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.

The two questions Japanese people most often ask about the homeless people they see around them are “Why are there any homeless people here in Japan?” and “Why are they nearly all men?” Answering those two simple questions will, I believe, lead us in fruitful directions for understanding both homelessness and masculinity in contemporary Japan.

The first question is not quite as naive as it might sound. After all, article twenty-five of Japan's constitution clearly promises that “All people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living,” and the 1952 Livelihood Protection Law is there to see that the promise is kept. For many years the government refused to address the issue of homelessness on grounds that it was already covered by existing welfare provisions. The second question, usually based on the evidence of visual observation, may be slightly more naive than it sounds, since homeless women may have good reason for staying away from areas where there are many homeless men and thus are not necessarily immediately noticeable. Nonetheless, there is abundant quantitative data suggesting that at least 95% of homeless people, in the narrowlydefined sense of people not living in housing or shelter, are men. Men are I believe more likely than women to become homeless in all industrialized countries, but nowhere is the imbalance quite as striking as in Japan.

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.

Oguma Eiji, a sociologist from Keio University, has emerged as one of the most astute commentators on the shifts that have occurred since the 3.11 crises. As an engaged intellectual with a respected history of solid scholarship, he has repeatedly done two things few others have: link the events since 3.11 to larger patterns of political and economic transformation in post-war Japan, and situate this moment in Japan in relation to similar moments of political crisis beyond Japan.

“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).

Scholars and journalists in Korea and the United States have worked hard over the past 15 years to bring to light the mass killings of civilians that occurred during the Korean War. These stories, including that of the strafing of civilians at No Gun Ri, have challenged the hegemonic narrative of the ‘good war’ that has dominated south Korean and US accounts of this tragic past. In the following revised excerpt of a chapter from his new book, Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), Canadian historian John Price documents the story of Mr. Shin Hyun-Chan, a survivor of a Canadian war crime committed during the Korean war. In investigating the Shin case the author uncovered numerous other war crimes committed by Canadian forces in Korea, including rape and murder. In almost all cases where the perpetrators faced court-martials, they were found guilty but then exonerated upon return to Canada. Reporters in Korea at the time pointed to racism as endemic and a contributing factor. But the Canadian military, supported by religious leaders, refuted the accusations and buried the stories. The case reveals much about the politics of impunity as practiced by both the American and Canadian military during and after the war. And of the politics of impunity wherever Status of Forces Agreements protect foreign military forces from prosecution on the ground. As in the US, the Canadian military continues to refuse to accept responsibility for this and other war crimes. Sixty years later, however, the truth is finally coming out. Mr. Shin has recently retained legal counsel to press his case with the Canadian government. The case illustrates the importance of expanding research on war crimes committed during the Korea War beyond the US and South Korean archives. It also raises important dimensions of law and justice in an era in which Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA) insulate US and other foreign military forces from domestic courts where soldiers are stationed on foreign soil, whether in war or peace.

On the surface the story is simple enough. Japan's most powerful and controversial politician has done it again: shaking up the party political world by leaving, and perhaps breaking up, the DPJ, Japan's ruling party. And that because things did not go his way. The Japanese media were, predictably, ready with their favorite epithet, ‘the destroyer’, and with quotes from political commentators that this time his star may be truly fading because the perennial polls show that the people have had it with him.

On the occasion of its centennial, the Russo-Japanese War drew great attention among historians who organized many symposia and published numerous studies. What have been the recent perspectives, debates and insights on the historical impact of the Russo-Japanese War on the imperial world order, evolution of international society, and global intellectual history? Gerhard Krebs provides a comprehensive historiographical essay introducing the major works published in the last ten years on the world-historical impact of the Russo-Japanese War, including works in Japanese, Russian, English and German.

After decades of preoccupation with traditional security issues, trade, finance and investment have become key areas of concern to policy makers in Asia, broadly defined to include South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. Whereas in the past, governments in Asia applied a traditional understanding of security, today ‘economic security’ is part of a broadened concept of security that most countries in Asia apply (Pempel 2010a: 213). Of course, international trade and the efforts to deepen intra-regional trade integration are part of this process.

