“I don't know,” opines a 31-year old Korean woman. “I have always believed that Korea is a single-race country. And I'm proud of that. Somehow, Korea becoming a multiracial society doesn't sound right.” This is not an unusual view. Indeed, the large majority of Koreans would likely agree that Korean society is inextricably tied to and defined by a unique Korean identity, one based on an uncompromising conflation of race and ethnicity. The strong tendency among Koreans to conflate race and ethnicity has important implications, the most salient of which is this: it has served to create an exceptionally rigid and narrow conceptualization of national identity and belongingness. To be “truly” Korean, one must not only have Korean blood, but must also embody the values, the mores, and the mind-set of Korean society. This helps explain why overseas Koreans (from China, Russia, Japan, the United States and other countries throughout the world) have not fit into Korean society as Koreans. They are different, “real” Koreans recognize, despite sharing the same blood. At the same time, those who lack a “pure blood” relationship, no matter how acculturated they may be, have also been rejected as outsiders. This rejection, more importantly, has generally led to severe forms of discrimination.

In 1928, at the age of one and a half years, Elizabeth van Kampen, daughter of a Dutch plantation manager, arrived with her parents in Sumatra in the former Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia), a land which she evokes from childhood memory as “paradise on earth.” But the attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941, when she was fourteen, was quickly followed by Japanese invasion of the Dutch colony and the nightmare to follow.

Elizabeth and her family experienced extraordinary times between two empires, that of Holland in Asia at the end of a 400-year epoch, and that of a rising militarist Japan. The following images convey a sense of a range of experiences of plantation life through the lens of the Dutch planters.

Little attention internationally was paid to the agreement signed in February, 2009 between the newly commissioned Obama government in the US and the declining and soon to be defeated Aso government in Japan - the Guam Treaty. Many commentators drew the bland conclusion that by choosing Tokyo as her first destination Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was merely showing how highly the Obama government intended to regard the Japan alliance. Another view, advanced in these pages, was less benign. (See “Hillary in Japan - The Enforcer “ 22 February 2009) It was that Clinton went quickly to Tokyo fearing the Aso government might collapse in order to tie it and any successor government to the extraordinary deals that had been done between the Pentagon and Japanese governments over the preceding years. The Guam Agreement was the culmination of those deals, Okinawa the sacrificial victim.

These are tough times for the people of Burma. They have endured decades of economic mismanagement, low living standards and brutal political oppression under an incompetent and negligent military that shows no signs of relinquishing its grip on power. Indeed, as the country approaches elections in 2010, the regime has cracked down on those it targets as opponents, imposing prison terms of up to 65 years on relief workers, comedians, writers, intellectuals, monks and others engaged in peaceful demonstrations or relief activities. No challenges to the junta are allowed and even local disaster relief workers are subject to arrest for embarrassing the regime. Those who joined peaceful demonstrations in the Saffron Revolution of 2007, or tried to help the survivors of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, have been singled out by the military junta for sentences that in many cases ensure the imprisoned will die behind bars. Moreover, political prisoners have been sent away to remote prisons where it is difficult for relatives to visit or to monitor their condition. Although the junta released about a dozen political prisoners in February 2009, the number of political prisoners has more than doubled since 2007 and stands at an estimated 2,100.

In late 2009 Indonesia revived a proposal to build a nuclear power facility on the seismically active Muria Peninsula of north central Java over sustained civil society opposition including the voice of moderate Islam. The following assessment by Richard Tanter, Arabella Imhoff and David Von Hippel poses a range of issues about siting decisions in light of state-society relations and nuclear power feasibility. The issues are as relevant to mature democracies as to “emerging democracies,” as Indonesia is now sometimes styled. Muria poses formidable challenges to Indonesian democracy while posing equally important questions about the nation's developmental trajectory.

Two decades ago, as Japan's economic engine hurtled along at full throttle, the Justice Ministry announced a policy that seemed to signal an end to its attempt to keep the world at bay. After years of restricting new immigrants to a trickle of white-collar professionals, the country would start accepting mostly unskilled workers to feed a labor shortage in its hungry factories.

Xinhua News Agency reported in October 2009 that Nishimatsu Construction Co. “secured a reconciliation” by voluntarily agreeing to compensate Chinese victims of wartime forced labor in Japan, after resisting the redress claim for more than a decade. But questions have arisen regarding the content of the settlement, and whether it might foreshadow greater Japanese willingness to address past injustices. (The Japanese text of the settlement is available.)

The election of Barrack Obama was a remarkable event in many ways. Not only was the election of a black, Democratic president a domestic milestone, but it was a potentially transformative moment for foreign policy, too. The administration of George W. Bush was responsible for some of the most divisive and counter-productive foreign policies of recent times. The standing and authority of the US had been steadily undermined as a consequence. It is clear that the election of Obama has already seen a dramatic improvement in sentiment toward the US around the world, something that bodes well for the US's ‘soft power’ and influence. One might expect, therefore, that US policymakers will once again be able to assert themselves in East Asia, a region in which the US has had a powerful presence and influence since the Second World War. While the region is not unique in this regard—the US as the world's sole remaining superpower has been a major factor in the development of every other region, too—East Asia's post-war trajectory, both as the epicentre of international wars between 1945 and 1975, and as a rapidly advancing economic region throughout the era, has been especially marked by American influence. Indeed, East Asia's recent development history, its intra-regional relations and its place in the overall international system might have been profoundly different were it not for its engagement with the United States.

