Thousands of barrels of Agent Orange were unloaded on Okinawa Island and stored at the port of Naha, and at the U.S. military's Kadena and Camp Schwab bases between 1965 and 1966, an American veteran who served in Okinawa claims.

In a Jacksonville Florida interview in early April with The Japan Times and Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV network based in Okinawa, former infantryman Larry Carlson, 67, also said that Okinawan stevedores were exposed to the highly toxic herbicide as they labored in the holds of ships, and that he witnessed it being sprayed at Kadena Air Base.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the fate of nuclear power appeared to hang in the balance as generating states scrambled to conduct safety checks on their existing nuclear reactors and newly-restarted nuclear programmes. A number of these states have since elected to phase out their nuclear power plants.

Fresh Currents: Japan's flow from a nuclear past to a renewable future is an e-book edited by Eric Johnston in cooperation with The Kyoto Journal that considers the possibility of replacing the Faustian bargain of a nuclear- and-fossil-fuel powered Japan with a renewable energy future.

Regions are socially constructed areas defined by state, supra-state, and societal agents, with shifting territorial, economic, and sociopolitical parameters. In contrast to the dominant literature, which has focused on states and state-constructed regions, we assess multiple forces in defining, constructing, and deconstructing regional formations in an epoch in which competing definitions of, and approaches to, region and nation challenge the reigning order (Katzenstein and Shiraishi 1997; Gamble and Payne 1996; Hamanaka 2009). Political, geostrategic, economic, social, and cultural factors may all shape a regional order and its position in the world economy. In light of competing claims of national, regional, and global forces, we inquire into the possibility of contemporary region formation that does not rest on the hegemony of a single nation or power, that is, an imperium whether formal or informal, and which serves, in varying degrees, the interests of the nations and peoples that comprise it. In particular, consider the interplay between economic nationalism and region formation, including China, Japan, Korea, and the United States.

By the beginning of 2013, Japan is relying on just two nuclear reactors to fulfill the nation's enormous demand for electricity. There is a strong push to re-start the remaining reactors from Keidanren, the leading business association, and from the electric power companies, while the New Abe administration has already signaled its intention to review the nuclear power program. It is not so much the revelations about earthquake faults and other dangers; there is something wrong with the entire chain of reasoning driving the new energy agenda. This raises an important question. Are the plants really safe? Is even one of them safe? This article reviews the safety situation of every one of Japan's 54 reactors and assesses the logic of restart.

Despite the description of the March 11, 2011 disaster as “outside safety expectations”, there were multiple warnings from Japanese scientists, writers, activists, and international bodies that a large earthquake and tsunami could cripple Japan's nuclear plants. This article examines how assumptions of nuclear safety remained strong in Japan from the 1950s until the 2000s, even after numerous accidents that demonstrated inadequate oversight, and ties these assumptions to technological nationalism at the heart of Japan's conservative political culture.

Attention in Japan and elsewhere has focused recently on the seaside village of Henoko (Ryukyuan: Hinuku) in northern Okinawa where a powerful protest movement has stymied the Japanese and U.S. governments from building an offshore air base. Attempting to ameliorate outrage in Okinawa after three U.S. servicemen raped a twelve-year-old schoolgirl in 1995, the governments in Tokyo and Washington announced an agreement in 1996 to close Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, located in the middle of Ginowan City. However, the agreement stipulated that a “replacement facility” be built in Okinawa “within five to seven years.” Yet, after more than fifteen years and numerous bi-lateral declarations reiterating the two governments’ determination to build the base, construction has yet to begin. In 2006 they announced a related agreement to transfer 8,600 of the 18,000 Marines in Okinawa and their 9,000 dependents to Guam, but this is conditioned on relocation of Futenma MCAS to Henoko and remains on hold.

While a great deal of attention focuses on the chain of islands dividing the East China Sea from the Pacific Ocean between Japan's Kyushu and Taiwan, it tends to focus heavily on those that are part of Okinawa prefecture and to neglect those in the northern part of he chain that are close to Kyushu and administratively part of Kagoshima rather than Okinawa prefecture. Mage is one such. Mage (literally: Horsehair) island sits well north of the line that separates Kagoshima from Okinawa prefecture. It is not Okinawa but is worthy of attention because it shows the same general trends as does Okinawa - of “remote island” blues (especially depopulation), dependence on whims of the central government, and the insidious workings of a military base mentality (even though not one soldier has yet set foot on it).

