World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.

He unleashed sudoku on an unsuspecting world - and within months, millions were hooked. But Japan's master of the mind-bender didn't stop there. From his workshop in the heart of Tokyo, Maki Kaji is devising a new, even more fiendish wave of puzzles.

TOKYO - The past week has seen an unprecedented flurry of top-level Japanese diplomacy aimed at ensuring the resource-poor nation's energy security through stable supplies of oil and other resources.

After traveling to the United States for talks with President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo flew on to the oil-rich Middle East, where he visited Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Egypt to strengthen bilateral relations. The trips to the US and the Middle East were both his first since assuming office last September. Abe returned to Tokyo on Thursday.

Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, have enjoyed considerable success in Japan and the United States. Letters from Iwo Jima, which told the story of the battle from the Japanese perspective, made nearly 5 billion yen at the box office in Japan, and won an Academy Award and a number of other major awards in the United States. Critics in America praised a film that, in the era of the war on terrorism and the Iraq conflict, attempted to understand the humanity of the enemy, while those in Japan celebrated the film's anti-war message and its largely unbiased portrait of Japanese. Few, however, have tried to analyze the reasons behind this success and how audiences were approaching these films. One of these rare cases was a short piece in the Asahi Shinbun (13 December 2006) by Ikui Eikoh, which suggested conceptualizing the film against the background of the Iraq War and the fact that to America, having lost many of its staunch allies except Japan, “Japan is the sole country in the whole world that it feels it can understand, that it wants to understand.” Japan Focus, in extending a series of articles we have featured on the two films, asked Professor Ikui to expand on his thoughts. This article appears for the first time in Japan Focus and was translated and introduced by Aaron Gerow.

Since the 1980s, a widespread view has arisen in the literature that the post-1950 economic successes of Taiwan and the Republic of Korea have been due, in part at least, to the legacy of Japanese colonialism. This paper challenges that view by comparing Japanese economic achievements in both Taiwan and Korea with those of the British, French, Dutch and Americans in their Southeast Asian colonies. The paper examines the record of economic growth and structural change across the various colonies, and also discusses policies relating to government revenue and expenditure and to trade, exchange rates and the balance of payments. The paper also looks at some non-monetary indicators relating to living standards, including mortality rates and educational enrolments. The main conclusion is that the facts do not wholly support the case for Japanese exceptionalism.

Defense News describes itself as “the authoritative, independent, professional news source for the world's defense decision-makers.” Reaching a “highly selective VIP list of top leaders and decision-makers in North America and in Europe, Asia and the Middle East,” it “provides the global defense community with the latest insight and news analysis on defense programs, policy, business and technology.

On December 9, 1970, US President Richard Nixon telephoned his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to discuss the ongoing bombing of Cambodia. This sideshow to the war in Vietnam, begun in 1965 under the Johnson administration, had already seen 475,515 tons of ordnance dropped on Cambodia, which had been a neutral kingdom until nine months before the phone call, when pro-US General Lon Nol seized power. The first intense series of bombings, the Menu campaign on Vietnamese targets in Cambodia's border areas — which American commanders labeled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack — had concluded in May, 1970 shortly after the coup.

While “karma” is used so often in the West today that it has become almost a household word, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the socio-political role played by karma in Asian societies, past or present. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the very idea of karma having a socio-political role will come as a surprise to many. That is to say, how could an ethical concept like karma, commonly associated with the good or bad effects of an individual's acts, play a role in collective entities like society and politics?

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied, warned radical war reporter Claud Cockburn. That famous dictum resonates strongly throughout the murky story of Okinawa's reversion to Japanese rule in 1972.

Tokyo and Washington have always denied the secret pact that obliged Japanese taxpayers to shoulder the burden of compensating Okinawa landowners during the transition. Both governments have clung to that denial despite recent damning testimony from a key Foreign Ministry official and the release of papers in 2000 and 2002 from US government archives proving the existence of the deal beyond all reasonable doubt. Throughout the twists and turns of the scandal, officials on both sides have corrupted the judicial process, lied to the people who pay their salaries and destroyed the lives of the few whistleblowers brave enough to take them on.

This is the first article by John McGlynn in a series that meticulously dissects US charges of North Korean criminality, notably the forgery of US currency and money laundering, the significance of the legal instruments it has imposed on North Korea through Banco Delta Asia, and the significance of US actions for the resolution of the interrelated issues of North Korean nuclear weapons and the normalization of US-North Korean relations.

Upon my inauguration in February 2003, I laid out three major national policy goals: Establishment of participatory democracy, balanced development of society, and the opening of a new era for a peaceful and prosperous Northeast Asia. This third objective has served as the backbone of my government's foreign policy – an attempt to build a Northeast Asian community through a new regional order of cooperation and integration that transcends old antagonisms and conflicts among countries in this region. I believe this policy is vital in ensuring our survival and enhancing our prosperity.