“We too are an army of rapists,” anonymous soldier, letter to the editor, Time Magazine, November 12, 1945.

What explains the lack of records regarding the number of rapes in occupation Japan by American servicemen? I briefly review the situation of rape during World War II in the European theater for which there is reasonable documentation to better understand why the names and numbers are concealed or lost. I then examine the situation postwar, focusing particularly on conditions in Japan at the beginning of the American occupation. I conclude by analyzing what little documentation I discovered about an execution for rape while writing Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, my memoir about my uncle who committed suicide after leaving me tapes about his experiences as an MP in Tokyo's 8th Army stockade.

The China Heritage Quarterly covers recent developments and scholarship in areas related to China's heritage. Founded as an e-journal in 2005, from 2008 it expanded its purview to include more material on intellectual history, literature, culture (in the broadest sense) and translation.

In 1877 Robert Myers and four others living on the Bonin/Ogasawara Islands became the first foreigners to be naturalized as Japanese subjects after more than two hundred years of Japan's semi-exclusion from the outside world. In the space of five years, fifty-nine other first settlers became Japanese subjects/‘naturalized foreigners’ through entry on the Household Family Registry (koseki). At a time when Japan was emerging from a feudal-like system to a modern nation state the Islands were one of Japan's first attempts, in modern times, at overseas expansion. The multinational community on these islands presented the Meiji authorities with unprecedented challenges that could only be overcome through extraordinary measures. In this study I explore the circumstances and context surrounding the unusually placed Bonin Islanders in the late nineteenth century to shed light on the processes of Japanese colonization and social control. I argue that the koseki, as an instrument of ‘bio-power’ (Foucault, 1998: 140), was indispensible in successfully legitimizing and exercising sovereign power over the Islands.

It is a well-known fact that warfare and obligatory military service system long played decisive role in the formation of modern nation-states, first in Europe and later elsewhere in the world. While externally the military prowess of a given state was (and still is) decisive for defining its place in a competitive international system explicitly based upon an equilibrium of military force and hegemonic interstate relations,1 internally conscription-based national armies formerly served as main pillars of the state, linking conscript-age able-bodied males with the nationalist ethos1 and acculturating them to views and practices often referred to as “militarized masculinity culture”. “Militarized masculinity”, both in the conscription states and in states possessing large-scale military but relying upon a volunteer force in peacetime, usually involves both a gendered view of the world in which the able-bodied man, the “defender of the fatherland”, was unconditionally privileged over women, defined either as sexualized objects or as child-rearing “mother of the nation”, and a shared feeling of superiority towards men unfit for or unwilling to engage in combat (handicapped, conscientious objectors, etc.).2 Examples of modern states which chose to define their whole able-bodied male citizenry as potential soldiers and use conscription as the primary instrument of “creating nationals”, include revolutionary and post-revolutionary France (which began the history of modern conscription by declaring the levée en masse on August 23, 1793), and the Prussian state, which began introducing French-style conscription practices after suffering a defeat at the hands of Napoleon's conscript army in 1806-1807.3 In more recent times, the state of Israel successfully used a comprehensive conscription system applicable to both men and women. The conscription system inculcated Zionist ideals and the newly-forged Israeli national identity, as well as a siege mentality based upon the imperative of the “national defense” against the demonized Arabic/Muslim world, into the minds of a very heterogeneous body of citizens,4 In South Korea too, as we will see below, conscription provides an ideological fiction of equality, the exclusion of women from the conscription system and, consequently, much more manifestly the “hegemonic masculine” character of the army being an important difference.

I would like to start with by defining what I mean by “Greater China.” It is a term used commonly in economics and investment communities around the world. It includes mainland China (hereafter China), Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan (Singapore, given its sizable Chinese community, is often included), despite the uneasiness of some Taiwanese scholars about the concept. At a cultural level, “greater China” corresponds with the term “cultural China,” coined by Tu Wei-ming during the 1990s when he spoke about the revival of Confucianism in the postwar period, arguing that instead of an impediment, Confucian values and ideals actually paved the way for the advance of economic expansion in many East Asian countries and regions. This economic expansion continued subsequently powered by globalization. Here, I offer a brief survey of the differing interests in, and engagements with, the study of globalization and global history in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I argue that in the face of globalization, each of these regions developed distinct strategies to perceive and interpret its multifaceted impact. Thus, though I use the term “Greater China,” I intend to emphasize the very different approaches to the regional and the global in the case of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The presence of some 737 US military outposts around the world imposes great strains, and there is always the possibility of rejection by the inhabitants of adjacent communities. Chalmers Johnson, author of the acclaimed trilogy on US imperial expansion and its costs, highlights the tensions between overseas US bases and the countries where they are deployed, most prominently Okinawa. Nearly one-fifth of the land surface of Okinawa's small, crowded main island is devoted to 38 bases and facilities for the US military (almost 75% of the US forces stationed in Japan). Johnson depicts Okinawa as a hotspot among other US military outposts, where anti-American opposition might undermine the US alliance network in the Asia-Pacific. He draws particular attention to the US forces' exemption from the local criminal justice system, as well as from responsibility to overcome the environmental contamination of local sites caused by US military usage.

