On May 21, 2009, lay citizens will join professional judges in deciding the fate of suspects of major crimes in Japan's new saibanin or lay assessor system.[1] This system, laudable for pursuing public understanding and reform in a judiciary long criticized for being distant and overly bureaucratized, contains provisions that could do as much harm as good. Among causes for concern, the new law contains a harsh secrecy provision that stands out as a potential source of problems. This provision, which threatens to imprison or fine citizens who speak too freely about their service as lay assessors, will make reporting misconduct difficult and chill the public discourse that the system ostensibly aims to foster. Such secrecy may also inflict significant psychological harm upon those affected by the disturbing details of a criminal trial. These potential ramifications should be taken into consideration as Japan makes its way through this new world of lay participation.

A relentless Taliban insurgency, reluctant allies, political doubts, competing priorities - the pressure to change United States policy in a key region may prove irresistible.

The difficult global inheritance of the United States administration of Barack Obama is exemplified in the possible loss of the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan. This would be a painful event in any circumstance, not least as it may involve the Bishkek government making a deal with Russia that would further signal a changing geopolitical balance in the region. But the troubles the US and its allies are facing in Afghanistan means that this is a particularly bad time to be threatened with a loss of facilities and influence in another part of central Asia.

Most media attention to Okinawa concentrates on the bases, and rightly so since they do indeed affect everything. Here, however, author Urashima shifts the primary focus to development politics and nature, in the context of a plan conceived at the height of Japan's “bubble” in the mid- 1980s to “landfill” one of Japan's most fertile, bio-diverse and extraordinary natural resources, the Awase Tidal Wetlands of Okinawa. Okinawa City, the administrative unit in which the wetlands are located, is also home to the largest US Air Force base in East Asia, Kadena, and the authorities decided to compensate it by creating new land for the city to expand. It would be a resort, a “Future City,” etc, in keeping with the grandiloquent public works mentality of the time. Typically, it would involve substituting an artificial beach for the existing natural one.

Police death squads are out of control in The Philippines say human rights campaigners, murdering slum children, the poor and political enemies with impunity.

While mainstream education has received ample attention from scholars of Japan, the diverse kinds of private institutions concerned with the rehabilitation of so-called ‘problem youth’ have not hitherto been subjected to systematic analysis. This article offers an in-depth study of two starkly contrasting organizations, the Totsuka Yacht School and K2 International. We focus on the rehabilitation philosophies of these groups and examine how they view ‘problem youth’; the remedies they advocate; the critical incidents they have been implicated in; and how they have responded in their aftermath. These two organizations epitomize two important opposing paradigms of rehabilitation: one ‘disciplinarian’ and one ‘accommodating’, and therefore reflect different moral discourses regarding youth and the problems they face. Analysis of these groups illustrates how they are being challenged by current social and educational trends, but also how, as local actors, the charismatic leaders of these institutions also play a significant role in shaping the discourse. This study is among the first to map out the complex terrain of residential rehabilitative institutions in Japan. It also raises questions for educators regarding the meaning of ‘nonformal’ or ‘alternative’ education, helps youth specialists better understand the diversity of approaches employed in dealing with ‘problem youth’, and will be of interest to non-Japan scholars seeking evidence of approaches to rehabilitation which do not solely attempt to ‘medicalize’ youth as being ‘ill’ or to ‘activate’ them in order to return them to the labor market.

The firing by North Korea on Yeonpyeong Island dealt an unprecedented blow to the national mood. Following the June 15, 2000 declaration by Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il, the feeling that no state of war existed between North and South gripped the people of South Korea. But now, islanders and military personnel died as a result of the bombardment from the North in broad daylight, and houses and facilities were destroyed. South Korean people felt shock, fear and anxiety. It's understandable that President Lee Myung-bak, who first warned against enlarging the situation, eventually decided to take counter measures. People of South Korea have to think about how to prevent the situation from worsening, while responding to this new situation. Moreover, people throughout the region need to reflect on this situation.

Debilitated by nearly 20 years of rising debt levels, stagnation, mismanagement and lack of direction, Japan faces an economic crisis of almost unprecedented severity. Considerably worse than the US (and worst in the post-war period, according to Economic and Fiscal Policy Minister Yosano Kaoru), it is matched by a no less severe political crisis. Even before Finance Minister, Nakagawa Shoichi, gave the incoherent, alcohol-driven performance at the Rome G7 Finance Ministers' meeting that cost him his job, the Aso government's support level in the polls was down to 14 per cent [1]. Since then it has obviously fallen further, by some accounts already to around the nine percent record low of Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro in 2001.

Chiri Yukie (1903-1922) was born in Horobetsu, Hokkaidō, to Chiri Takakichi and Nami. Nami was the daughter of an Hokkaido Ainu grandsire, Kan'nari. Yukie was the older sister of the linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-1961). When she was five and six years of age, she lived in Horobetsu with her grandmother, the great bard Monasinouk. Yukie grew up listening to recitations in the oral tradition as narrated by Monasinouk and later also by her adoptive mother Kan'nari Matsu, Nami's sister. Starting in 1909, she and Monasinouk lived with Matsu at the Episcopal Church compound in Chikabumi in the suburbs of Asahikawa. After a total of seven years of normal and higher normal school education, she attended Asahikawa Girls Vocational School for three years, graduating in 1910.

The high occurrence of pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia has prompted an increase in the number of nations planning to send naval units to fight them. In the Asian continent, India has become the first to sink a pirate vessel, South Korea has announced the deployment early in spring of the 5,000 ton-class KDX-II destroyer Gang Gam-chan, and China is sending two destroyers and a supply vessel.

While these three countries have shown no qualms about deploying their navies in the Gulf of Aden, Japan has once more embarked on a painful debate on the legality of such a move, with the government looking for a legal basis on which MSDF units might be deployed and a number of commentators doubting this would be possible without either a constitutional amendment (or of the official government interpretation of the Constitution's warrenouncing Article Nine) or the passage of new legislation.

This article is part of an ongoing series at The Asia-Pacific Journal commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the US-Korean War.

Japan's best-known proletarian novel, Kani Kosen (depicting conditions aboard a crab-canning factory ship operating off Soviet waters)[2] [1] by Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in the course of 2008.

“There is no one who can tell what it was like at the hypocentre when the bomb dropped.”

- Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi1