As the Japanese government moves to beef up the country's military preparedness, once again the issue of the protection of foreigners’ rights has been raised.

Tehran - Speaking of business as unusual. A mere two months ago, the news of a China- Kazakhstan pipeline agreement, worth US$3.5 billion, raised some eyebrows in the world press, some hinting that China's economic foreign policy may be on the verge of a new leap forward. A clue to the fact that such anticipation may have totally understated the case was last week's signing of a mega-gas deal between Beijing and Tehran worth $100 billion. Billed as the “deal of the century” by various commentators, this agreement is likely to increase by another $50 to $100 billion, bringing the total close to $200 billion, when a similar oil agreement, currently being negotiated, is inked not too far from now.

Shiodome Shiosite, a major high-rise office, shopping, and residential development in the heart of Tokyo, has been heralded by the media as the newest attraction in the city. The first building in the complex opened in December 2002, and the project is scheduled for completion in 2006. Here, the Shiodome site's history as a major freight yard of the Japanese National Railways is recalled, along with the government-business collusion that delivered it into the hands of the developers.

In June 1994, Bill Clinton came close to launching a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea's nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six years, until George W. Bush brought a host of the Agreement's critics into his Administration, and they set about dismantling it, thus fulfilling their own prophecy and initiating another dangerous confrontation with Pyongyang. The same folks who brought us the invasion of Iraq and a menu of hyped-up warnings about Saddam Hussein's weapons have similarly exaggerated the North Korean threat: indeed, the second North Korean nuclear crisis began in October 2002, when ‘sexed-up’ intelligence was used to push Pyongyang against the wall and make bilateral negotiations impossible.

Fifty-nine years have passed since the August sixth when Hiroshima was so thoroughly obliterated that many succumbed to such doom. Dozens of corpses still bearing the agony of that day, souls torn abruptly from their loved ones and their hopes for the future, have recently re-surfaced on Ninoshima sland, warning us to beware the utter inhumanity of the atomic bombing and the gruesome horror of war. I Unfortunately, the human race still lacks both a lexicon capable of fully expressing that disaster and sufficient imagination to fill the gap.

On 14 October 2004, a suit filed by 45 plaintiffs against the Japanese state and Kumamoto prefecture was successful in the Supreme Court in Osaka. The case concerned the mass poisoning almost half a century ago of residents of the town of Minamata in Western Japan, when mercury contained in effluent from the Chisso Corporation's factory contaminated the Shiranui Sea and then accumulated in the bodies of those who ate its fish and shellfish. The Supreme Court found the national and prefectural government authorities responsible for administrative malfeasance. The status of the plaintiffs as Minamata sufferers, till then persistently denied by the authorities, was upheld, and compensation was ordered. This was an action launched in 1982, preceded by a long and anguished course on the path of the plaintiffs, and in the twenty-two years that has passed since the suit was launched twenty-three of the fifty-nine died (the bereaved families of fifteen of them persisting in the action), and the average age of the survivors came to be over seventy. The authorities, responsible for protecting the rights and health of the people, had caused these citizens continuous pain by denying them their just rights.

On the eve of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro's second visit to North Korea in eighteen months, Japan Focus presents Wada Haruki's analysis of the larger stakes in the Japan-North Korea negotiations. Setting off the emotional issues of the kidnapping of Japanese against the record of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Wada examines the prospects for negotiating an agreement that could become the basis for defusing the range of contentious issues that continue to swirl around a nuclear North Korea facing acute problems of starvation and isolated from its powerful neighbor and historic antagonist, Japan. Wada Haruki is Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo. A specialist in Russian and Korean history and politics, he is the author of the monumental Complete History of the Korean War (Chosen senso zenshi). This article appeared in Sekai (World), January 2004.

Nagai Eishun is part of a dying breed, a man who would rather have his life ruined than stand to attention for a flag and anthem he despises. “Not so long ago, everyone I knew thought the same as me but times have changed a lot,” says the 56-year-old Tokyo highschool teacher. “Our numbers are dwindling, but we have to keep fighting. Educational freedom in Japan depends on it.”

In other countries, standing for the national anthem is a source of pride but in Japan the anthem is the Kimigayo (His Majesty's Reign), the same dirge that rang in the ears of millions of Imperial troops who went off to kill in the name of the Emperor in Asia during World War II. Since 1999, the playing of the anthem and the flying of the Hinomaru (Rising Sun) flag, have been compulsory at Japanese school ceremonies, but some teachers refuse to toe the line. Invariably, controversy erupts every year in March when the flag flutters at graduation ceremonies across the country.

Otaka Yoshiko was born Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Manchuria in 1920. After joining the Manchurian Film Association in 1938, she starred in films as a Chinese actress under the name of Li Xianglan (Ri Koran in Japanese). Arrested as a spy by the Chinese Nationalists following Japan's surrender, she was arraigned before a war crimes tribunal and acquitted. Following her release, she was active as an actress and singer in Japan and then in the United States. She subsequently served as a television host and journalist covering Vietnam and the Middle East. She served in the upper house of the Diet between 1974 and 1992. This is one in a series of Japanese Lives.

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry minces no words when he attacks President George W. Bush about his Iraq policy. Kerry calls the invasion of Iraq “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Since Kerry voted in favor of the war as a senator, his footing and standing on the problem had remained shaky up to now.

