To top it off last week, the Japanese Defense Minister threatened to fire live (albeit tracer) rounds on Chinese aircraft which continue to buzz the disputed Senkaku islands - 400 km west of Naha, the Okinawan capital.

It was against this drumbeat of resurgent Japanese militarism that more than 140 Okinawan civic representatives made a historic trip to Tokyo on Sunday. This was the first time since Okinawa reverted to Japanese control in 1972 that leaders from each of Okinawa's 41 municipalities have visited the nation's capital - and despite the bitter cold, they were met with a warm reception by 4000 Tokyoites at a rally in Hibiya Park.

Is Makoto Aida a misogynist? It seems a fair question. Among his cheerfully scattershot collection at the Mori Art Museum is a series of manga-style paintings called ‘Dog,’ showing naked young women with severed and bandaged limbs being led around on a leash. A 62-minute video depicts the artist tediously masturbating in front of the kanji characters “beautiful young girl.” In “Blender,” he uses more naked girls to make a bloody milkshake. What was the thinking there?

As someone who cares deeply about many Japanese people and learns from them, I am most concerned by Japanese voters' decision to return Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to office because of his lengthy record of denigrating the histories of those who suffered under Japan's attempts to conquer and control much of Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. Abe has an equally vibrant record of denigrating those who give voice to these histories today. In response to the prime minister's first few weeks in office, Australia's former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans pointedly noted that it was “the responsibility of statesmen, if they are to deserve the name… to take the politically uncomfortable high ground and then bring their publics along.” With Abe we have it the other way around; he drags Japan down.

Two years after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered the planet's worst's nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, journalists are still often asked: is the crisis over? One plausible reply might be that it has just begun.

It is just over two years since Japan's quake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. It was Japan's 3rd nuclear catastrophe, at level 7 highest on the scale and on a par with Chernobyl, although, unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was self-inflicted. The triple event left 20,000 dead, 315,000 refugees, and a devastated swathe of productive farm and fish country and its towns and villages that will take decades, at least, to recover.

In a ritual that has become as predictable as the tides, environmentalists have returned home after trading blows with Japan's whalers in freezing Antarctic waters. Sea Shepherd, the US-based anti-whaling group, says it has again successfully disrupted the Japanese fleet's bid to harpoon about 1,000 whales, sending it back to port with probably a third of that number.

“While it is crucial to explicitly define and communicate the acts or damage that we would find unacceptable, we should not be too specific about our responses. Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US might do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool – headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially ”out of control“ can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.” Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger called this the Madman Strategy. For nuclear weapons to serve as a deterrent, it's not enough simply to possess them. The problem is, it's difficult to believe that a person of ordinary human feeling or rationality would actually use them. A first strike would be a moral abomination, and would also mean abandoning the policy of deterrence; a second strike would mean that deterrence had failed, so that its only motive would be vengeance. For nuclear weapons to be an effective deterrent, it's best for a government to persuade adversaries that its leaders are crazy enough to use them – as the document says, “out of control”, “irrational and vindictive”.

In the first months of 2013, the rhetoric of the Zainichi tokken wo yurusanai shimin no kai (Citizens' League to Deny Foreigners Special Rights) or Zaitokukai has turned more and more extreme. The above quotes are representative of Zaitokukai slogans and placards in 2013. Now there are signs that anti-racism protestors and ordinary citizens are fighting back.

On April 28, a “Ceremony to Commemorate the Anniversary of Japan's Restoration of Sovereignty and Return to the International Community” was held in Tokyo. As the Abe government makes plans to revise the 1947 constitution, this celebration of the anniversary of the end of the American-led occupation of Japan in 1952 took on a special significance. This brainchild of Abe and other far right conservatives is more than just an attempt at a Japanese “Independence Day”. It casts the Constitution as a foreign imposition and frames postwar reforms as an affront to Japan's sovereignty and traditions.

The recent controversy over Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru's statement that the wartime comfort women system was “necessary to maintain discipline” and “needed to provide rest to … brave soldiers” shows that historical revisionism in Japan's public sphere is by no means limited to Abe Shinzo's Liberal Democratic Party. Abe is known to hold revisionist views and a firm belief that the current approach to history in Japanese education is “masochistic”, but since the December 2012 election, he and other LDP elites have tried (not always successfully) to maintain voter support by skirting controversy and focusing on the “economy first” approach of “Abenomics” which has spurred a stock market boom and proven popular with the public.

