[What is the driving force behind Japan's policy in the Middle East? Can it be summed up in one word, oil? Is Japan essentially the lapdog of the United States, or has it established an independent position on contentious issues in the region such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Iraq War, and Iran's nuclear development? Raquel Shaoul and John de Boer take up these questions in two articles as they evaluate Japan's impact on the Middle East.]

The original Godzilla film was produced in 1954 and released in November that year, only nine years after the end of the Pacific War. The same production team produced a sequence of 22 Godzilla films between 1954 and 1995, and six more films were created in the years 1995 to 2004 by a different production team. The original Godzilla film, Godzilla, and its first sequel, Godzilla Raids Again produced in 1955, were the result of close cooperation between Producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, Director Honda Ishiro, Special Effects Director Tsuburaya Eiji, and scriptwriter Koyama Shigeru.

When Professor Sodei Rinjiro submitted his book on caricaturist and illustrator Arthur Szyk to his Hosei University publishers, he received an apologetic but unequivocal rejection: “It is well written, nothing wrong with the content, but we can't print the pictures.” The problem was several war-time caricatures of the late Emperor Hirohito that Sodei had provided from his personal collection. “I am sure they were afraid of right-wingers.”

It is widely believed that the major source of kamikaze suicide pilots was the Air Force Cadet Officer System in the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army Forces, which recruited university and college students on a voluntary basis. In fact, however, the majority of kamikaze pilots were young noncommissioned or petty officers, that is graduates of Navy and Army junior flight training schools. A total of 708 noncommissioned Army officers died as kamikaze pilots, while the total death toll of Army Air Force officer class kamikaze pilots was 621. In the Navy, 1732 petty officers died as kamikaze pilots compared with 782 officers. Many assume that the majority of kamikaze pilots were former college students, because the letters-home, diaries and wills of these young men, who became kamikaze pilots through the Air Force Cadet Officer System, were compiled and published as books and pamphlets after the war. The best known of these publications is Kike Wadatsumi no Koe (Listen to the Voices from the Sea). Unfortunately similar personal records left behind by non-commissioned and petty officers are not publicly available. It is therefore necessary to rely on private records to gain a fuller understanding of the thoughts and ideas of these kamikaze pilots.

[With Japan's snap election campaign in full swing and scheduled for 9/11, this timely critical article by UFJ Institute senior analyst Morinaga Takuro looks deep into the social and economic implications of the competing ‘reform’ agendas that presently define Japanese politics to reflect on Japan's emerging underclass. Coverage of Koizumi's “postal privatization” election in the overseas press as well as much of the Japanese media has, by contrast, largely held to script. A chorus of business voices, particularly overseas investors and their advisors, apparently see Koizumi as the embodiment of fiscal austerity, open markets and vigorous growth.

Over 35 years since returning home from the Vietnam War, a former US soldier has returned a poignant diary he recovered from a young Vietcong military doctor. The diary has sparked a patriotic revival in Vietnam, turning the two former enemies into national heroes.

“I had to do an appendix operation without enough medicine. Only a few tubes of Novocain, but the wounded young soldier never cried out or yelled. He continued to smile to encourage me. Looking at the forced smile on his dry lips, knowing his fatigue, I felt so sorry for him…I lightly stroked his hair. I would like to say to him: ‘Patients like you who I cannot cure cause me the most sorrow, and their memory will not fade.’“

In the wake of the North Korean famine, which began in 1995, hundreds of thousands of people fled to northeast China. Although many returned and a smaller number went to third countries, many tens of thousands remain. They face two main problems. First is the mistreatment they sometimes receive. China does not recognize them as refugees, or even the legality of their being in the country, so they are forced into an underground existence, making them targets for economic and sexual exploitation.

The firebombing of Tokyo, or for that matter the bombing of any city, whether it be Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden or London, cannot be fully comprehended unless it is examined in the context of the history of indiscriminate bombing throughout the twentieth century.

[This is an introduction to two Office of War Information propaganda films on Japanese Internment. To view the films, click on the URLs at the end of this article.]

Upon viewing once again the Office of War Information's “newsreels” on the forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II, I am struck by the contradictions of the ideals of U.S. democracy and its realities. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his message to Congress about a year before the U.S. plunged into the war, articulated some of those ideals. In his speech, Roosevelt told the nation and world that the U.S. was a beacon of democracy amidst the darkness of Europe and East Asia engulfed by despotisms. “We look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms,” the President declared. “The freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—anywhere in the world.” That global insistence on American democracy's imperative, “everywhere in the world,” bespeaks an imperial and “noble” mission that became the ostensible purpose for U.S. involvement in World War II.

We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stone wall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb. Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it. An hour later he had to give a speech as head of the Independent Commission on Disarmament of which I was a member. “My fear,” he remarked, “is that mankind itself will end up as nothing more than a shadow on a wall.”

