[Debate continues in Japan on how to address what is widely felt to be a long-continuing economic, political, and social malaise. One set of prescriptions would be to return to the values of the prewar era, in particular those of the Meiji Constitution and Rescript on Education (1889 and 1890), believed by some conservatives to be “more” Japanese than the Constitution and Fundamental Law of Education that were adopted under the US occupation and came into operation in 1947. Here, Umehara Takeshi, one of Japan's best- known scholars of philosophy and religion and himself a prominent conservative, takes issue with such a view. Japan Focus]

[New efforts are underway to overcome deep strains in Japan-Korea relations in a year in which territorial disputes flared over the Tokdo Islands (Takeshima) and over the treatment of war, colonialism and atrocities in new Japanese school textbooks.]

Although it comes more than 60 years after the fact, Tokyo is trying to get an accurate picture of the use of Korean civilians-often as forced labor-in wartime Japan.

Today the bells of Nagasaki echo in the sky, marking 60 years since the atomic bombing. At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, a single atomic bomb was dropped from an American warplane, exploding in this same sky above us, instantly destroying the city of Nagasaki. Some 74,000 people were killed, and another 75,000 wounded. Some of the victims never knew what happened. Others pleaded for water as death overtook them. Children, so burned and blackened that they could not even cry out, lay with their eyes closed. Those people who narrowly survived were afflicted with deep physical and mental wounds that could never be healed. They continue to suffer from the after-effects of the bomb, living in fear of death.

[The largest number of “Japanese” executed in the B and C Class war tribunals that followed the Tokyo trials after World War II were actually Koreans and Taiwanese, many of them low ranking guards or police in POW camps.

Four times now since August 2003, the government of China has been host to what have become known as the “Six-Sided Talks.” The key protagonists, the United States and North Korea, are as asymmetrical as any two countries could be, on one side the greatest military and industrial power in history and on the other one of the world's poorest and most isolated small states.

How different the 60th anniversaries of the end of World War II in Europe and in Asia. In the former, German participation was taken for granted, and the defeat of Nazism celebrated on all sides as the dawn of liberation. In the latter, it would be inconceivable for the Japanese Government to be invited to participate in commemorative events in Beijing, Seoul, Pyongyang, or elsewhere, as debate over what the war was about continues.

[Beginning in the 1980s, Japan began repatriating thousands of Japanese who remained in China, many of them adopted by Chinese families, six decades ago when Japan was defeated and hundreds of thousands of farmer settlers were abandoned by fleeing Japanese soldiers. This is the story of one survivor. Japan Focus]

Harada Ikuko is haunted by the day she was marked for death. It was August 1945, and she was among a group of 200 Japanese in northeastern China fleeing the advancing Russian army.

The participants at the six-party talks should consider the full scope of activities needed to implement the South Korean scheme; that they should explore an alternative approach that would link the Russian and South Korean grids, thereby achieving the same outcome at lower cost and lesser political risk; and that the six parties should consider adopting a short-term, alternative package rather than resuming HFO deliveries to the DPRK because this approach would provide more energy services, faster, and at lower risk and cost to give immediate substance to statements of longer “term intention to supply assistance to the DPRK. We further suggest that these issues be explored with the North Koreans at the six-party talks at a subsequent technical working group before major commitments are made to proceeding with the South Korean proposal.

Over the past 25 years piracy and armed robbery against vessels have become a growing concern for the shipping industry and the international community. Since 1984, when the International Maritime Organization of the United Nations started to collect information about acts of piracy and armed robbery against vessels, close to 4,000 such acts have been reported to the organization. The problem, moreover, has grown worse since the turn of the millenium. In 2004 alone, 330 cases were recorded - a notable decline from the previous year's 452 cases, but still a substantially higher figure than any year of the twentieth century. Over half of the attacks worldwide, 169 cases in 2004, occurred in Southeast Asia, and a map of the region included in the IMO's annual Report on Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships shows much of Indonesia's coastline dotted with black spots, each representing an attack (1). With most of the attacks in or around Indonesian waters, the country has earned a reputation as a haven for pirates, and a couple of years ago a well-known correspondent and author on organized crime in Asia even dubbed the country the “pirate republic” (2).