In 1993, an onsen (hotspring) in the city of Otaru, Hokkaido, decided it had had enough of Russian sailors not following bathhouse rules. The managers put up signs saying “JAPANESE ONLY,” and refused entry to all foreigners.

Excluded people complained about this situation for years, but the Otaru city government ignored the situation. Although they admitted that this activity was discrimination, they maintained that they had no power to stop it. This was, after all, not specifically illegal in Japan, and they considered it “too early” to legislate against it.

Japan is stuck between lots of rocks and several hard places. It confronts the escalating costs of the world's most rapid pace of ageing with a low and declining birthrate and virtually no support for mass immigration. Moreover, the country faces these costs while severely handicapped by a public debt 1.5 times its GDP plus dramatic declines in the high rate of savings that has hitherto financed it. In addition to all this, the poorly performing economy is in its fourth year of deflation with little hope of producing a recovery in tax revenues. Indeed, deflation and minimal economic growth have eroded national income- tax revenues to their lowest level since the collapse of the bubble economy.

Takato Nahoko has an extraordinary ability to pick herself up again whatever blows life deals her—including being held captive in Iraq.

The former hostage of the Mujahideen Brigades in Fallujah has already resumed her volunteer work in the Middle East, this time as part of the effort to reconstruct a school in the town west of Baghdad where she was abducted for nine days in April along with freelance photojournalist Koriyama Soichiro and Imai Noriaki, who writes on depleted-uranium weapons issues.

Until recently, the present Bush administration hewed faithfully to its vow never to succumb to North Korea's “nuclear blackmail”. The offer that it presented at the third round of the six-nation talks in June 2004, which promised North Korea energy assistance and improved relations as it disarmed its nuclear weapons, appeared to break with this hard-line approach. In late July 2004, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State John Bolton both visited Northeast Asia to emphasize that North Korea will be surprised to see how much is possible if it simply abandons its nuclear programs; the case of Libya provides a demonstrative example of the rewards that await its cooperation.

Japan Focus introduction: In late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a “hundred head contest” in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline during the Japanese capture and occupation of the city that has come to be known variously as the Nanjing Massacre, the Rape of Nanjing, or simply the Nanjing Incident. The event belongs to a long list of 20th century atrocities, and is emblematic of Chinese suffering at the hands of a barbarous Japanese military as well as of Japanese predations across wartime Asia and the Pacific.

On December 19, 2003, Japanese police arrested 54-year-old rightist Murakami Ichiro, along with five accomplices, charging them with violating the Firearms and Swords Control Law.

Murakami is accused of leading a terror campaign, under the banner of the Kenkoku Giyugun (Nation-Building Volunteer Corps), and the Kokuzoku Seibatsutai, (Volunteer Corps to Punish Traitors), which conducted 23 shooting, arson and bomb attacks on targets across Japan over a one-year period beginning in November 2002.

As the region's economy grows, a common Asian currency will gain favor, says Mr. Yen. ‘The current calm Japan-U.S. economic relationship basically means Tokyo is no longer seen as an economic threat to Washington.’

Sakakibara Eisuke, the man known internationally as Mr. Yen from his time as head of international monetary affairs at the Ministry of Finance, believes that Washington's unilateral action in Iraq has triggered the beginning of the decline of the ‘Pax Americana.’ He foresees that in the mid- to long term, creation of an Asian version of NATO and a common Asian Monetary Unit could become a reality.

Niigata. The Niigata District Court ordered the state and a Japanese company Friday to pay 88 million yen ($760,000) in compensation to Chinese who served as slave-laborers in Japan during World War II.

It is the first time for a Japanese court to order both the state and a firm to pay compensation for wartime slave labor. A Fukuoka District Court ruling in 2002 did uphold a compensation claim, though it only ordered the defendant firm to provide redress.

The diary of Victor Klemperer, who had repeated tragic experiences in the 1930s as a German Jew, provides a valuable record of that epoch. In the diary he frequently asks why “extreme nationalism” has become so rampant in Germany and some other countries at a time when “modern technology annuls all frontiers and distances.” Klemperer remained basically optimistic, and he wrote in late 1938 that nationalism was “already a thing of the past” and that its appearance in such extreme forms was perhaps its “last convulsive uprising”.

America's unprecedented and growing dependence on foreign capital to finance its ballooning trade and budget deficits periodically merits a piece in the business pages. Readers shake their heads, and then forget about it. Even academic economists tend to shy away from the issue, at least in print. Most recognize that a severe crisis is brewing, but they are wary of looking foolish by writing about it and then watching nothing happen in the short run. And plenty of business economists, convinced that America's deficits and their precarious financing are the pillars of a robust economy, rudely dismiss any cautions as hyperventilating. But some staunchly market-oriented analysts are worth heeding, including Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach. During America's stock-price bubble, Roach was one of the first to bell the cat. Being a skeptic in an era of blind faith and herd instinct takes guts, but he turned out to be right. For some months Roach has been warning that the US dependence on the inflow of money from Asian central banks is showing dangerous signs of reaching its limits. He points to the increasing role of central banks as the buyer of last resort, and its worrisome parallel in the Black Monday stock market collapse of October 1987. He's warned for months (http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20040823-mon.html) that a serious crisis is unfolding, especially as it's fed by such ancillary forces as skyrocketing oil prices and the erosion of trust in America. The pangloss crowd dismiss this of course, but reports indicate that Warren Buffet, the world's most savvy investor and its richest man, has already pulled his fortune out of American-dollar investments. If Asian central bankers back off too, we will all painfully relearn that - as economist Herbert Stein used to say - if something is unsustainable, then someday it will stop.