Thursday, June 16, 2005 is a date that will be etched in memory as the day Japan's proposal for United Nations reform was dealt a fatal blow by the U.S. government.

The United States’ proposal on reform of the U.N. Security Council released that day calls for expansion of membership from the current 15 to 19 or 20, by adding “two or so” permanent members to the current five– Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States–as well as two or three additional nonpermanent members.

This article introduces the concept of “Insider minorities”, those whose difference is of a sort that currently does not deny their Japanese-ness in the eyes of other Japanese, as opposed to outsider minorities, who are considered foreign despite their long, even multigenerational, residence within Japan. Most surveys of minorities in Japan have focused on ethnic minorities, including Koreans and Chinese, as well as the indigenous Ainu and Okinawans. The Burakumin ends up being the only non-ethnic group to be included (see De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995; Weiner, 1997; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1998). Such a focus on ethnic and racial minorities, however, fails to recognize the extent of difference that exists in Japan. Indeed, ethnic minorities in Japan, together with the Burakumin, account for only 4 to 6% of the Japanese population (De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995, p.272), making it easy for many Japanese, most notably former Prime Minister Nakasone, to claim ethnic and racial homogeneity in contrast to other countries such as the U.S. (Creighton, 1997).

“Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over.” Chevron

Over the past year, benchmark oil prices shot up from a little over US$40 per barrel and reached just over $70 a few weeks ago. As of this writing, prices have fallen back to about $64, but that probably reflects the end of the summer driving season in the US, which somewhat reduces pressure on gasoline supplies. A lot of optimism also animates the markets, in spite of the havoc Hurricane Katrina wreaked on American oil production and refining capacity. The markets look to the International Energy Agency's (IEA) early September decision to coordinate a release of 2 million barrels of oil and oil products per day, for at least 30 days, from its 26 member countries’ strategic reserves and supplies.

[This posting consists of a two part article by Wall Street Journal Correspondent Jess Bravin on the rights, and abuses of those rights, of POWs under the Japanese in World War II and under the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, and the pertinent legal and criminal issues. The analogy should be a chilling one for a nation that pioneered, in the wake of World War II, in pressing charges of prisoner abuse and insisting on responsibility both of the immediate perpetrator of violations of human rights, on up through the chain of command to the highest authority. See also the article by Utsumi Aiko, Japan's leading specialist on World War II POW issues, which addresses Japan's policies toward prisoners.]

As Randolph Bourne discerned as far back as 1917, a state waging war is readily able to obtain support for its undertaking from sizable numbers of intellectuals. Such factors as jingoism, combative egos, power worship, or considerations of profit and prestige ensure that numerous academics, journalists, writers, and critics will pronounce eloquently in favor of the warring state and exhort their compatriots to back it without question. Although a uniformly pro-war consensus is seldom attained, hawkish intellectuals play an important role in engineering consent and discrediting opposition to official policies. Appreciative of the services rendered by its intellectual myrmidons, the state rewards them, directly or indirectly.

[This is one of a series of articles on Japanese thinking about war, war responsibility, Yasukuni shrine, and Japan's place in East Asia. Others include Yomiuri Shimbun, Yasukuni: Behind the Torii, Herbert Bix, Japan's Surrender Decision and the Monarchy, Yomiuri and Asahai, Yasukuni Shrine, Yasukuni Shrine, Nationaliism and Japan's International Relations, Laura Hein, Remembrance of World War II and the Postwar in the United States and Japan Remembrance of World War II and the Postwar in Japan and the United States, and John Breen, Yasukuni Shrine: ritual and memory. The series as a whole highlights deep divisions in Japanese thought both about the assessment of the war and the implications of that assessment for the future of Japan's role in East Asia.]

The media discourse of ‘winners and losers’ is spreading. Yet in everyday conversation, people rarely describe themselves as ‘winners’. Often it is nothing but the subject of a joke. We should reserve judgment about the extent to which this perspective has been internalised. It is difficult to apply the ‘win-lose’ vocabulary. To begin with, this new ideology of ‘competition’ and ‘win-lose’ is a choice by elimination due to the lack of an alternative. It is forced on people by the impact of globalisation and international competition. It criticises past ideology, but it has not been embraced on the basis of conviction. Hence it remains somewhat strange and unfamiliar to us.

On the day of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March 1995, we were shocked beyond words. It was the first act of indiscriminate terrorism in Japan. It was also the first time for most of us to hear the term “sarin.” But this nerve gas with an unfamiliar name was actually released inside subway cars, killing and injuring many people.

I am among those who accept the necessity for reorganization of the United Nations Security Council; we need a change in composition of the countries that comprise it. At the same time, I should like to recall that this reorganization is not the same as a reform of the United Nations.

Restructuring of the Security Council is needed, I believe, because the principles guiding its composition are outmoded. In particular, the basis for the selection of its permanent members has lost any sense of reality and legitimacy.