In December 2012, not a few people in Japan remembered the 75th anniversary of Nanjing Massacre. Those people hoped that the lessons from war crimes committed by the Japanese Army from 1931-1945 would be learned so that Japan would never wage war against another country again, and peace would be achieved in East Asia. These Japanese, however, now face a major challenge.

The hydrogen explosions at the three Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in March 2011 launched one of the largest disasters in industrial history. A year after the Japanese government declared that the reactors were under control, experts continued to find radioactive leaks. According to TEPCO's latest estimate, cleaning up the mess—removing fuel rods and debris, decommissioning the reactors, and decontaminating some of the surroundings—will take four decades and cost at least $125 billion.” Along the way, thousands of workers will be exposed annually to levels of radiation well in excess of 20 milliSieverts, the internationally recognized maximum limit for normal working conditions.

Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition (University of California Press, 2012) seeks to answer the complex question of why the Chinese Communist revolution took such a different path from its Russian prototype. It suggests that a key distinction between the two revolutions lay in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources - during their rise to power and afterward. Skillful “cultural positioning” and “cultural patronage” on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades, and successors helped to construct a polity in which a once-alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly “Chinese.”

A single sentence buried among 7000 pages of documents recently released by the Pentagon might well be the needle in the haystack that conclusively proves the U.S. military stored toxic herbicides, including Agent Orange, on Okinawa during the Vietnam War. American veterans have long claimed that large volumes of these chemicals were present on the island and hundreds of them are suffering from serious illnesses they believe were triggered by their exposure. But the U.S. government has repeatedly denied their allegations, insisting it has no records related to the issue.

According to accounts published after Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972, nuclear weapons were stored in the northern Okinawan village of Henoko at an Army ordnance depot adjacent to the Marines’ Camp Schwab. The depot was constructed in 1959, becoming the Army's 137th Ordnance Company (Special Weapons) and was turned over to the Marines as Camp Henoko (Ordnance Ammunition Depot) following reversion in 1972. The camp is located only a few hundred yards from the proposed site of the replacement base for the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, which is located in the middle of densely populated Ginowan City. Newly re-instated Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has vowed to push for construction of the base, delayed more than sixteen years by local protests and despite widespread Okinawan opposition. The January 11, 2013 Japan Times reported, “The [Japanese] government may apply next month to bring in earth to fill a coastal area in [Henoko,] Okinawa where a U.S. Marine Corps air base is to be relocated, ahead of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's trip to the United States, government reports said Thursday.”

Why did ROK President Lee, Myung-Bak, changing his position on the issue of “comfort women”, forcefully demand for the first time in December 2011 in Kyoto that Japan's Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko act to settle this issue? The reason is that the ROK government was compelled to do so by the August 30, 2011 decision of the Korean Constitutional Court. As of January 2013, however, there has been no tangible Japanese action on the issues. This article considers possible ways to resolve the issues that continue to poison relations between two neighbors with extensive economic, financial and cultural bonds.