On April 17, 2012, the day that Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarô went public with his plan for the metropolis to purchase the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, the government of Yilan County in Taiwan responded, “The only way to carry out a sale of the Diaoyu Islands is through an official open, competitive bidding process.”

“Adding insult to injury” sounds like a lawyerly phrase compared to its painfully evocative Japanese equivalent 泣面に蜂 nakitsura ni hachi – literally “a bee to a crying face”. But even that stinging proverb fails to convey what Japan has been through during the recent past. In March 2011 its economy, slowly recovering from the worst global post-World War II downturn, was hit by a powerful earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. That twin disaster disrupted many supply chains of Japan's important manufacturing sector and caused a catastrophic failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant; the ensuing fears led to the eventual shut-down of all of the country's nuclear generating stations, limited electricity supply, increased imports of fossil energies and the first annual foreign trade deficit in a generation.

The efforts of two Japanese citizens, Matsuura Akio and Murata Mitsuhei, to raise awareness of the risk of a further major accident at Fukushima are to be commended. More than 13 months after the accident began - the threats from the Fukushima Daiichi site are multi-dimensional and on-going, but the under reporting of these risks as a result of nuclear crisis fatigue tied with the 24 hour news cycle can lead to a complacency on the current and future reality at the site.

The specific issue highlighted by Matsumura and Murata is the risk and consequences of the failure of the spent fuel pool at the destroyed reactor unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi. As they report the spent fuel inventory at this pool is the largest of all 4 reactors that were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

“What's wrong with being a fag? What's shameful about being a fag? Why is it wrong for a man to love a man? Why is it wrong for a woman to love a woman? What is shameful is living a lie. What is shameful is not loving others.” Tōgō Ken campaign slogan.

I delivered the following remarks at an antiNATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. I was the only North American speaker at an all-day conference, having been invited in connection with the appearance into Russian of my book Drugs, Oil, and War. As a former diplomat worried about peace I was happy to attend: as far as I can tell there may be less serious dialogue today between Russian and American intellectuals than there was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the danger of war involving the two leading nuclear powers has hardly disappeared.

David McNeill revisits Japan's northeast and the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant a year after it was battered by the triple disaster of March 11 and finds a region still struggling to emerge from its huge shadow.

“The world is heavy on us,” says Sakurai Katsunobu, recalling the day that its weight almost crushed the life out of his city. On the morning of March 11 last year, Minamisoma and its mayor were struggling with the same mundane problems as many other small rural cities across Japan: a declining, greying population, creaking public services and a faltering local economy. By nightfall, an existential disaster had engulfed Mayor Sakuraťs office, one from which it has yet to reemerge.

In addition to political participation, women's groups in Japan continue to advocate for equality in employment opportunities and to challenge gendered labor structures. Charles Weathers discusses the question of whether Japan has truly progressed towards equal career opportunities for women after twenty years of legislative interventions (1985-2005). Weathers provides a concise overview of some of the lingering obstacles that women confront in Japan's workforce. First, he highlights the reality that companies in Japan find ways of evading gender equality in hiring and promotion structures. The so-called “dual-track” personnel system allowed corporations to hire managers (men) versus clerical workers (women). Even after the equality laws established in 1985 and 1999, firms could still divide workers into “regular” versus “non-regular” categories. Female employees often fall into the category of “non-regular” workers, which include “part-timers” who may work full hours or temporary employees with limited contracts. Non-regular workers lack job security, an issue particularly discriminatory when some firms continue to offer “regular” male employees lifetime employment.

