[Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of South Korean atomic bomb victims, repatriated to South Korea and bereft of the Japanese citizenship they held under colonial rule, continue to be denied access to Japanese government supported medical care and benefits, despite court victories that guaranteed these rights. Pressure rightly continues to be applied to the Japanese government to assure their rights. No one, however, seems to be asking another question: what is U.S. responsibility for the surviving victims of the atomic bombs, whether Koreans or Chinese, many of them taken to Korea against their will, or Japanese? Japan Focus]

Over the nearly six decades since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a substantial majority of Americans has continued to defend the action. The heated controversies surrounding the opening in 1995 and 2003 of bomb-related exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum of the U.S. government's Smithsonian Institution help to clarify the bases for this stubborn defense. During the Smithsonian disputes, peace groups and historians provided a spirited and informed critique of the necessity for the Hiroshima bombing and highlighting its human costs. Nevertheless, more hawkish forces, appealing to narrow definitions of patriotism, easily won the battle for public opinion.

[Warren Buffett, the so-called Sage of Omaha (and the world's wealthiest investor), reputedly lost $310 million in the first quarter of this year betting that the US dollar would fall. On the other hand, he is said to have made masses of money on the same bet last year. When asked about the dollar, Buffett admits he can't say whether its value will be up or down a year from now, but is confident it will be down over five years. As long-time Japan watcher Clyde Prestowitz points out in this article, Buffett is not at all alone. George Soros, Bill Gates and many others with plenty of cash to absorb even immense losses, are patiently waiting for America's overheating structural problems - especially the huge and expanding budget and trade deficits - to melt more wax from the still high-flying dollar's wings.

From the Taiwan Strait to the Strait of Malacca, security concerns are growing around the South China Sea. While the Bush Administration sees a resurgent Chinese military threat across the Taiwan Strait and a terrorist threat in the Strait of Malacca, many countries between the Straits are more concerned about security for their maritime resources from the threats of competitors, traffickers, poachers, and pirates.

Mr. Tsuboi Sunao would appear to be an ordinary healthy elderly Japanese man except for the large patch of white skin that medical specialists call leucoderma on his forehead. He is a cheerful 79 year old, but over the past 60 years he has been critically ill four times, each time being told that he would not survive. He first fell ill immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima when he was unconscious for 40 days. He is presently suffering from prostate cancer. Despite his illness he has been and still is an active campaigner against nuclear arms and one of the best known hibakusha, or victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In December 2003 he went to Washington D.C., to protest against the permanent display of the “Enola Gay” in the new wing of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He was not against the actual display of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people by the end of 1945. Rather he was against the exhibition of this plane without any explanation of the consequences caused as a result of the attack that took so many civilian lives and left tens of thousands of others to suffer throughout their lives.

As the United States gears up for an attack on Iran, one thing is certain: the Bush administration will never mention oil as a reason for going to war. As in the case of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be cited as the principal justification for an American assault. “We will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon [by Iran],” is the way President Bush put it in a much-quoted 2003 statement. But just as the failure to discover illicit weapons in Iraq undermined the administration's use of WMD as the paramount reason for its invasion, so its claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism. More important, any serious assessment of Iran's strategic importance to the United States should focus on its role in the global energy equation.

The final reflections of a convicted war criminal enshrined at Yasukuni Jinja

One of the major reasons for Chinese and Korean public criticism of Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to Yasukuni Shrine is that 14 out of 28 A-Class Japanese war criminals are enshrined there. Seven among them including Tojo Hideki and Matsui Iwane were executed at the conclusion of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and the other seven died either during the tribunal or while serving their sentences. Yasukuni Shrine also sanctifies many B and C- Class war criminals, many of whom were directly responsible for atrocities committed throughout the Asia-Pacific region. One of those is Tomoyuki Yamashita, who was enshrined on 17 October 1959. As the commander who led the Japanese Imperial Army troops to invade Singapore in February 1942, he was nicknamed the ‘Tiger of Malaya.’

In late July 2004, as I opened the window curtains of my posh room in the Rihga Royal Hotel and looked out at the city of Hiroshima, I was struck by how marvelously it had been restored. Fifty-nine years ago, Hiroshima had been nearly obliterated by the fire and blast of the U.S. atomic bombing, which killed 140,000 people by the end of 1945 and left tens of thousands of others dying slowly and painfully from radiation poisoning. Now the city had been thoroughly rebuilt, with its sea of modern buildings, surrounded by green mountains, glittering in the sunshine. More than a million people lived there.

The overwhelming attention accorded the North Korean nuclear issue seems to have precluded a close examination of the U.S. - South Korean relationship as it enters a profound transitional period. [1] Current internal trends and dynamics in South Korean politics will require a fundamental reassessment of that relation. A major change in the character of the alliance, especially its military dimensions, is in the offing. However, such a change need not be seen as detrimental to the U.S.