On 16 March 2012, North Korea announced that it would launch an earth observation satellite named Kwangmyongsong (Lodestar) 3, aboard an Unha carrier rocket sometime between the hours of 7 am and noon on a day between 12 and 16 April, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of its state founder, Kim Il Sung, and the attainment of “strong and prosperous” status by the country. The launch from a base in the north of the country close to the border with China would be pointed south, dropping off its first phase rocket into the Yellow Sea about 160 kms to the southwest of South Korea's Byeonsan peninsula and the second into the ocean about 140 kilometres east of Luzon in the Philippines. Due notice of the impending launch was issued to the appropriate international maritime, aviation and telecommunication bodies (IMO, ICAO and ITU) and, to mark the occasion, North Korea announced that it would welcome scientific observers and journalists. The 15 April date, in the 100th year according to the calendar of North Korea, has long been declared a landmark in the history of the state, and the launch seems designed to be its climactic event.

On August 1991, Korean former “comfort women,” (women who were forced to serve as sex workers for the Imperial Japanese Army) including Kim Hak-sun, the first to speak publically about her experience, began to raise their voices. Before then, the issue had only been discussed quietly in postwar Japanese society. Previous testimonies had come from soldiers, partly in the form of romanticized memoirs of their time spent with the women.

One important new witness is Mizuki Shigeru, a leading Japanese manga artist, who provided detailed descriptions of a “comfort station,” that is, a military brothel, in his book “Soin Gyokusai Seyo [All of You Shall Die for Honor]” (14-15.) based on his personal wartime experience. In his afterword he wrote, “I can't help but feel irrational resentment when I write war chronicles. Maybe the spirits of the war dead make me feel that way.” There Mizuki told of a soldier who shouted, “Thirty seconds for each!” and another who said, looking at the long queue in front of the station, “Hey Sis, about 70 more to go. Be patient.” This important historical testimony reveals how the Japanese army set up comfort stations in the very front lines at that time. (See Matthew Penney, War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki Shigeru)

For the media, time is of the essence in a news story. The March 11, 2011 disaster attracted thousands of reporters and photographers from around the world. There was a brief deluge of Japanese and international media coverage on the first anniversary, this spring. Now the journalists have packed up and gone and by accident or design Japan's government seems to be mobilizing its agenda, aware that it is under less scrutiny.

The press pack has disappeared like a ghost since this April. The influx of foreign media has suddenly stopped, as I can attest since I worked as a translator and aid to many foreign journalists in the year up to the 3.11 anniversary in 2012. Using the keywords ‘Fukushima’ and ‘nuclear plant’ in Japanese to scour the Nikkei TELECOM 21 search engine shows 9,981 domestic news items in April 2012, just over half the 17,272 stories the previous month.

Daffodils that bloom along the Cape Echizen cliffs overlooking the Sea of Japan are wild. With their sword-shaped slender leaves and lovely white or yellow blossoms, these plants convey a sense of trim tidiness that makes them stand out among rare winter flowers and attracts many admirers. Perhaps because they are wild, these Echizen daffodils look tougher at a glance than their counterparts grown in city greenhouses. The green of their leaves too is a shade darker. Tough as they are – perhaps because they grow on windswept hills pounded by roaring waves – they look all the lovelier for being wild. Nowadays, when trains arrive at Takefu, Fukui, and other stations along the Hokuriku main line near Cape Echizen, so-called flower girls with pretty golden baskets stroll from window to window selling daffodils in small bunches, bulbs and all. They have recently made this wild flower the “regional flower” of Fukui Prefecture.

A massive decontamination effort is underway in Fukushima Prefecture to lower radiation levels in areas affected by nuclear fallout. The program, worth billions of US dollars, is presented by the government as a necessary step to allow the early return of some 160,000 residents displaced by the crisis. But authorities have yet to address a number of key issues, including the long-term storage of contaminated materials, criticism about the effectiveness of cleanup operations, and residents’ concerns about their immediate future.

“Yoshiharu Tsuge is arguably Japan's premier eccentric manga artist… he has probably had more written about him than he has himself created.” (Schodt 1996: 200).

