The Iraq war has produced more ironies than successes. The greatest of them is that an attack designed to demonstrate the preeminent power of the United States has ended up making clear that we now live in an era of supranationalism.

The United States stands poised between wanting to write its own ticket and wishing to speed efforts to solve the world's problems. Conspicuously first among equals, it is going to have to get used to the idea that national sovereignty belongs to the past.

Three US administrations have failed to avoid North Korean breakout from the NonProliferation Treaty and a gaping hole in the IAEA safeguards system. Nuclear war is once again conceivable in Korea after a brief interlude in the early 1990s when this prospect all but disappeared. The North's announcement on October 4, 2006 that it intends to test a nuclear weapon underscores this failure.

Hikikomori is a Japanese term that, like sushi and sake, or more to the point, hibakusha, has entered the world lexicon. It refers both to the phenomenon and the individuals who suffer from “acute social withdrawal,” defined by the Japanese government as youths who isolate themselves in a single room of their parents’ home for six months or more. Estimates of the number of hikikomori vary widely, from several hundred thousand to over a million, but there is no denying that it is a major, and growing, problem confronting contemporary Japanese society. Most of the hikikomori are teenagers, eighty percent of them male, who often begin by refusing to go to school and then cut themselves off from social interaction entirely.

The big three, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, have divided the Pacific island territories. New Zealand now controls Polynesia, Australia is “in charge of” Melanesia (including the plundering of natural resources by its multinationals in Papua New Guinea), and the U.S. has a firm grip on Micronesia. Andre Vltchek considers the consequences for the people of the island nations.

So wide-ranging are 71-year-old Inoue Hisashi ‘s talents and activities - including playwright, director, novelist, public intellectual and activist, that it is difficult to know which to focus on at the expense of others.

Inoue not only writes plays regularly for numerous theaters in Japan, but his own Komatsu-za company that he founded in 1983, and which only stages his plays, is constantly touring the country. He is also a prolific best selling novelist and has been president of the prestigious Nihon Pen Club since 2003 – as well as being director of Nihon Gekisakka Kyokai (Japan Playwrights Association), director of Sendai Literature Museum and the director of a library of his own collection of books in his small hometown of Higashi Okitama-gun in rural Yamagata Prefecture.

Despite Chinese intermediation and South Korean flexibility and generosity in the past three years, prospects for security settlement on the Korean peninsula and normalization of relations between Pyongyang and Washington and Tokyo seem to be farther than ever. The six-party talks are stalled, and early implementation of the principles embodied in the 19 September 2005 Joint Statement on Denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is put in doubt. North Korea continues to publicly build up its semi-opaque nuclear arsenal. In turn, the United States insists that “all options are on the table” and keeps on “kicking the can down the road” in terms of its policy of “regime change,” while intensifying its efforts through “proliferation security initiative,” in various multilateral fora, and via other venues to form an “anti-DPRK coalition” aimed at restraining, if not rolling back, the North Korean arduous march to the nuclear superdome.

“Slaughter and plunder are inseparable from armies and wars. Whenever war is waged, looting, robbery, and murder are invariably committed. Depending on their merits, such events are either reported with exaggeration or, conversely, passed over in silence.” In 1930, Japanese writer Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943) published an antiwar novel that “remains startlingly and tragically timely in a world of nationalist-driven military intervention.” Zeljko Cipris introduces Kuroshima and presents excerpts from his novel, Militarized Streets, which Cipris translated for the University of Hawai'i Press.

The U.S., overstretched already, should treat Kim Jong Il as a regional crisis and let China take the lead.

The United States is bogged down in what appears to be an unwinnable war in Iraq; it is facing very unpleasant options in regard to neighboring Iran's nuclear program; senior NATO officers say that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating fast; in the former Soviet Union, Georgia and Russia are moving toward military confrontation, with the U.S. seemingly unable to restrain either; in large swaths of Latin America, new nationalist and populist movements are challenging U.S. interests.

Just after 9/11, the United States allegedly threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” unless it joined the war on terror. In his new book, Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf attributes the ultimatum to Richard Armitage, who flatly denies it. Sounding slightly less sure, President Bush says he was “taken aback by the harshness of the words.”