“We'd like to cut down the trees with nature in mind.” So declared Suzuki Takehiko, director of the Shōsenkyō Kankō Kyōkai (Shōsen Gorge Tourism Association), in August 2008. Part of Japan's Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park, Shōsen Gorge has for decades been labeled the country's “most beautiful valley.” Years of deforesting meant that when the park was founded in 1950, little stood between tourists and the majestic rock formations for which the gorge is most famous. But by the turn of the twenty-first century visitors were frustrated that trees were now blocking much of the view. The park's laissez-faire approach to the valley's vegetation did not threaten its ecosystems—trees are hardly invasive species there. But this economically disadvantaged part of Japan depended on a steady stream of tourists who wanted to see cliffs, not trees; some even claimed that the trees were depriving the valley of its beauty. So Suzuki argued that “trees” (part of nature) should be felled so that people could have a better view of “nature” (the gorge). Despite Suzuki's appeal, most of the trees still stand and in fact are highlighted in the park's promotional materials. The Shōsen Gorge Tourism Association's website features images of colorful trees growing beside, and out of, majestic crags; in some pictures trees effectively obscure the cliffs. A banner running near the top of the website declares Shōsen Gorge the most beautiful in Japan, full of the [many] wonders of nature (Nihon ichi no keikokubi o hokoru “Shōsenkyō” wa shizen no subarashisa ga ippai desu).

On July 7-8, 2012, a two-day mass rock concert called No Nukes 2012 was held in the Makuhari Messe Convention Center in Chiba, near Tokyo. The organizer was Sakamoto Ryuichi, member of the groundbreaking Japanese technopop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) and Academy Award-winning composer. Profits from the concert were donated to Sayonara Genpatsu 1000 Man Nin Akushon (Citizens’ Committee for the 10 Million People's Petition to say Goodbye to Nuclear Power Plants), an antinuclear group which Sakamoto has been backing, along with Nobel Prize-winning author Oe Kenzaburo and others. The concert featured performances by 18 groups, including pioneering electronic groups Kraftwerk and YMO as well as rock bands Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Acidman, and others.

German sociologist Ulrich Beck writes that Japan has become part of the ‘World Risk Society’ as a result of the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. By World Risk Society he means a society threatened by such things as nuclear accidents, climate change, and the global financial crisis, presenting a catastrophic risk beyond geographical, temporal, national and social boundaries. According to Beck, such risk is an unfortunate by-product of modernity, and poses entirely new challenges to our existing institutions, which attempt to control it using current, known means. As Gavan McCormack points out, ‘Japan, as one of the most successful capitalist countries in history, represents in concentrated form problems facing contemporary industrial civilization as a whole’. The nuclear, social, and institutional predicaments it now faces epitomise the negative consequences of intensive modernisation.

Precis: Using Kawaguchi Kaiji's graphic novel Jipangu (2001-2009) as an example, this essay explores a horizon of historical consciousness revealed by alternative histories of the Asia-Pacific War. Alternative histories of the war attempt to remove the stigma of defeat but also betray the extent to which contemporary Japan is unimaginable without the experience of defeat. Jipangu suggests a limit to the alternative pasts imaginable in early-twenty- first-century Japan.

This essay investigates the relationship between art and politics by exploring the wartime activities of a Japanese photographer, Natori Yōnosuke, during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). Natori was an active participant in the production of propaganda photos and photo magazines that were aimed particularly at reaching non-Japanese speaking audiences, such as different groups of Asians living in Asia or Americans and Europeans in North America and Europe. Germer analyzes the political significance of Natori's aesthetics, his wartime political agency in China, his activities in the contexts of tourism and imperialism, and his direct involvement in the state's cultural propaganda. The author focuses on Natori's political agency as it is reflected in three particular areas: his creative work, his visual strategies, and the management of magazines that he edited.