War is said to be the ultimate cause of environmental destruction. The absolute devastation of the environment in combat has been proven by examples such as World War II, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. However, even in peacetime, military activity causes environmental destruction through the construction of facilities, everyday activities on base, and the preparation for war such as military training and maneuvers. Particularly in the case of the United States, the enormous military power that accounts for half of the world's military expenditures, the destruction of the environment is appalling. For example, in Japan, the damage to nature that would accompany the construction of an alternative facility to Futenma Marine Corps Air Station in Okinawa will be accelerated and aircraft noise will damage the areas surrounding the bases. In the Korean community of Mehyang-ri, aerial bombing practice has caused severe environmental pollution. This essay will focus on the pollution of US bases in Asia in order to come to grips with the environmental problems caused by military activity. After investigating the pollution of US bases in Yokota (Japan), Okinawa and the Philippines, we will examine the principal conclusions that can be draw from those examples. Our purpose is to locate ways to resolve these military environmental problems.

Out in the academic cemetery to which avatars of market fundamentalism thought they had consigned their intellectual and political opponents, one can hear today the unmistakable scrape of coffin lids opening. And climbing out of their graves are the bodies of those who contend that the reductionist assumptions of neo-classical/rational choice orthodoxy are not simply inadequate but flawed in the most fundamental sense.

At first glance, the Liberal Democratic Party's decades-long denial of clear evidence revealed by the U.S. government that it had secret agreements allowing the introduction and stationing of US nuclear weapons in Japan appears absurd. This was the reality, however, for the nation that long proclaimed the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles,” barring the production, possession or importation of nuclear weapons, as a bedrock of national policy. With the fall of the LDP looming in the September 2009 election, several former top officials of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who were well informed of these secret deals, came forward to disclose the deal. Their motive was not protection of Japan's “Three Non-Nuclear Principles.” To the contrary, their view is that, as the “Three Non-Nuclear Principle” did not effectively prevent the entry of nuclear weapons into Japan, they should be scrapped.

In November 2006 a new translation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov appeared that soon had sold 500,000 copies. I knew the translator, Kameyama Ikuo, as the author of a fascinating book on Stalin and the artists of his time.

Just as in other countries, people in Japan have been lamenting since the 1980s (if not much longer) that young people no longer read the classics of world literature. First it was the culture of manga and television that was seen as the culprit; later it was the internet, computer games and obsessive text messaging. The number of books sold each year has actually been rising, because manga, the autobiographies of TV stars, internet literature and even text-message literature have come out in book form—but nonetheless people have been complaining that the old canon of world literature is no longer being taken seriously. And so this new Karamazov boom was a pleasant surprise. But I asked how this new translation of the novel could be so different that suddenly hundreds of thousands of Japanese readers were in such a hurry to buy it and were reading it with such enthusiasm. Even in times when literature supposedly had many more readers than today, Dostoevsky was never a bestseller.

The making of an unequal, unconstitutional, illegal, colonial and deceitful US-Japan agreement.

Elections at the end of August gave Japan a new government, headed by Hatoyama Yukio. In electing him and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Japanese people, like the American people less than a year earlier, were opting for change – a new relationship with both Asia and the US, including a much more equal one with the latter. Remarkably, however, what followed on the part of the Obama administration has been a campaign of unrelenting pressure to block any such change.

The Ryūkyū Kingdom Festival (Ryūkyū ōchō matsuri), organized and sponsored by the Shuri Promotion Association (Shuri shinkōkai), is a fixture on Okinawa Prefecture's cultural and tourist calendar.

This one-day festival is one part of the larger Shuri Castle Festival (Shurijō sai); together, they celebrate the grandeur of the Ryūkyū Kingdom and its court traditions as a pure cultural past for the prefecture. Of pivotal importance to these events is Shuri Castle itself. Not merely the stage on which festivities unfold, Shuri Castle - with its vermillion architecture epitomized by its main hall (seiden) and Shurei Gate (Shurei mon), and its high, imposing ishigaki stone walls - is cast as the very heart of Ryūkyūan culture. While this representation of the castle celebrates local culture, it is difficult to ignore the role it plays in Japan's continuing colonization of Okinawa. By suggesting that Ryūkyūan culture not only exists, but flourishes within the framework of the Japanese nation state, this representation plays an important part in a narrative that obfuscates the rupture of Japanese colonization of the Ryūkyū Kingdom and naturalizes Okinawa's inclusion into the modern Japanese nation state.