Ran Zwigenberg makes a case for revising the history of Hiroshima and its global connections and importance. Focusing on the little known episode of the 1962 Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March, he argues that the march was a unique point of convergence between multiple national narratives of victimization. The Peace March illustrates the emergence of a shared discourse of commemoration of WW II following the Eichmann trial and others, which agents like the marchers facilitated and which emerged from multiple Western and non-Western sources.

This paper sketches how nuclear threat is woven into inter-state relations in the Northeast Asian region, and the case for reducing and ending such threats against non-nuclear weapons states (hereafter NNWSs). It then outlines how a regional nuclear weapons-free zone could bring about an end to such nuclear threats, and describes how the DPRK's active participation might be an integral part of such a zone from the outset. The paper also addresses the central issue of nuclear extended deterrence in the region, and suggests that it is possible to square the circle—that is, to end nuclear threats by nuclear weapons states (hereafter NWSs) in the region against NNWSs by creating a NWFZ—but maintaining strategic deterrence between the NWS should one of them threaten to use or attack a NNWS party to the zone, or should a NNWS party to the treaty break out and proliferate nuclear weapons. Finally, the paper argues that it is in the interests of all states in the region to create a NWFZ because all of them are subject to nuclear threat today; and, it is the only way whereby they can create a stabilizing framework within which to manage, reduce, and eventually abolish nuclear threat in Northeast Asia, including those aimed at and coming from the DPRK.

The Yomiuri Shinbun stunned the world in late November with a highly unusual apology. The paper announced that it had found dozens of articles in past issues of the English-language Daily Yomiuri (now called The Japan News) between February 1992 and January 2013 that used the expression “sex slave” to refer to wartime comfort women.

Last April, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee selected for contention Japanese citizens working to conserve Article 9, Japan's longstanding constitutional prohibition against waging war.

Although trite, at certain moments original definitions are helpful. In his final will, dated November 27, 1895, the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel stipulated that the bulk of his wealth should be used for five prizes - and, without explanation, one for “peace.” Award of the prize since to individuals such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger, whom many equate with war, has raised eyebrows about its virtue. Notwithstanding, Nobel's initial terms that the award go to someone who has “done the most or the best work for the fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses” continues to make it synonymous with hope - as in the case of 2014's worthy winners, Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, and such earlier recipients as Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Schweitzer.

Naha, Okinawa, 17 January. Yesterday I took a bus up to Henoko from Naha, where I live. There is a new organisation called Shimagurumi Kaigi, formed to support the newly elected Governor in his “all Okinawa anti-base” campaign. Since “all-Okinawa” includes progressives, pacifists, business people, and politicians who recently broke away from the pro-base Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), they will, I hear, need to do a whole lot of talking among themselves before they agree on much more than a few simple issues. But they have agreed on at least one project: to set up a daily bus service to carry people to the main gate of the US Marine Corps' Camp Schwab, at Henoko, where construction of the new Marine Corps Air Facility has resumed after a break of a month or so. At the main gate a 24-hour sit-in is aiming to block the big trucks that are bringing in equipment and building materials. The buses leave at 10:00AM, one from Naha, one from Okinawa City and one from Uruma City.