On May 27, Anand Grover, Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council, released a report on his November 2012 mission to Fukushima. The UN Council did their job – to protect – or at least clearly expressed their intention to do so. This article outlines the main conclusions of Grover's sharply critical report which is available for download here.

In the last several months, the Abe Shinzo government has favored a rhetoric of economic revival by using nuclear power at home and selling nuclear technology abroad. It appears, however, that only a minority of the Japanese public supports these plans. As the Asahi has reported, polls show that 58% of voters are opposed to Abe's nuclear plans with only 28% responding that the government should go ahead with restarts. Similarly, a poll carried out by Jiji News Service revealed that 58% “do not support” nuclear exports with only 24% in favor. With news of a new leak or system failure at the site of the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup coming every few weeks, it is little wonder that the population is skeptical about the safety and utility of nuclear power.

During the Battle of Okinawa, thousands of civilians were caught in the crossfire as U.S. and Japanese troops waged one of the final - and bloodiest - fights of World War Two. The combat lasted for more than three months, devastated the south and centre of the island and forced starving refugees to flee to the relative safety of the north. There, they turned to the place which had always sustained them during difficult times - the sea.

The pain of Okinawa's main island, forced to accept US military installations nearly seven decades after the end of the war, is relatively well-known. It took many years for it to resolve the splits and tensions created by base imposition and to adopt a united stance of opposition to any new base and demand for withdrawal of the US Marine Corps' Osprey vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. A similar pattern – imposition, split of local communities, heavy pressure from Tokyo – is being repeated in the islands deep in the East China Sea.

The Japanese House of Councillors election will be held on July 21, 2013. It now seems certain that PM Abe Shinzo's Liberal Democratic Party will follow its landslide win in the December 2012 House of Representatives election with another overwhelming victory. This essay summarizes the results of recent Japanese opinion polls in order to identify major election issues and assess what it is about the new iteration of Abe's LDP that has made them so popular with the public.

Miyazaki Hayao, director of famous animated films such as My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001), is one of the most popular and influential media figures in Japan. The premiere of a new Miyazaki film is a major event and on July 20, Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises), his first project since the 2008 hit Ponyo (an eco-fable discussed here by Susan Napier), arrives in theatres across Japan.

On July 18, Japan's Softbank announced that it has formed a partnership with US Bloom Energy to enter the Japanese market and proceed from there through Asia. The good news comes at a time when an election victory prompts PM Abe Shinzo to embark on a bold and risky agenda of constitutional revision, military expansion and heightened conflict with China. Back in the early 2000s, Softbank CEO Son Masayoshi blazed a trail that led Japan to having the among the fastest and cheapest internet services in the world. Abe and Son appear to represent polar opposites in their approach to development, independence and power. In this short piece, I argue that while analysts have been dazzled by Abe's electoral triumph, Son's resilient and internationalist road could shape a very different and positive Japanese economic, technological and energy future than that envisaged by the PM.

The September 7 decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award the 2020 games to Tokyo is potentially of monumental importance. That significance is not merely due to the fraught geopolitics of the so-called pivot to the Asia-Pacific or the collective angst of all those analysts waiting for Abenomics arrows.

I am an admirer. I love your beauty and your strength, your serenity and your energy, your creativity and your traditions. Beyond that, I am deeply grateful to you for providing me with at least part of the education and experience that allowed me to follow a diplomatic career, one it is true which is over.

Long ago in my teenage years, nothing gave me more joy than reading. Finally the day came though when I wanted to have the type of adventures I had been reading about, so I dropped out of college and hitchhiked around the world. It was in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan that I met a young Japanese musician and reporter who was writing about nomadic peoples. Because I spoke a little Farsi I was able to help him negotiate a price for a horse and guide that was agreeable to all. That was the beginning of my Japanese karma. In fact we later met again by chance in Istanbul. At that point we decided to return to Europe together, where he had once performed as a musician and still seemed to have quite a few girlfriends. When it was time for him to return to Japan he invited me to come along. I was though at the moment deeply involved in learning French with a beautiful young woman, and said if he didn’t mind I would try and come later.

On August 9, 1945, President Truman, who had just returned to Washington from the Potsdam Conference, addressed the American people in a radio report: