Dolphin and humpback whale are just two of the items on the menu in the fishing village of Taiji where the locals battle Hollywood environmentalists and ‘racist’ foreigners. David McNeill mingles with the suspicious locals and witnesses a clash of cultures. Below, too, see his interview with dolphin trainer turned activist Ric O'Barry.

With the Bush administration in deep trouble on many fronts, the government of Japan is striving to carry out a reorganization that will integrate Japanese forces in American strategic actions throughout the Arc of Instability. For ten years, from 1996, Japan's longest unfulfilled promise has been to build a new base for the US marines in Okinawa to replace the inconvenient, obsolescent and politically charged Futenma. All efforts at construction have been blocked by a coalition of local Okinawan residents and citizens.

Talk of love, beauty, and hope filled the air in Tokyo as 2007 dawned. It is not that Japanese people were suddenly smitten with such romantic sentiments, but that their leaders were demanding it of them. The country's political and economic leadership was insisting that the Japanese love their country and their corporations. It is the phenomenon described by Japanese critic Sataka Makoto as that of a “stalker state,” to which now, in light of the document introduced below, may be added “stalker corporation.” Nowhere else in the industrial world is there anything quite like this. Those in Japan itself with long memories recall the time in the first half of the 20th century when citizens were compelled to love their state and told that its deeds were incomparably beautiful. It did not end well. Hence the general foreboding in the wake of new state and corporate demands.

The Republican loss in the November midterm election, most observers have maintained, was a rejection of President Bush's failed Iraq policy. But the Bush administration's North Korean policy (not to mention its botched Iran policy) has also been unsuccessful, since the six-party talks that were created more than three years ago, far from defusing the nuclear crisis with respect to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), has only deepened it. While there was no hard evidence that Pyongyang actually had a nuclear weapon before the North Korean nuclear crisis emerged in October 2002, there is irrefutable evidence now that it has restarted its plutonium-reprocessing plant at Yongbyon and that it has the technological know-how to detonate a nuclear device.

Drawing on English language sources and material from Western Samoa (now Samoa), this examination of photographically illustrated serial encyclopaedia and magazines proposes an alternative historical analysis of the colonial photographs of Samoa, the most extensively covered field in Oceanic photographic studies. Photographs published between the 1890s and World War II were not necessarily from that era, and despite claims in the text of illustrated publications of an unchanged, enduring, archaic tradition in Samoa, the amazing variety of content and subject matter often offered contradictory evidence, depicting a modern, adaptive and progressive Samoa. Contrary to orthodox historical analysis, the images of Samoa in illustrated magazines and encyclopaedia were not limited to a small, repetitive gallery of partially clothed women and costumed chiefs.

What role, if any, does kinship play in the ability of Indonesia's Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) to rejuvenate itself? I aim to show how conceptions of kinship have important ramifications for the ways these and other jihadists establish political authority among their recruits and capitalise on the perceived grievances suffered by Muslims world wide to galvanise the anger among marginalised young Muslims. Although kinship is the most arcane aspect of anthropological study, we need to understand it, if we are to analyse elements of society, like those of jihadists, who conceive of their organisations in terms of blood relationships and ties of affinity. In this context, it is essential to establish the importance of blood relations and parenthood, rather than simply looking at the more general rituals of kinship, such as ‘spiritual kinship’ in Christian societies (Parkin, 1997: 124).

Seeking a “21st-century way of working” that promotes increased labor productivity and “diverse work styles,” Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) has issued a report recommending major changes to work hour regulations. The centerpiece of the proposal is an exemption from overtime pay for white-collar workers.

The first lines of Robert Browning's poem, ‘The Patriot’ – “It was roses, roses, all the way” – may well characterise the splendid success of prime minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Japan during December 13-15. It all started with the “breaking of protocol for a late evening arrival at Tokyo International Airport, Haneda, by the Japanese foreign minister Taro Aso”. The next day he had an afternoon audience at the Imperial Palace with the emperor of Japan, Akihito, and empress Michiko, followed by a historic honour – a first for an Indian prime minister – to address the joint session of the Diet, the Japanese parliament. The visit concluded on December 15 with a joint public statement, with the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, on “India-Japan Strategic and Global Partnership”.

Two prominent leaders of the Middle East headed abroad last weekend, canvassing support from the international community. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad went on a tour of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador, the “red rain land” of Latin America, while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert headed for China.

In his final televised speech to the Iraqi people in 2003, Saddam Hussein denounced the invading Americans as “the Mongols of this age,” a reference to the last time infidels had conquered his country, in 1258. But the comparison isn't very apt — unlike the Mongols, the Americans don't have the organizational genius of Genghis Khan.