The popular status of outlaws logically relates to the integrity of the legal system outside which they operate. Putting it simply, for villains to look bad, the police need to look good. Tamura Eitarō has shown how the chivalrous image enjoyed by nineteenth-century yakuza stemmed in part from public disgust for corruption and violence by the police squads who hunted them. A similar problem confronts the NPA today. Since the early 2000s police corruption has been the subject of increasingly numerous academic articles and media reports. Ichikawa Hiro, a lawyer who gave testimony on police corruption in the Diet, says, ‘There is an institutionalized culture of illicit money-making in the NPA, and since it has gone on for so long it is now very deep-rooted’ (Akahata 2004:116). In 2009 a veteran police officer named Senba Toshirō, while still serving on the force, published a lengthy exposé of police corruption: financial scams, fabricated evidence, forced confessions, beatings of suspects, drug abuse by police officers, embezzlement from police slush funds, and much else. Senba's sensational conclusion: ‘The largest organized crime gang in Japan today is the National Police Agency’ (Senba 2009:73).

“Though global safety standards kept on improving, we wasted our time coming up with excuses for why Japan didn't need to bother meeting them.” Madarame Haruki, Chairman, Nuclear Safety Commission, Diet testimony, 2/15/12

The nuclear accident at Fukushima was precipitated by natural disaster, but poor risk management, including a failure to comprehend tectonic risk in the most earthquake prone country in the world, and an institutionalized complacency about risk, were major factors increasing the likelihood of a major accident and fumbling crisis response. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the utility operating the Fukushima Daiichi Plant, and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), the government regulatory authority, mismanaged a range of risks - siting, seismic, tsunami, emergency preparedness and radiation - and it is this mismanagement that made Fukushima into Japan's Chernobyl. Investigations into the accident have established that the crisis response was improvised and inadequate because of lack of preparation, institutional flaws in emergency procedures, and poor communication within the government and between officials and TEPCO.

Clashing views about Thailand's future are being played out on the streets of Bangkok, taking the form of forceful demonstrations, contentious commemorations and populist grandstanding by red shirted and yellow shirted rivals. Behind the searing rhetoric and policy clashes are battles of personality, in which patron-client links coalesce, regroup and solidify, rewarding loyalty with a top-down sharing of power and spoils.

This paper examines the social meanings embedded in Japanese melodramas produced since the 1990s and their use by the public for comfort and healing in an attempt to deal with declining confidence, both personal and national, in the wake of the burst of the bubble economy. It notes, further, how the Japanese media has used similar tropes in an effort to rebuild morale in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake.

From the Japanese point of view, the 1990s and 2000s are characterised by two broad historical shifts. The first is globalization. The word has many nuances but is most often taken to mean the expansion of economic interconnectivity between countries. In 1970 just under a million Japanese went overseas; by 2000 that number had risen to nearly 18 million. Likewise, in the 1970s, China was relatively isolated, its foreign trade a mere 20 billion USD in 1978. Now it is the axis of production on which the world economy turns, with about 3 trillion dollars in total imports and exports. Globalization also signifies the more rapid movement of people, information, ideas, and cultural forms across borders. In 1986 Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro made the shocking comment that “So high is the level of education in our country that Japan's is an intelligent society. Our average score is much higher than those of countries like the U.S. There are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in America. In consequence the average score over there is exceedingly low.” Why did he say what he was thinking? Perhaps he lacked awareness that something said in Japanese at a press conference in Japan would be picked up by the world outside Japan's borders. Japanese politicians are still gaffe-prone, but now all know their comments may be tweeted around the globe in seconds. Importantly, Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans, and others now have quick access to information about historical narratives prevalent in other societies.

Why did Japan begin World War II by invading China in 1937 and then widen it by attacking the British and Americans in 1941? Were these attacks the outgrowth of a Japanese state with a uniquely intense nationalism, or of a particularly coercive social order, or of economic and social inequalities, or had Japan by the late 1930s entered a stage of late capitalist development that naturally segued into fascism? Was there a direct causal connection between the West's forced intrusion into Japan in the 1850s and subsequent Western pressure on Japan and its neighbors and the launching of Japan's World War II in Asia in 1937? Various wartime and postwar Western and Japanese writers have advanced all of these views in discussing Japan's involvement in World War II.

