Stuart Levey, who helped put the US Treasury at the center of US national security strategy and policy-making during a career that spanned the Bush and Obama administrations, has announced his retirement.

The policy-making legacy he leaves behind, central to the enhanced unilateral use of financial and economic sanctions against “rogue” states by the Bush and Obama administrations, underscores the need for a broader understanding of the ways in which US global policy functions. Specifically, at a time when the US faces costly failures on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, and growing social unrest across the Middle East and Africa, its hidden financial weapons retain their near mystical power to coerce recalcitrant nations.

The Korean War is multiple wars. Not only is it a war that began on 25 June 1950, it is also a conflict that is rooted in Korea's colonial experiences, postcolonial desires and frustrations, and interventions and partitions imposed by outside forces. In South Korea, the war is a site of contestation: Which war should be remembered and how should it be remembered? The site has been overwhelmed by Manichean official discourse that pits evil communists against innocent Koreans and that seeks to silence other memories that do not conform. But the hegemonic project remains unfinished in the face of the resiliency embodied in the survivors who have withstood “triple killings” by the state. The historical significance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea (TRCK), lies in its success in bringing back to life the voices of the silenced that complicate the hegemonic memory of the war as yugio, the “June 25th war.” At the same time, the Commission embodies the structural dilemma that the effort to give voice to the silenced has turned to the state to redress the state's wrongdoings. The TRCK as such stands on the problematic boundary between violence and post-violence, insecurity and security, exception and normalcy. Truth and reconciliation, and human security, are perhaps located in a process of defining and redefining the boundary. The historical contention over the Korean War constitutes such a political struggle for the future.

We've recently covered here the accelerated construction of six new US heliports in the village of Takae, and a new fence on Henoko beach on Okinawa. This, despite the apparently more conciliatory tone on base issues in Japan's southernmost prefecture struck last month by US Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Tokyo's outspoken governor Ishihara Shintaro says his country, which suffered history's only nuclear attack, should build nuclear weapons to counter the threat from fast-rising China.

In an interview with The Irish Times, Ishihara said Japan could develop nukes within a year and send a strong message to the world. “All our enemies: China, North Korea and Russia - all close neighbors - have nuclear weapons. Is there another country in the world in a similar situation?”

Worried by a US political climate that in some respects bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the fear mongering that 70 years ago led to the forced relocation of more than 100,000 Japanese American citizens from the west coast and southwest to internment camps located in the American interior, some Japanese Americans are speaking out against the US Congressional hearing planned for March 10 by New York Representative Peter King to examine the alleged “radicalization of the American Muslim community.”

Tokyo is crawling unsteadily back on its feet. Its buildings are intact, its vast transport network is creaking back to life, cellphones work again, patchily. Planes land in the main international airports but traffic crawls through the streets.

After years of warnings about the “North Korean nuclear threat” now suddenly the entire Northeast Asian region is subjected to the “Japan nuclear threat,” just as North Korea has been warning for years. Apart from the Fukushima meltdown risk, how safe is Japan's plutonium mountain, accumulating in the waste piles and underground parking places outside reactors up and down the country, 50 odd tons of radioactive sludge, and at the vast repositories at Rokkasho, just up the road from Fukushima, which has a planned reprocessing capacity of 800 tons of spent fuel per year, including eight tons of plutonium?

It was once a family house in this northeastern corner of Miyagi Prefecture. Mum would have cooked dinner on the kitchen stove. Children may have played video games in the front room, facing the Pacific Ocean. Now all that's left of the house is its bare concrete base and a few scattered belongings: the shreds of a kimono and a child's schoolbag.

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) is asking an important question about Japan's nuclear crisis that seems to have been ignored by the media and in announcements from the Japanese government and Japan's nuclear power industry: What is happening with the spent fuel pools located at the top of the buildings housing the Unit 1 and Unit 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant facility? Both reactor buildings have lost their upper structures due to explosions possibly caused by a hydrogen gas build-up (Unit 1 on March 12, Unit 3 on March 14).