Germer introduces some of the representative state-sponsored photo magazines in which Natori was directly involved, such as Shanghai (1937), which justified Japan's invasion in China, and Manchukuo (1940), which represented Japan's rule of Manchuria as benevolent. This essay discusses the format, visual strategies, and the management of the state-sponsored magazines and the private Nippon; and problematizes Natori's postwar silence about his wartime activities. This essay includes images of photo magazines and provides Natori's views on the role of photographs in propagating wartime ideologies.

Japan has had a love-hate relationship with its outlaws. Medieval seafaring bands freelanced as mercenaries for the warlords or provided security for trading vessels; when not needed they were hunted as pirates. Horse-thieves and mounted raiders sold their skills to military households in return for a degree of tolerance toward their banditry. In the 1600s urban street gangs policed their own neighborhoods while fighting with samurai in the service of the Shogun. Feudal lords paid gang bosses to supply day laborers for construction projects.

Austria is a great country for many reasons, but with just 8.4 million citizens and locked in the center of the European continent, it is hardly a global player. However, even here the death of Kim Jong Il, the details of the mourning procedure, and the assignment of titles and functions to his son Kim Jong Un, were reported by almost all media as top news.

This tells us something about globalization and our own profession. News is being produced and fed by a few globally operating press agencies that make hundreds of national media outlets look like clones with minor local mutations. It also shows how visually oriented the consumption of news has become. We have reason to believe that without the particular features of Kim Jong Il's appearance, and without the TV broadcasts of thousands of ecstatic mourners [Erich Weingartner: The reality of tears], attention in the West would have been much lower. I was asked by one journalist why our public does not seem to be too worried about the humanitarian situation in North Korea. My answer was: because they cannot see it on their TV screens.

During the Vietnam War, 25,000 barrels of Agent Orange were stored on Okinawa, according to a recently uncovered U.S. army report. The barrels, containing over 1.4 million gallons (5.2 million liters) of the toxic defoliant, had been brought to Okinawa from Vietnam before being taken to Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean where the US military incinerated its stocks of Agent Orange in 1977.

Providing historical context for contemporary political issues relevant to women and gender in Japan, this first article examines gendered power structures in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (1945-1952). Occupational policies targeted Japanese women and the ideal of gender equity to remake Japan as a democratic nation. The Constitution of Japan, enacted May 3, 1947, states that “All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin” (Article 14). In addition, women received the right to vote and to mutual consent in marriage based on the “equal rights of husband and wife” (Article 24). Although drafting and revising the post-WWII constitution involved numerous political actors including a few Japanese women, historical accounts of this complex process often celebrate General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) as a generous patriarch who “granted” rights to women in Japan. Similarly, historians in the U.S. and Japan credit women working for the occupation forces, such as Beate Sirota Gordon (1923-), for “giving” Japanese women gender equality. Depicted as a liberator who helped to rescue Japanese women from feudalistic traditions, Lt. Ethel Weed (1906-1975) encouraged women to “pull themselves up by their geta straps to pioneer in democratic procedures.”

See the link to Part 2 of China's Industrial Energy Revolution

China is undergoing the most astonishing energy transformation underpinning the industrial revolution that is making it the workshop of the world. It is building its ‘black’ energy system at a prodigious rate - building the equivalent of a 1-GW thermal power station every 10 days, and burning vast amounts of coal in doing so. But at the same time it is building a ‘green’ energy system based on non-fossil sources (renewables and nuclear) faster than any other country on earth. China's green revolution is reflected in its targets for building renewable energy systems, which are being expanded as fast as is humanly and technically possible - in the name of energy security and nation-building infrastructure as much as for decarbonizing the economy. Which wins in this close race between black and green development is a matter of the highest importance, for China and for the world.

Over the past three decades, it has become “chic” to be “Chinese” or to showcase one's “Chinese” connections in Southeast Asia. Leaders ranging from President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino of the Philippines to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj, and Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand to President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia and Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia have proclaimed their Chinese ancestry. Since 2000, Chinese New Year (Imlek) has been officially celebrated in Indonesia, after decades of legal restrictions governing access to economic opportunities and Chinese-language education, use of Chinese names, and public observance of Chinese customs and ceremonies.