room, Bush had hosted a visit by South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun. The welcome for Kang, the refugee, was by all accounts much warmer than that for the head of state, and at forty minutes lasted about as long.

Takehara, Hiroshima Prefecture- Yamauchi Masayuki guides a group of junior high school students through the hills and forests on the tiny island of Okunoshima in Hiroshima Prefecture.

Just before the May 2005 NPT (Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) Review Conference, Tokyo made what appeared to be a bold announcement: Japan would press for the early entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and for a reduction of all types of nuclear weapons. With the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just a few months away, Japan was attempting to improve an image that had been undermined by its continuing willingness to accommodate the nuclear weapons states.

[Debate continues in Japan on how to address what is widely felt to be a long-continuing economic, political, and social malaise. One set of prescriptions would be to return to the values of the prewar era, in particular those of the Meiji Constitution and Rescript on Education (1889 and 1890), believed by some conservatives to be “more” Japanese than the Constitution and Fundamental Law of Education that were adopted under the US occupation and came into operation in 1947. Here, Umehara Takeshi, one of Japan's best- known scholars of philosophy and religion and himself a prominent conservative, takes issue with such a view. Japan Focus]