Japan and China appear headed for a showdown over natural gas exploration and drilling in the East China Sea.

Up until Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Monday visited a controversial shrine to his country's war dead, it was hoped the showdown might occur at the negotiating table. But the visit, his fifth since 2001, once again infuriated China, as well as other Asian nations, putting the status of a wide range of talks between the two countries in jeopardy. Among them was this week's hoped-for decisive round on East China Sea gas.

BRUSSELS – In a vital move toward securing greater stability, North Korea announced last week it would return to the six-party talks in Beijing with the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to try to resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula. The breakdown in negotiations had been triggered most recently by U.S. claims that North Korea had a secret enriched-uranium program to produce nuclear weapons.

[This comprehensive survey of India's growing military strength and geostrategic relationships involving China, the United States and Russia reveals the interplay between economic and military-nuclear power in a region that is doubly volatile, as the scene of recent nuclear breakthroughs and rapid changes in military and economy might. Noting the predominantly military character of the U.S.-Indian relationship, and the predominantly economic and resource-driven character of the unfolding China-Indian relationship, Lora Saalman raises important issues of regional development in an era of military insecurity. Japan Focus.]

The Fox-ification of the US media proceeds apace. In Italy, the country's media mogul doubles as Prime Minister. In Britain public broadcasting is under pressure from Blairite forces. Japan, the world's No 2 capitalist power, is left out of most discussion on global media trends, but is undergoing the same pressures. Allegations of political intervention to tailor the way the issue of “comfort women” in 1930s and 1940s Asia should be addressed in a 2001 documentary stirred a full scale media war in 2005.

Seoul – Patients in hospital gowns crowded in with their IV poles. Visitors pressed against glass doors to watch. The crew hovered with lights, camera and microphone.

“Ready … cue,” the director barked, then filmed the scene of a young widow undergoing tests to give a kidney to her mother, who had abandoned her as a child.

[Stephen Roach is among the most acute analysts of the risks inherent in the chronic US balance of payments deficit and low savings rates. Here he steps up his warning of the dangers of a meltdown of the global economy by a close examination of the vulnerability of the US and Chinese economies to a slowdown in US consumption related to oil and other factors. Japan nowhere figures in his simple story of forces driving the global economy, the implications for Japan and Asia are no less stark than those for China and the US. Japan Focus.]

The imperial institution with its official toleration of hereditary succession and gender discrimination is an enormous contradiction embedded in the Constitution of Japan. Debate over a female successor to the throne ignores this illogicality at its peril. Today we should be thinking not about a female monarch but the monarchy itself, and what the country ideally should be. Yet nobody discusses this issue.

Ever since rapid adoption of the mobile Internet in the late nineties, Japanese mobile phone use has been the object of international attention. Although other countries have led in terms of wireless technology development, mobile phone adoption rates, and certain usage patterns (such as political mobilization), Japan is considered by many to define the future of mobile phone use. In addition to high rates of adoption of Internet-enabled mobile phones, 3G infrastructures and camera phones, Japan has also been considered an incubator of popular consumer trends that integrate portable technologies with urban ecologies and fashions. In Smart Mobs, the book that catapulted mobile cultures into heightened visibility in Western public culture, Howard Rheingold (2002: xi) opens with a scene of texters eyeing their mobile phones as they navigate Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, allegedly the site of the highest mobile phone density in the world. A BBC reporter writes in a piece titled “Japan signals mobile future”: “If you want to gaze into the crystal ball for mobile technology, Tokyo is most definitely the place to come to” (Taylor 2003).

“Nothing attests more dramatically to the psychological sway of its lingering shadow than the very reluctance of today's Japanese to debate in public the pros and cons of retaining the imperial family,” says Ivan Hall, a former Gakushuin University professor and author of Cartels of the Mind.

Yet changes are under discussion concerning the imperial succession that raise important questions about the nature and future of the institution. What are the consequences of change? How have other monarchies adapted to a changing world? And what are the consequences of hewing firmly to the present system? Why is it so difficult to have public discussion of issues central to Japan's future, particularly the character of Japanese democracy?

For nearly 60 years many Japanese have been struggling honorably to come to terms with the China War and the Pacific War, and indeed their entire imperialist past. But their struggles never take place in a vacuum. Trends in history, politics, international relations, and even culture, shape them. During the occupation years (1945 to 1952) neonationalists who rejected the Tokyo Trial and justified the lost war seldom spoke out. At that time, Japanese who sought to grasp the war experience, end the era of irresponsibility, and develop a critical historiography went virtually unchallenged.

The granddaughter of Japan's wartime leader Tojo Hideki has become one of his staunchest public defenders since emerging from obscurity a decade ago. But exactly who is she and why has she come in from the political cold?

There is no mistaking the impact of the family genes on Tojo Yuko: she has the same myopic, almond-shaped eyes, thin mouth and wide cheekbones as her grandfather, General Tojo Hideki, who led Japan to disastrous defeat in World War 2. She even affects his rigid military bearing.