Another day, another unnecessary loss of lives: 24 people killed and 10 still missing in floods and landslides on the small island of Tahuna off Indonesia's Sulawesi. The date is January 12, 2007.

Italian authorities investigate Roman antiquities in Japanese museums, just as Japan launches a global cultural offensive.

The risk of war on the Korean peninsula remains high, and the U.S. government is raising it higher by opening an economic front. In September 2005, one day after regional negotiations produced an agreement with the potential to defuse North Korean-U.S. tensions, the U.S. government charged North Korea with counterfeiting $100 bills. Calling this alleged North Korean effort a direct attack on U.S. sovereignty and technically an act of war, Washington imposed an ever-tightening and ever-widening web of financial restrictions on the country.

The Asahi Shinbun and the International Herald Tribune recently published a five-part series on Korean residents in Japan. Many of these zainichi – the word literally means “residing in Japan” – have lived in the country for two, three and even four generations. Having been deprived of the Japanese citizenship that they obtained under colonial rule in the years 1910-1945, the 600,000 zainichi are those Korean residents who have not become naturalized Japanese citizens. The series shows that they now find themselves in a crossfire between the North Korean and Japanese governments. The zainichi are the largest ethnic minority in a country that often prides itself, mistakenly, on being homogenous.

BANGKOK - Energy-hungry China has started to use the Mekong River as a new oil-shipping route, raising new environmental concerns that accidental spills could adversely affect the livelihoods of nearly 60 million downstream river dwellers and eventually evolve into a bone of diplomatic contention between Southeast Asian countries and China.

Since the early 1980s, China has been hailed as the poster child of post-socialist transition, shifting its revolutionary course via a reform that has generated the world's most dynamic growth in GNP and trade over a quarter of a century and elevated it to the forefront of nations attracting foreign investment. Often eclipsed in this glowing picture of reform are enduring, indeed exacerbated, structures of inequality and the vibrant forms of popular resistance these have spawned. So too are the inequalities of the revolutionary era, including both persisting historical legacies and new forms of inequality. This article seeks to provide a framework both for assessing structures of Chinese inequality in successive epochs of revolution and reform and for gauging the changing relationship between social movements and structures of inequality. Three key questions drive the analysis: What are the legacies of the Chinese Revolution for the pursuit of social equality? How has reform restructured patterns of inequality? What is the relationship between the social upheavals that took place during both periods and changing patterns of inequality?

Japan Focus is pleased to present an introduction to, and excerpts from, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller and Anthony Weller, with a foreword by Walter Cronkite. The story presented here explores MacArthur's censorship of Weller's reportage as the first journalist to enter Nagasaki, where he interviewed military and medical personnel, and the first to write at length on Japan's POW camps, where he interviewed hundreds of allied prisoners. Weller brings direct experience to bear on questions of US censorship of the atomic bomb, and particularly issues of radiation. Extraordinarily, not only were his Nagasaki dispatches censored, but his detailed interviews with POWs were also censored. Weller's reports, censored for sixty years, have only now become available.

Tanaka Shozo (1841–1913) is widely acknowledged as Japan's “first conservationist.” A former village headman, in the 1890s he led the fight against the Ashio Copper Mine's pollution of the Watarase and Tone rivers northwest of Tokyo. Tanaka's endeavors are frequently cast as a peasant warning to an industrializing Japan, but they can more accurately be seen as the work of a modern environmental thinker who developed a sophisticated ecological theory of society based on the twin processes of nature: “poison” (doku) and “flow” (nagare). From this position he went on to combat the Meiji state's flood control plans for the Kanto plain: a massive reengineering of the entire watershed and the beginning of the Japanese state's systematic intervention in nature. In response to the state's flood control plan, Tanaka's Fundamental River Law (konponteki kasenho) and philosophies of “poison” and “flow” describe the harm that comes from ignoring the dictates of an active nature in the name of absolute human agency. His law revered flow, “not as a made thing” but as fundamental to nature, indeed, to all life.

This article deals with the Japanese Imperial Government's and Military's involvement in the wartime military comfort woman system (1931-1945) and presents new archival evidence documenting the use of comfort stations by Japanese businessmen as well as soldiers.

The Chukiren Peace Memorial Museum nestles among swathes of identikit houses in a suburb of Saitama Prefecture, watched over by a pensioner – a foot soldier in what Milan Kundera called the struggle of memory against forgetting. Voluntarily funded and still smelling of new paint, the museum is a work in progress; an antidote, hopes Curator Niki Fumiko, to the narcissistic chauvinism of the Abe administration, which she and her supporters believe is poisoning the bloodstream of Japanese politics.