In October 2003, the summit meeting of the heads of government of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) issued a major statement that declared, “[a]n ASEAN Community shall be established comprising three pillars, namely political and security cooperation, economic cooperation, and sociocultural cooperation…” Each successive ASEAN Summit and Annual Ministerial Meeting (AMM) of foreign ministers has advanced this goal. It was expected that the 45th AMM, held under the motto “ASEAN: One Community, One Destiny,” would follow its predecessors by adopting further measures to make the ASEAN Community a reality. As events transpired, differences among ASEAN states over how to manage territorial disputes in the South China Sea emerged as a litmus test of their ability to achieve an ASEAN Political-Security Community by 2015.

This essay compares museum representations of WWII from Japan and the USA and discusses how museum curators responded to the changing international and domestic environment in their exhibits. The authors also identify challenges that museum curators in these countries have often faced. In Japan, for example, when the newly opened peace museums in Osaka, Kawasaki, Saitama, and Kanagawa began to depict Japan's role in the Asia-Pacific War from a critical angle by including photographs of the Nanking Massacre, they drew heated criticism from conservative nationalist groups. This in turn eventually led some of the museum curators to revise their exhibitions, while other museums like the Peace Osaka remained firm about keeping their original exhibitions. This kind of tension was also evident at the National Air and Space Museum in the USA, where the curators’ initial plans to display war artifacts such as the Enola Gay (the airplane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) had to be restructured to be more “American” due to pressure from veterans’ groups. What to display in exhibitions and how to display it are sensitive issues for museum curators, who are expected to serve racially and culturally diverse audiences, and this is one reason why the pedagogic role of the public museum has become increasingly challenging since the 1990s. The authors of this essay introduce the ways in which museum curators in these regions have developed their strategies to accommodate public demands in ways that contribute to a more inclusive environment.

The Nanjing Massacre (also called the Nanjing Atrocity or Incident) is a much-contested historical event that has generated heated debates among historians and the general public on questions ranging from the validity of the reported number of victims to criticism of some documents as having been fabricated. (For a discussion of these issues, see Joshua A. Fogel, “Response to Herbert P. Bix, ‘Remembering the Nanking Massacre,’” Japan Focus). The Nanjing Massacre has become a site of “competing narratives” between China and Japan, since it was mobilized to legitimize an “official” history of each nation, and this is the underlying issue at stake. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial's (hereafter NMM) presentation of the victimization of Chinese people by Japanese militaries has been challenged by the Japanese government. By re-examining historical debates on the incident in the context of recent China-Japan relations, the author shows how the memory of war is constructed in the newly renovated NMM and how the memorial has further encouraged antagonistic attitudes between Japanese and Chinese citizens.

The current conflict between China and Japan over the NMM, however, is not entirely shaped by a state invoking patriotism from its own citizens. It has also been influenced by small yet powerful interest groups who mobilize media to generate blatant nationalist sentiments among the public, sometimes more vigorously than the government wishes. By looking at the museum's display of artifacts, documents, and statistical data, this essay inquires into the way state patriotism and popular nationalism are entwined to produce monolithic views of history.

The departure of former leader, Ozawa Ichiro, from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) signifies that the twenty year-long effort at reform of politics and realignment of the political party system has come to a dead end. It was just twenty years ago, in the summer, that the resignation of Deputy Prime Minster Kanemaru Shin over political fund problems led to crisis within the Takeshita faction and the search for a way to reform Japanese party politics.

This paper is an expanded and updated version of “Social Media in Disaster Japan,” in Jeff Kingston, ed., Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan's 3/11 (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies).

Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan's 3/11 (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies) by Jeff Kingston

The mercury discharged into the sea by the Chisso factory in Minamata, and the radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are not entirely different “accidents,” although one was the result of a “natural disaster” and one not. Minamata offers hints of future developments as Japan attempts to respond to and recover from Fukushima.