Since the 9.0 quake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11 and the situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant rapidly degenerated, Fukushima residents and politicians, those most afflicted by the current crisis, have criticized the lack of information provided by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the government. Prefectures with a concentration of nuclear power plants like Fukui and diverse citizens' groups have also sounded off, condemning the lack of information and delay in releasing critical facts to the public. A particular concern is that the government initially left far too much up to the company, was slow in establishing a headquarters to coordinate joint response, and initially accepted TEPCOs vague description of the situation and assurances, many of which have since turned out to be suspect. Tabloid Sponichi gives a credible account of an exasperated Prime Minister Kan Naoto blowing up at TEPCO representatives asking, “Just what the hell is going on!?” (一体どうなっているんだ) on the 15th. This is a question and, indeed, a tone shared widely among the general public. Jiji now reports that Kan subsequently continued his private criticism of TEPCO, accusing them of having a “very shallow sense of urgency”, even on the 16th as the situation at the site deteriorated. The popular press continues to take shots at the “irresponsibility” and lack of transparency of TEPCO higher ups while nuclear energy specialists share their criticisms with the public. Scientists and even amateurs with Geiger counters, many of whom are communicating through blogs and social media, a dimension of civil society that has proven enormously important in the aftermath of the earthquake, have worked to make independent information available. In some cases, this has assuaged public fears, in others, however, by calling into question bland official nostrums and presenting evidence of a deteriorating situation at the plants, it has simultaneously increased public understanding of the evolving situation and elevated fears.

Tokyo is crawling unsteadily back on its feet. Its buildings are intact, its vast transport network is creaking back to life, cellphones work again, patchily. Planes land in the main international airports but traffic crawls through the streets.

The exceptions can be brutal, such as the Twitter comments by Alec Sulkin and Gilbert Godfried, but overall, online and print media have conveyed an incredible outpouring of sympathy for Japan in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake. This trend seems particularly pronounced among Japan's neighbors, many of whom have often been at odds with it over historical and territorial issues.

Assessing the Economic Aftershocks of Japan's March 11 Earthquake Stephen S. Roach warns us not to be complacent about the effects of the March 11 earthquake in Japan on the global economy. After outlining a “narrow view” based on a declining global profile for the Japanese economy – a shrinking percentage of both global exports and GDP, a rising China, and an irreplaceable position in only a handful of critical upstream industrial components – Roach urges us not to accept the “superficial” conclusions that might flow from this view: that Japan “doesn't really matter any more” and that disruptions to global economic activity from the March 11 earthquake and its aftermath will be “transitory” and “small.”

Although people can be educated in a variety of ways, experience is a particularly effective teacher. Consider the Japanese, who today are certainly learning how dangerous nuclear power can be.

Of course, the Japanese people also have had a disastrous experience with nuclear weapons—not only in 1945, when the U.S. government destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, but in 1954, when a U.S. government H-bomb test showered a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon #5, with deadly radioactive fallout, and a vast nuclear disarmament movement began.

As the crisis in Fukushima grows more serious (see reports here, here, and here), international scientific organizations have begun painting an increasingly dire picture of radiation releases from the plant.

The Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics reports here on March 24 that the dispersion of certain radioactive compounds are approaching those emitted in the Chernobyl disaster. The data on cesium and iodine emissions are drawn from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna: “The three day emissions from Fukushima of Iodine-131 would be about 20% of the total Chernobyl emissions, while those of Cesium-137 would be between 20 and 60% of the total Chernobyl emissions, depending on whether one believes in the different Iodine to Caesium ratio measured in Japan.” The Institute forecasts, moreover, that the winds, which have for the most part been taking the radioactivity out to sea, were predicted to shift to carry the poisoned air inland, as it has on a few earlier occasions.

Tetsuo Sakuma has loaded his small pickup with all it can carry. There's not much of value: a television, some books, boxes of clothes, snatched in haste from a home he may never sleep in again. “We hope to come back, but it's difficult to tell when,” he says.

The Fukushima plant workers have been widely lionized but who they are, why they work under such desperate conditions, and how they are being treated is less discussed. On the 29th, however, the Tokyo Shimbun published an article that sheds light on some unpleasant realities behind the heroic “Fukushima Fifty” (workers at the plant really number in the hundreds) story.