With the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings fast approaching, commemorative events and symposia are being planned across the globe in places as diverse, yet symbolically significant, as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tinian, London, Tokyo, Washington, and Los Alamos. While forthcoming books by historians Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Gerard DeGroot, and Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird will advance the scholarly criticism of the bombings and show that viable alternatives for quickly ending the war without a U.S. invasion of the Japanese homeland existed, the bombs’ defenders, including Gen. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, will also be out in force. Tibbets, echoing a refrain made popular by President Harry Truman, insists that he never lost sleep over that decision. Interestingly, the 1952 Hollywood film, Above and Beyond, on which Tibbets consulted, shows him unable to sleep on the night before the bombing of Hiroshima as he grappled with the profound consequences of what he was about to do. As historian Peter Kuznick explains, those consequences included not only the wanton slaughter of over 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the condemning of additional scores of thousands to a life of torment, but the inauguration of the nuclear era in a fashion that Truman and others understood could ultimately end life on the planet. The major mobilization this May around strengthening the Non- Proliferation Treaty during the review meetings at the United Nations is designed to reverse the spread of nuclear weapons and the further increase in nuclear weapons states to make sure that that dire prospect is never realized. Japan Focus introduction.

Just prior to the July 18, 2005 meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a senior official commented that the two parties would talk about “whatever is on their minds”; apparently, this turned out to be a lot. Some pursuits, such as a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, did not come to fruition. Still, India made major gains in one area of particular note: access to dual-use technology. Nuclear technology will lift India's masses to a higher level of electricity and convenience. Rocket technology will offer India's space program a giant leap forward.

With the lunar New Year, in Northeast Asia the darkness of winter recedes, a pale sun gains strength, daylight hours lengthen and the earth stirs. However, in one of the bleakest and coldest corners of the region, North Korea, the land is still hard-frozen, spring is far off, and political frosts have not melted for more than half a century. Yet all extremes are eventually exhausted and yield, as yang to yin, and even for North Korea that time may not be far off.

New Delhi - Seven years after blasting its way into the world's ‘nuclear club’, India has executed a major shift in its policy stance by jettisoning its long-standing advocacy of global nuclear disarmament in favour of nuclear nonproliferation. On Monday, the country's Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran enunciated a new doctrinal orientation: India will now be “part of” a “new global onsensus on nonproliferation”.

Sakakibara Eisuke, a former Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs and currently Professor of Economics at Keio University (Tokyo), has described the Japanese economy as 10% capitalist and 90% “socialist”. He was of course contrasting the internationally competitive sectors of Japanese manufacturing industry (automobiles, computers and consumer electronics, integrated circuits, industrial robots (mechatronics) and other industrial machinery, steel, chemicals) with the protected domestic sectors (agriculture, banks and financial services, transportation, retailing, healthcare, etc) which have frequently been portrayed as overly-regulated, protected, and inefficient.

The year 2005 has particular significance for Koreans concerning Japan: it is the 100th anniversary of the 1905 protectorate treaty (or Ulsa Treaty) which led to Korea's formal colonization by Japan in 1910. It is also the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Korea from colonial rule and it is the 40th anniversary of the normalization treaty of 1965. The year 2005 has also seen a distinct rise in anti-Japanese sentiments in South Korea. In March, angry swells of South Koreans protested at the Japanese Embassy, burning the flag of the Rising Sun, and expressing emotions so deep that some demonstrators cut off parts of their fingers. Riot police blocked a group of anti-Japanese demonstrators from blowing up a propane gas tank at the embassy gates. Citizens groups called for a boycott of Japanese goods, and at several golf courses, Japanese players were no longer welcome.

In a cavernous basement-style studio in Tokyo's hip Harajuku district, Takahashi Jun, the man some call the future of the Japanese fashion industry, is drawing a picture of a pistol. “This is what we call an ‘art jam session,’ “he says, through a cloud of smoke from an ever-present Marlboro Light, passing the sketch to his friend, the Japanese-American artist Madsaki, who draws what looks like the US White House underneath Takahashi's original gun.

[Written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and later re-worked in Memories of the Battlefield published on the fiftieth anniversary of Japan's surrender, this essay presents wartime violence not as something distant and exceptional, but rather as a pervasive condition of our lives. Tomiyama attempts here ‘to bring out the battlefield in the everyday’, and then from the battlefield, ‘to reconstitute the everyday’. In a time when war and violence can be seen everywhere and yet felt at a remove, his ideas are as pertinent as ever. N.M.]

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Shimoda, the pact that established diplomatic relatins between Japan and Russia.

2005 also marks the 100th anniversary of the Portsmouth Treaty, which ended the Russo- Japanese War.

At those historic moments, Russia and Japan were two unique civilizations at different stages of national development: Russia was at the apex of its eastward expansion and Japan was at the end of more than two centuries of self- imposed isolation. By concluding those treaties, the leaders of the two countries taught us an important lesson: Success in bilateral relations was made possible by extraordinary political leaders who were able to overcome cultural differences and forge a peaceful relationship beyond the immediate consequences of imperialism and war.