[Japan Focus Introduction: The world has little noted nor long remembered the multinational character of atomic bomb victims including Americans of Japanese ancestry, Chinese, and, by far the largest group, Koreans. Many of the tens of thousands of Korean hibakusha were forced laborers conscripted during the war to work in mines and factories of Japan's leading corporations. Like their brothers conscripted into the Japanese military, and their sisters kidnapped into sexual slavery, Korean forced laborers were cut loose following the end of the war, frequently denied the most rudimentary benefits, shortly deprived of Japanese citizenship and, notably in the case of those who returned to Korea, denied access to government-funded treatment available to hibakusha in Japan. The landmark Supreme Court case described here for the first time held the Japanese government liable for compensation to the Korean atomic victims, At the same time, while severely criticizing the wrongdoing of the Japanese government, it denied government or corporate liability to provide compensation for crimes associated with slave labor on grounds of the statute of limitations and treaty provisions. The present article, and the literature generally, while shedding much light on Japanese war responsibility, make no mention of another unmet responsibility: is it not high time that the United States contribute financial support for the treatment of the surviving hibakusha, whether in Japan, Korea, Taiwan or the United States?]

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were Japan's single greatest catastrophe of World War II. They loom so large in the popular imagination that the events of the previous decade and a half have paled – or faded from view altogether. (Conveniently so, as Asians affected by those events have noted.)

In millions of words and images, eulogizing and otherwise, the bombings have been ritualized and abstracted in that same imagination, their horror endlessly referred to, but less and less clearly felt. Meanwhile, the victims have come to be seen more as park statuary, less as flawed human beings.

Upon his arrival at Seoul's Incheon airport in September 2003, Song Du Yol, professor of philosophy and sociology at Germany's Munster University, was arrested and indicted for offences under South Korea's National Security Law. Prosecutors demanded a fifteen-year sentence. In March 2004 he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. On appeal, this was reduced to three years, suspended for five years, and on 21 July 2004 he was released. Though now free, he is still not completely free from the web of the National Security Law, and a final “not guilty” verdict still lies somewhere in the future.

Three years have passed since the birth of the Koizumi Cabinet. While the Cabinet has been preoccupied with such Koizumi reforms as the privatization of postal services, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has changed character. In discussions over constitutional revision and security policy, it has set a course of prioritizing the state over the individual and abandoning the emphasis on “light armament and prioritizing the economy” that was initiated shortly after the end of the war by Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and was long the heart of LDP politics.

At the very beginning of the long dialogue between thinkers that makes up western political theory there is Plato's Republic, and at the very beginning of the Republic there is this strange and interesting exchange. Socrates asks an old man, Cephalus, if he can define justice. Cephalus says, Of course, justice means to tell the truth and to return anything you have borrowed. Socrates then asks, Suppose you have borrowed a sword from a man, and while the sword is in your possession the man goes mad. In this state of madness (mania) the man comes and asks for his sword. Does justice require that you return it?

The roots of the Japan-China War (1937-45) can be traced back to the surprise attack that Japanese army officers launched, in September 1931, on Chinese forces in Manchuria. Their premeditated coup led to Japan's seizure of the vast, resource-rich region. Initially carried out in the name of self-defense and national security, the Manchurian takeover was later justified as a step toward establishing a new status quo in Asia. A long series of clashes alternating with truces followed between Japanese forces and Chinese un-reconciled to Japanese rule.

Umehara Takeshi, born in Aichi prefecture in 1925, is among Japan's preeminent philosophers and an ancient historian. Since graduating from the philosophy department of Kyoto University in 1948, he has taught at Ritsumeikan University, City University of Art in Kyoto and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies.

The issue of Primer Ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine honoring Japan's war dead has reverberated in Japan's domestic and international politics since the first such visit nearly two decades ago. The criticism of Prime Minister Koizumi's several Yasukuni visits by the Kyoto philosopher Umehara Takeshi makes clear not only the breadth of political opposition to such visits, but the ways in which the issues intersect with century-long conflicts over the relationship between the Japanese state and religion, both Buddhist and Shinto. This essay likewise raises important questions about who should be enshrined in war and peace memorials: should they respect only the dead of one's own nation, as in the case of Yasukuni and Washington's Vietnam Memorial, or should all who died in war on all sides of the conflict, as in the Okinawa Memorial?

The images and references to Pearl Harbor seem to be all around us as the anniversary of the attack looms. They are instantly recognizable. But what do they mean?

The analogies came easily after September 11, 2001, when newspaper headlines picked up the cry of “Infamy!” and President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary that “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” As historians who focus on popular memory have insisted, we experience the present through the lens of the past – and we shape our understanding of the past through the lens of the present.