Letters in the Heian Period (794-1185) were written on paper made from the bark of the dakekanba birch tree. It's a bit of trivia that few know. One who does is Shinji Iwata.

Iwata, 58, is an aspiring nature guide. Every weekend he drives 150 kilometers to a campsite in Takayama, Gifu Prefecture, where the forest is deep and skunk cabbage blooms in tiny brooks. He has been training here as a guide for the past nine months.

News on New Delhi's foreign policy has recently been among the top stories in the media. On April 11, 2005, India started a strategic partnership with China, and, on June 29, 2005, signed a 10-year defense agreement with the United States. Western observers, however, have paid less attention to an ambitious Indian move in the military field: Project Seabird. This plan – with origins from the mid-1980s – is to be assessed in light of two geopolitical triangles juxtaposing on the Indian Ocean's background: U.S.-India-China relations and China-Pakistan-India relations. In this complicated geopolitical configuration, New Delhi is not simply a partner of China or the United States: India is emerging as a major power that follows its own grand strategy in order to enhance its power and interests.

As Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has adopted its draft of a new constitution that would clear the way for a greater role in international security, many people here and abroad will question:

September 8, 2005, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of US soldiers on the Korean peninsula to accept the surrender of Japanese forces. There will likely be little fanfare accompanying this event. At the end of World War II, Koreans viewed the Soviets and the Americans equally as liberators, and neither occupation force was expected to stay long on Korean soil. The special relationship between South Korea and the United States was forged by later events: the formation of the Republic of Korea (ROK) under American auspices in August 1948, the Korean War of 1950-53, and the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954. The US-ROK alliance was, as the North Koreans and Chinese like to say of their own relationship, a “friendship cemented in blood,” marked by memories of shared sacrifice. It also involved the stationing of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea. For over forty years, the purpose of this alliance was seen by both sides as clear and unambiguous: defending South Korea, as part of the “free world,” against the threat of the North, backed by China and the Soviet Union. The loosening of cold war alignments and the Soviet collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s problematized but did not fundamentally alter this sense of shared purpose. But in the last ten years, and especially the last five, the US and South Korea have drifted increasingly farther apart in their views of the North Korean threat, and the nature of US-ROK relations more generally. While new critical attitudes toward the US in South Korea are often portrayed in the Western media rather simplistically as “anti-Americanism,” in fact they reflect a changing and increasingly complex relationship between America and Korea, between the ROK and North Korea (DPRK), and between Korea and its regional neighbors. The cold war is, in fact, finally and belatedly ending in and around the Korean peninsula, and with it the structure of international relationships it created.

[For forty years, beginning with a desert test visible from the Sky Bar at Las Vegas’ Desert Inn, 928 nuclear devices were exploded at the Nevada test site, many of them above ground. In March 2005, the 8,000 square foot Atomic Testing Museum opened its doors near the Las Vegas strip. As Greg Mitchell records in the following piece, the museum is as notable for what goes unmentioned as for the events it depicts: these include the victims of the first atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the plight of the “downwinders”, more than 12,000 of whom have filed claims in relationship to cancer and other illnesses that may be linked to the nuclear tests or uranium mining.]

The military implementation of the George W Bush administration's unilateralist foreign policy is creating monumental changes in the world's geostrategic alliances. The most significant of these changes is the formation of a new triangle comprised of China, Iran and Russia.

After the election of moderate President Khatami in Iran in 1997, and the lack of any change in Washington's hardline policies toward that country in the months and years that followed, Tokyo began to grow more and more uncomfortable with the American line. As a result, by about 1999 the Japanese government began to seek closer relations with Teheran. This was symbolized by Foreign Minister Komura Masahiko's visit to Iran in August 1999, and the resumption of yen loans.

Tahara Soichiro's Nihon no sengo (Japan's postwar), a recent work of Japanese popular history from one of the country's best-selling and most widely read journalists, bears the provocative subtitle “Were we mistaken?” [1] This question, asked of the entire postwar period, is representative of a significant current in contemporary Japanese thought - the idea that Japan has strayed from the “correct” path and failed to live up to international “norms”. In recent years, Japanese debates about war and peace, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been influenced by this view. Conservatives play up the idea that the Japanese constitution, which explicitly forbids participation in armed conflict and the maintenance of military forces, means that the nation has not been able to play a role in world affairs appropriate to its economic might. Progressives criticize the Japanese government's failure to adequately apologize and compensate the victims of colonialism and war for aggression and atrocities. In both views, Japan is abnormal, and incapable of living up to “universals” - either the “universal” right to self-defense and duty to participate in international conflicts like the “war on terror”, or the necessity to inculcate the view that “war is wrong” and the idea that past crimes must be dealt with honestly in the public sphere.

The third annual head-of-state summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Moscow on May 20, 2003, may be considered a minor water-shed in the life of the organization, made up of Russia, China, and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

First, the meeting implemented concrete measures to institutionalize the organization, by mandating the creation of two permanent offices and attendant staff—an SCO Secretariat, and a Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS). Second, China has since emerged as the first among equals of the players in the SCO in terms of influence and benefits, when it was decided that Beijing would be the site of the proposed SCO Secretariat, subsequently inaugurated on January 15, 2004, and that its first Secretary- General would be the former Chinese Vice-Foreign Minster and Ambassador to Russia, Zhang Deguang. Third, although cooperation among governments of member states against terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and separatism has remained the focus of the SCO, the summit expanded its purview to the economic sphere by encouraging trade, investment and infrastructural development among member states. Lastly, by creating the RATS in Uzbekistan's capital of Tashkent after protracted discussion, Russia and China demonstrated that they have recovered sufficiently from the shock and numbness of the introduction of United States soldiers and weaponry into Afghanistan and Central Asia to frame their own approach to regional security within the rubric of the SCO.