Can there be any other manga artist who has been so lavishly praised in the English language and yet been so little read or understood? To date only three short comics by Tsuge Yoshiharu have been translated into English (Tsuge 1985, 1990, 2003a), a few more into French (Tsuge 2004), and outside the Japanese-reading world, even the most avid manga fans have little idea what Tsuge is all about, beyond a vague awareness that he is difficult, dark and perhaps, surrealistic. He is typically accorded a few paragraphs in general surveys of postwar manga, but there is only a single short paper devoted specifically to his work published in English (Marechal 2005).

The emergence of a modern Japan in the late 1800s involved struggles to define what it meant to “be modern” and what it meant to “be Japanese.” Vivian Blaxell's essay explores this issue of identity formation through a focus on the transformation of the island that we now know as Hokkaidō. The term “Hokkaidō” dates to 1869 when it was so named by the Meiji government. These northern reaches used to be known as Ezochi and were inhabited by the Ainu, indigenous people who considered themselves distinct from “the Japanese” (wajin) who populated the lands to their south. Blaxell examines the incorporation of Ezo-turned-Hokkaidō into modern Japan, a process that she frames as Japan's first colonial acquisition, with particular attention to the built and natural environments. While considering Blaxell's argument about how ideas of modernity and national identity were revealed and extended by the manipulation of space, note the various kinds of space discussed in the essay and how Blaxell approaches and views what “being Japanese” meant for Hokkaidō.

The governments of both mainland China and of Taiwan have turned their civilisation’ into a national heritage, in different but often converging ways. But civilisation was transmitted before without its being a tradition’ (chuantong) or a material and non-material heritage in the UNESCO-speak that prevails. Sinocentric views of civilisation speak a language of national pride and exaggeration of longevity and continuity, just as do Eurocentric and other nationalist views of their civilisations. All these claims need to be taken with at least pinches of salt. This article will be a handful of salt. Taking a more dispassionate and distanced concept of civilisation, which most importantly does not judge from the standpoint of any one civilisation and certainly not just from a civilisational elite in pronouncing what is and is not civilised but includes all ranks in a civilisational hierarchy as subjects of that civilisation and of aspirations within it, I shall seek answers to what has happened to civilisation in China under its present government. I will focus on the People's Republic of China.

Muto Ruiko is a long-time antinuclear activist based in Fukushima. She is also one of 1,324 Fukushima residents who filed a criminal complaint in June 2012 pressing charges against Tepco executives and government officials.

This article introduces Muto's activism on nuclear energy, her life before and after the Fukushima Dai'ichi disaster, and her recent effort to mobilize citizens for the criminal complaint. An English translation of Muto's speech at the University of Chicago on May 5, 2012, follows.

On 11 September 2012, in a conference room in a hotel in Fukushima city, Professor Yamashita Shunichi presented the latest results of the Fukushima Prefectural People's Health Management Survey, launched in June 2011. Twenty-seven people were in the audience, mainly journalists. The CRMS (Citizen's Radiation Measuring Station network) was one of two citizen groups present on that day.

This paper documents the fact that distributed power is a rapidly expanding and quickly evolving market with important implications for Japanese and global energy futures. It also shows that Japan has an excellent opportunity to grow a robust and sustainable business area that includes primary, secondary and tertiary industries. Distributed power can improve equity, local resilience, and build a more competitive export sector. But Japan may be handicapped by Galapagos features as well as the capacity of vested interests to block progress in power deregulation and other aspects that favour the diffusion of distributed power and efficiency. These handicaps may become even more pronounced after the December 16 general election, which is shaping up to be - at least in part - a contest over whether to stick with centralized power in the hands of Tepco and other giant utilities or accelerate the distribution of opportunities. The election seems likely to bring on even worse political confusion and gridlock than Japan endures at present, which will almost certainly advantage the status quo.

However one feels about the death penalty, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that its application in Japan is arbitrary. At a mid-April symposium hosted by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and the EU Institute in Japan at Waseda University in Tokyo, former Justice Minister Hiraoka Hideo publicly denounced his successor Ogawa Toshio ‘s decision to have three men on death row hanged on March 29, saying that the government needs to discuss the matter more before continuing with executions. The fact that Hiraoka on principle did not sign any execution orders during his tenure while Ogawa, in accordance with a very different set of values, approved three soon after assuming office shows that choices regarding life-and-death are governed by personal whim. Don't forget, these two men belong to the same political party, the ruling DPJ.