Tokyo - The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday - laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.

A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as American forces occupied the Japanese capital.

In late August, just over a week before Princess Kiko gave birth, Newsweek Japan commissioned me to contribute an article on the succession issue. With most of the country expecting a baby boy, the remit was to write a ‘very outspoken, opinionated’ piece on how ‘foreign experts’ viewed the latest developments in Japan's imperial drama, with the emphasis on a single rhetorical question: wouldn't a girl be better?

Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neoconservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.

Writing in publications from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neoconservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by “realist” and other critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday's test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with “rogue” states like North Korea are useless and that “regime change” -by military means, if necessary – is the only answer.

In August 2006, Japan-Russia relations were strained when a Russian patrol fired warning shots at a Japanese fishing boat, killing a member of the crew. The boat was near disputed islands—what the Japanese call the Northern Territories and the Russians call the Southern Kuriles. The incident occurred in the 50th anniversary year of the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration (signed on October 19, 1956, and in effect from December 12 of that year).

Buried beneath the heaps of hot words on North Korea's nuclear test, the announcement in Moscow on Monday about the Shtokman natural-gas deposit off Russia's Arctic coast almost escaped attention, despite its comparable lethal fallout in world politics.

[The international press has focused attention on the Abe Shinzo administration's high profile China and Korea diplomacy. Little noticed has been the fact that the Japanese economy is slipping back into trouble. One strong signal is found in Japanese press reports from October 21 that the Abe Shinzo people basically kicked Hitotsubashi University Emeritus Professor Ishi Hiromitsu off the Government Tax Commission and replaced him with a supply-side true believer. Ishi's term was up, but according to the Nikkei he wanted re-appointment. Not in the cards, especially after Ishi put out a very public and explosive call for equity and tax increases last year. The new chief of the Commission is to be Osaka University's Honma Masaaki, who's keen on cutting the corporate tax and following the new Abe regime's line of low taxes despite Japan's stratospheric debt, skimpy social investment and mounting needs for elder care.

Journalist Ken Silverstein recently published a piece at Harpers.org called “Cold Comfort: the Japan Lobby Blocks Resolution on WWII Sex Slaves” (October 5, 2006), which Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe elaborated on in an article headlined “U.S. Congress backs off rebuke of wartime Japan” (October 15, 2006). What we know from both pieces is that, for the past six months, the government of Japan has paid hefty fees ($60,000 a month) to the Washington firm of Hogan & Hartson to prevent House Resolution 759 from reaching a vote before the House adjourned on October 13, almost guaranteeing that, once again, American legislative attempts to hold the Japanese government responsible for Japan's actions during the Second World War have failed. Former long-term Illinois Republican and House minority leader Bob Michel worked as Japan's main mouthpiece. Yet, as Silverstein contends, Michel “is only the most prominent of a small gang of lobbyists which Japan retains to handle World War II issues.”

Jungmin Kang, Science Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, and Peter Hayes, Nautilus Institute Executive Director, write, “Having tested and failed, the DPRK can no longer rely on opacity as the basis for having a credible nuclear force, at least sufficiently credible to threaten its adversaries with a nuclear explosion. The DPRK might believe that a half kilotonne “mininuke” still provides it with a measure of nuclear deterrence and compellence; but it could not rely on other nuclear weapons states to perceive it to have anything more than an unusable, unreliable and relatively small nuclear explosive device.”

When North Korea went ahead with its nuclear test on October 9, 2006 in defiance of China's objections, the Bush administration had hoped that Pyongyang's brazen act would finally create the necessary momentum to precipitate a strategic shift in China's and South Korea's view of North Korea. The two countries hold the key to Pyongyang's economic survival and both countries have been reluctant to pursue policies that might lead to its collapse and regional upheaval.

Ironically, the aggressive Washington foreign policy of the era of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld since 2001 has done more to nurture the one strategic combination in Eurasia most dreaded by Washington political realists such as Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, namely a strategic military and economic cooperation on a deep, long-term basis between two former Cold War foes, China and President Vladimir Putin's Russia.