Pachinko refers to the peculiarly Japanese amusement arcade game that was supposedly modelled on the ‘Corinthian’, a US pinball machine, imported to Japan in the 1920s. Pachinko machines closely resemble pinball machines, though they are somewhat smaller and have a vertical, as opposed to horizontal, playing surface. Pachinko machines are played almost exclusively in specialist pachinko parlours, where the compactness of the machines is an important factor, as we shall see. In 2005, there were an estimated 17.1 million pachinko players, providing revenue of just over 28.7 trillion yen (US$250 billion). It is difficult to think of another developed society in which gambling is as universally accessible and widely practiced on a daily basis by such a significant portion of the adult population.

Japan's Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, determined to promote Japan as (in the words of his book) a “beautiful country,” whose school students will be taught to love it and whose citizens will be offered a version of its history in which they can take pride, finds himself in the incongruous position of sinking deeper and deeper into a shameful mire over his refusal to accept state responsibility for the mass mobilization of women for the sexual slave services for the Imperial Japanese Army during the Asian and Pacific wars to 1945.

In late May 1949, after troops of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entered Shanghai, Mansfield Addis, then First Secretary of the British Embassy in Nanjing, wrote to his mother back home: “Shanghai liberated! We rejoice that it was not more difficult! It brings the end nearer.” The sentiment expressed in Addis's letter drew the attention of the British Foreign Office, which felt the matter serious enough to warrant a special telegram to its Nanjing embassy in July 1949:

We notice a growing tendency in telegrams from China to refer to the Communist occupation of an area as “liberation”. In the case of a Consular officer reporting to you en clair and post facto the expression may possibly be unavoidable, but we feel bound to point out that China telegrams get a wide distribution here with the consequent danger that expressions such as this, oft repeated, may serve to strengthen beliefs all too prevalent that Chinese Communism is different from the Soviet brand. We hope therefore that posts will in future refrain from using this word in a sense so far divorced from its true meaning.

[Japan Focus introduction: Among the various explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union, a popular argument has been that the US escalated the arms race with Moscow to the point that it broke the bank in Russia, finally leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire. China has been determined to avoid that trap. Overwhelmingly out-gunned by the United States in every conceivable aspect of military hardware, the PRC from its earliest years to the present has struggled with vital security problems of how to defend itself from the American superpower. One important answer has been to build a minimum second-strike nuclear capability to confront American strategists with the fact of mutual vulnerability to nuclear attack. However, the Bush administration's strategy of preventive war, in its relentless search for absolute security, has created a new and more dangerous situation for China. US plans to revitalize its nuclear weapons program, to build missile defenses, and to press on toward weaponizing outer space, threaten to undermine the viability of China's nuclear deterrent. The modernization of China's strategic defenses can best be understood as a comprehensive, asymmetrical response to the American challenge. But will that response set off a further arms race in an Asia Pacific region fraught with tensions and nuclear aspirations? The following report is reprinted from Defense News, a major organ of the US Defense establishment and its arms manufacturers. Characteristic of this genre, it makes no mention of expansive US missile development. Peter Van Ness]

Amid intensifying rivalry between Tokyo and Beijing over influence in Asia, Japan is revving up its drive to strengthen relations with countries in Indochina, an economically backward but geopolitically important part of the region.

The target countries are Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which are collectively referred to as the “CLV” countries. To be sure, these countries are all relatively small in terms of economic size and represent a tiny fraction of East Asia's economy.

Fifty years ago, the Canadian diplomat and noted Japan scholar, Herbert Norman, committed suicide, stepping off the roof of a nine-storey building in downtown Cairo. Canadian ambassador to Egypt at the time, Norman was 47 years old and his death on April 4, 1957 provoked a crisis in Canada-U.S. relations.

Here in Tokyo, I saw two movies last week. One was a feature, and the other was a documentary. Both were about Japan's Kamikaze pilots in World War II.

“I wanted to convey the corps' beauty to young people today.” So writes Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro at the start of “For Those We Love,” (Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku the feature film. Ishihara is the film's executive producer and scriptwriter.

One year after media reports that Aso Mining used 300 Allied prisoners of war for forced labor in 1945, Foreign Minister Aso Taro is refusing to confirm that POWs dug coal for his family's company—and even challenging reporters to produce evidence.

That is not hard to do. Records produced by both Aso Mining and the Japanese government clearly show that POWs toiled at the Aso Yoshikuma mine in Fukuoka Prefecture.

Despite centuries of subjugation by larger neighbours—Joseon Korea, Imperial Japan, and South Korea—Jeju island society has maintained a distinct identity and a measure of autonomy. Relations with both Korea and Japan have at times had devastating effects on the islanders, but also contributed to the dynamism of Jeju island society and opened up new routes for islanders to continue traveling as a vital part of their social life.