Every two weeks one of the world's estimated 6,000 languages dies. It appears inevitable to many that the number of languages spoken throughout the world will have drastically diminished by the end of the 21st century. Pessimistic estimations consider that as many as 80% of the languages currently used will by then have vanished. The danger of such loss does not go unnoticed. Many speakers of indigenous minority languages around the world struggle to retain their mother tongues. This holds also true for the Ryukyu Islands, located between Kyushu and Taiwan. In the course of the nation building process since the Meiji era, a language regime was established throughout Japan in which the language of Tokyo came to serve as the means of interregional communication throughout Japan, including the Ryukyu Islands. The spread of Standard Japanese led to re-negotiations of the language-identity nexus in the Ryukyu Islands. As a matter of fact, so strong proved the idea of one unitary Japanese national language to be in Japan that the Ryukyuan languages are seriously endangered today and conscious efforts of language revitalization are necessary to ensure their future use. This is an account of how the Ryukyuan languages came to be endangered and of current efforts for their revitalization.

[Japan's relations with both North and South Korea remain bedevilled by unresolved issues from the turbulent twentieth century, as illustrated by two cases concerning the remains of victims of a policy of abduction and exploitation across national borders. In the case of North Korea, negotiations over normalization remain stalled over the issue of the remains returned by North Korea in 2004 that supposedly belonged to Yokota Megumi, abducted to North Korea in 1977 (See Disputed Bones). In the case of South Korea, under heavy pressure from Seoul Japan has belatedly moved to settle the cases of some of the hundreds of thousands abducted from the Korean peninsula in the 1930s and 1940s as forced labor, many of who died, their remains being simply deposited in Japanese temples. Other issues still only slowly being attended to from the twentieth century that are addressed in the two articles from Yomiuri that follow include Korean victims of the atomic bomb devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a significant historical monument plundered by Japan from Korea and now about to be returned (to North Korea). Japan Focus]

[This is the third in a series of articles on Japanese policy toward the Middle East that debates the appropriate framework for unraveling issues of Japan-oil- and the United States in Middle East perspective. See earlier contributions by Raquel Shaoul and John de Boer.]

Dr. John de Boer in his article, “Gauging Japan's Role in the Middle East” (Japan Focus Sep. 6, 2005) portrays Japanese involvement in the Middle East, as characterized by a “multidimensional presence”. In his article De Boer claims that “at various points in time, Japan has had a relatively high political profile in the region and its people/institutions have demonstrated an active commitment to a variety of important causes in the Middle East”, illustrated by examples dated from 1904-5 to the present. He concludes, “Gauging Japan's overall involvement in the region makes clear that Japan and the Japanese did not simply become active in the Middle East with the Madrid Peace Process of 1991. Japan has contributed to the “peace process” on a variety of levels since the 1950s and its presence continues to be felt throughout the Middle East”. A major difficulty emerges from this thesis: its failure to differentiate between Japan's political involvement and her political commitment in the Middle East over the years.

March 10 is the 60th anniversary of one of the great forgotten atrocities of World War 2: the fire-bombing of Tokyo which killed over 100,000 people

Saotome Katsumoto was 12 when he heard the familiar rumble of B-29 bombers.

“It was a midnight air raid, but unlike anything we had experienced before. The planes flew in very low, so low you could see the fires reflected in their undercarriages, and they dropped mostly incendiaries. The fires started everywhere and we tried to fight them, but there was a strong, northerly wind fanning the flames. All around me people were on fire, writhing in agony.”

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has become ever more chaotic. Last November, U.S. forces insisted that Fallujah, a Sunni town in central Iraq, was the hub of Iraq's guerrilla organisations, and launched an all-out attack. The Bush administration had been insisting that if U.S. troops wiped out the guerrillas there, resistance in other regions would easily be brought under control, and this would allow the general elections, planned for January 30th, to proceed smoothly. Japanese foreign affairs specialists also predicted that ‘if the U.S. forces bring Fallujah under control, Iraq will become stable.’

Chong Hyang Gyun has just written herself into the history books, but not for the reason she wanted.

The 54-year-old spent a decade fighting the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for the right to take a promotion exam, from which she was barred because of her South Korean nationality. If she had won, nationality would have ceased to be a factor in determining senior civil service jobs in Japan.

TOKYO - With Japan experiencing strained diplomatic relationship with China and South Korea, the opportunity exists to set the tone in balance-of-power politics and economic integration with another neighbor. That is Russia, and the overarching, issue that continues to divide Japan and Russia is sovereignty over the four Russian-held Kuril Islands. Recently, some Japanese experts on Russia have been calling for greater flexibility and compromise by Tokyo, which has always demanded the return of all four islands. There's no sign yet of official acceptance, but pressures are building for Japan to strike a deal and accept a “two islands plus alpha” solution - still to be hammered out. In this perspective, Japan would give up its demands for the return of all four islands and instead accept the two smaller islands and a portion of the two larger ones.

The Nanjing Massacre remains a touchstone of China-Japan conflict nearly seven decades after the event. Now Chinese plans to honor John Rabe, a Germany citizen in Nanjing, for his efforts to protect Chinese citizens from slaughter have inflamed tensions with Japan over war and rare memory. The Chinese plan offers a rare example in the annals of warfare in general, and China in particular, of recognizing in a public and prominent way the achievements of a foreign national in a world that is dominated by nationalist icons.