The Tenno-empire (tenno teikoku, literally “emperor empire”) is Japan's hierarchical class order combining authority and power that oppresses and exploits the common people. At its summit are the bureaucrats who support the emperor, together with the complex of political parties and monopoly capital and its affiliates.

In the early years of the new century, Chinese dam builders and financiers appeared on the global hydropower market with a bang. China Exim Bank and companies such as Sinohydro, China Gezhouba Group and China Southern Power Grid started to take on large, destructive projects in countries like Burma and Sudan, which had previously been shunned by the international community. Their emergence threatened to roll back progress regarding human rights and the environment which civil society had achieved over many years. However, new evidence suggests that Chinese dam builders and financiers are trying to become good corporate citizens rather than rogue players on the global market. Here is a progress report from the perspective of an international civil society advocate.

Following through on a pledge made in early 2010, the Japanese government in late March supplied the South Korean government with a list of 175,000 Koreans forced to work for private companies in Japan during World War Two. The long-sought records include details about the 278 million yen (about $3 million, unadjusted for interest or inflation) in wages the workers earned but never received. The funds reside in Japan's national treasury today; the government has never indicated what it intends to do with the money. The data will enable authorities in Seoul to verify the forced labor experience of individuals listed in the records, and to finally compensate them under a South Korean program set up in 2007.

Something unusual happened on 5 March 2009 in the quiet compound of the French school known as Sciences Po, the National Foundation for Political Science, from which most of the past and present French governmental elite graduated. It was the first day of a major conference on “Memory, The Writing of History and Democratization” that assembled political scientists, sociologists, and historians, addressing a vast array of issues related to World War Two, Stalinism and Maoism, and recent African wars. Around one hundred people had gathered in one of the main lecture halls. The first session was ending when a woman from the audience quickly approached the speakers' table. She was not your typical academic conference attendant. A bailiff, she was there to hand one of the speakers a subpoena to appear before the Paris district court at the request of the “French Sasakawa Foundation” (FFJDS). The Foundation, having filed a libel suit against that particular scholar, had chosen this flamboyant way to make the case public.