Recent inquiries in the USA and the UK into alleged intelligence failures regarding the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have highlighted shortcomings in the way information is used and conclusions are drawn by Western intelligence agencies. There is a danger the same errors could be repeated in North Korea.

In two communities in Nagano Prefecture an increasing number of citizens are complaining of swollen lymph glands and muscle pain, and at the same time deformities are appearing in plants. The causes have not been clarified, but some people suspect that the electromagnetic waves from mobile phone base stations may be a factor.

President George W. Bush has repeatedly presented the American occupation of Japan as the model for Iraq's democratization. Does the Japanese occupation really illuminate contemporary reconstructions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other contemporary war-torn societies? Certain similarities do stand out: as in Japan half a century earlier, the U.S. has proclaimed its intention to return “sovereignty” to a democratic Iraq and assure a democratic transition in Afghanistan while preserving a dominant American military presence in both the Middle East and Central Asia. Yet beyond this obvious similarity lie profound differences in American strategy, goals and commitments, as well as in the nations and peoples it seeks to “reconstruct” and the problems encountered in the two regions and two eras.

Approximately 6,000 people in Japan and overseas have filed lawsuits in six district courts, charging that Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro's repeated visits to Yasukuni Shrine in his capacity as Prime Minister violates principles of freedom of religion and the separation of politics and religion enshrined in Japan's Constitution. Plaintiffs include Korean residents of Japan, whose fathers died in the Asia-Pacific War and who the Japanese state has enshrined as gods at Yasukuni Shrine, in violation of their families’ wishes. On 27 February, the Osaka District Court ruled that the Prime Minister's visit was made not as a private citizen but in his official capacity. A ruling by the Fukuoka District Court on April 16 declared the visits unconstitutional for violating the separation of religion and state. Both courts rejected payment of damages to the plaintiffs. The Prime Minister responded that he would continue his visits to the shrine in violation of the court judgments and despite (or perhaps because of) protests by the Chinese, Korean and other Asian governments. This article analyses the Yasukuni visits in relation to the Koizumi administration's decision to send Japanese troops to Iraq. It also inquires into the cultural and political meaning of enshrining Korean and Taiwanese soldiers in Japan's imperial army as gods at Yasukuni.

Observers of early twenty-first-century Japan commonly note economic, political, and social crisis, on the one hand, and pessimism, lethargy, or helplessness about the possibility of reform, on the other. Yet Japan's civil society was idealistic and energetic in the early postwar decades. What happened? The reform movement that captured much of the vitality of the early postwar decades was either foreclosed, as many were co-opted in the “all- for-growth” economism, consumerism, and the corporation, or crushed in successive waves of repression of dissidence as the cold war order took shape. Political parties sacrificed broad vision and ideals to narrow-interest articulation. While the mass base of the reform movement was discouraged, demoralized, and depoliticized, one minority in the late 1960s turned to violent revolution and another in the late 1980s turned inward to seek spiritual satisfaction. Both paths led to violence. This article looks at the course of the student movement between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, with particular reference to the Japan Red Army, and at the new religious movement Aum Supreme Truth in the 1980s and 1990s. Both adopted “terrorist” tactics, by almost any understanding of that term. However, they were children of their times, reflecting the same deep social, political, and moral problems that Japan as a whole continues to face in the early twenty-first century.

From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The total volume translates into 7,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs detonated at the pace of 11 a week. In particular, the hydrogen bomb tested in Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, named Bravo, had an explosive force equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

I lived in the United States from the age of 15 until I turned 19. When Japan went to war with America, I became a “hostile alien.” In 1942, I was sent to a detention center – a relocation camp.

I knew I was being detained unjustly, but fortunately I was treated fairly throughout my years of captivity. I was never tortured or abused.

In fact, I felt I was walking into a much worse prison when I returned to wartime Japan to find the nation completely in the grip of emperor worshipping totalitarianism.

Ever since the October 10 news conference announcing the discovery of a small tablet in China's Tang dynasty capital of Chang'an (now Xi'an), excitement in Japan has run high. Recording the death of a Japanese student in China in 734, the tablet indicates that Jing Zhencheng posthumously received from the Chinese Emperor a high official appointment. It also contains the earliest use of the name Riben or Nippon, the Chinese and Japanese characters for Japan that have been used ever since.

The Libyan Foreign Ministry's December 19, 2003 “Statement” outlining its plan to “get rid of [weapons of mass destruction] materials, equipment and programs, and to become totally free of internationally banned weapons” prompted some to ponder whether North Korea might be next.{1} Will the Northeast Asian “rogue state” join the Middle East “rogue state” in renouncing its nuclear weapons programs? The Japanese weekly magazine Aera questioned whether Kim Jong Il would follow the cooperative path of Muammar Kaddafi, or continue along the confrontational, and ultimately self-destructive, path that Saddam Hussein trod.{2} In an interview with the Nikkei Press, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage held out this offer: if they chose to voluntarily end their weapons programs like Libya, North Korea “would very rapidly find herself integrated into the vibrant community of East Asia.”{3} Neither of these two statements, however, address the central fact that the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, or the threat of their production, is the lone asset that the North Korean government under U.S. threat has as a bargaining chip in its effort to survive. Like other states, North Korea and Libya respond to international developments not as part of a “rogue alliance” but on the basis of analysis of their specific interests and needs.