[The press is filled with reports on the multiple conflicts erupting in the China seas: territorial conflicts, resource conflicts, and historical conflicts. Rarely is there serious discussion of the efforts by the nations of the world's most dynamic economic region to achieve amity and cooperation on issues of mutual interest. Fisheries and the resources of the sea is one such realm, and David Rosenberg explores the impressive progress among the powers of the region in attempting to regulate fishing, while highlighting the continued conflicts and difficulties in regulating fishing at a time of sharp decline in catch. Japan Focus.]

When Oe Kenzaburo was 28, and already a cult writer for Japan's postwar youth, his first child was born in 1963 with a herniated brain pushing out of his skull, the “two-headed monster baby” of Oe's later fiction. Corrective surgery threatened brain damage, and for a while the father longed for the infant's death -a “disgraceful” time, he later wrote in a fictionalised memoir, that “no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash out of my life”. Yet a visit to Hiroshima to report on a peace congress, and encounters with atomic-bomb survivors, convinced Oe beyond doubt that his child must live. “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son,” he says.

Many observers of the 3rd and 4th round of six-party talks in Beijing were surprised with what was labeled “an unreasonable demand” by North Korea for provision of a light-water reactor (LWR). Why did would North Korea not ask for something less controversial and easier- to-implement - such as a gas-powered thermal power station, or for the supply of electricity from South Korea or China? Since progress had been made on so many difficult problems, including Japanese concerns that Pyongyang did not want to discuss at all when the talks started, negotiators were at first disinclined to take the demand seriously, thinking of it just as another tactical maneuver to raise the stakes and prolong the discussion so that the time for real “actions for actions” would be indefinitely postponed.

The 2004 government announcement that it was considering joining the US in the production of a missile defence system was deeply troubling to Japanese and Asians concerned about Japan's expansive military posture in tandem with the US. Over the years, Japan has created a high tech non-nuclear military force. But it has steadfastly maintained an official ban on weapons exports. Many feared that the move heralded the end of Japan's nearly 40-year-old ban on arms exports.

Many Asians are now debating the idea of Asia. Some want to create a regional system in opposition to neo-liberal imperialism. Others want to transcend nationalism, which they regard as outmoded, and to create a fresh sense of Asian identity that does not depend on the old, and western-invented, dichotomy of East and West.

As the United States gears up for an attack on Iran, one thing is certain: the Bush administration will never mention oil as a reason for going to war. As in the case of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be cited as the principal justification for an American assault. “We will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon [by Iran],” is the way President Bush put it in a much-quoted 2003 statement. But just as the failure to discover illicit weapons in Iraq undermined the administration’s use of WMD as the paramount reason for its invasion, so its claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism. More important, any serious assessment of Iran’s strategic importance to the United States should focus on its role in the global energy equation.

The practice was known as “laborer hunting,” and on that June 1944 afternoon 28-year-old Liu Zhongtang became the prey. Abducted at bayonet point by Japanese Army soldiers from his North China farm field, Liu was first taken to their local base camp for torture and interrogation, and then plunged into the brutal feeder system for Chinese forced labor in Japan. At one point he was held in an underground pit covered with wooden boards before ending up in the wretched Tanggu concentration camp on the coast. Detention conditions were so bad that 812 captives died between the Chinese coast and their intended work sites in Japan, in Liu's case the Ashio copper mine in Tochigi Prefecture.

The Sept. 11 Lower House election resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Liberal Democratic Party. Now the prospect that two great parties will alternate administrations in the manner of the prewar Seiyukai (Friends of Constitutional Government Party) and Minseito (Constitutional Democratic Party) is more distant than ever. How has this come about?

Of course, the single-seat constituencies systematically favor the large parties. Even if the LDP loses some votes, the party does not lose Diet seats. Even if the Social Democratic Party gains some votes, it does not gain Diet seats.

Coastal defenses in Western Japan were threatened in late August by a ferocious storm, typhoon no. 16, that happened to coincide with the highest tide of the year. At the same time, a remarkable judgment, more startling and possibly more devastating than the typhoon, emerged from a court in Saga in Kyushu. The tide of Japan's civil society protest against the corruption, waste, and destruction wrought in the name of “public works” has long been rising. It is here that flotillas of hundreds of fishing boats have from time to time blockaded the government's reclamation works at Isahaya Bay, drums beating and flags flying as in the righteous uprisings of feudal times, till now always beaten back by the authorities. This unexpected judicial intervention had the potential to raise the tide to the point of threatening, or even breaching, the dikes surrounding Japan's infamous construction state (or doken kokka).