Aso Mining Company had been producing coal to fuel Japan's modernization for nearly 70 years by the time Aso Taro, Japan's current foreign minister, was born in 1940. Faced with a severe heavy labor shortage as the China war gave way to the Pacific War, Japanese industry increasingly turned to Korean, Allied POW and Chinese forced labor. Some 10,000 Korean forced laborers toiled under miserable conditions for Aso Mining. In addition, it is now emerging that 300 Allied prisoners of war performed forced labor at Fukuoka POW Branch Camp No. 26, better known as the Aso Yoshikuma coal mine. Two-thirds of the prisoners were Australian; one-third was British; two were Dutch.

Okinawa is far from Tokyo, even farther from Washington. An insignificant group of islands with a mere 1.3 million people, it is, more than anywhere, the child of the US-Japan relationship, in which the essential nature of both, and of their relationship, is starkly revealed. Insignificant … and yet, by their location between China and Japan, and between Japan and Southeast Asia, they are of extraordinary strategic significance in the postwar strategic calculus in the Asia Pacific region. Only in Okinawa does one become conscious that Japan's “peace state” has long had its counterpart of Okinawa as “war state.” Now, as the rest of Japan faces the implications of US pressure to become a fully-fledged ally, the “Great Britain of the Far East,” and as forces associated with the Libral Democratic Party relish and seek to advance this prospect, it is to Okinawa that one may look to see what this might mean.

The Iraq war has produced more ironies than successes. The greatest of them is that an attack designed to demonstrate the preeminent power of the United States has ended up making clear that we now live in an era of supranationalism.

The United States stands poised between wanting to write its own ticket and wishing to speed efforts to solve the world's problems. Conspicuously first among equals, it is going to have to get used to the idea that national sovereignty belongs to the past.

[We present a two part series on Angkor Wat and Asian tourism. See Geoffrey Gunn, “Angkor and Beyond: the Asian tourism phenomenon”]

SIEM REAP, Cambodia–Tourism is becoming the lifeblood of this land that survived the “killing fields” and a civil war. There are many signs of progress in the 13 years since United Nations-sponsored elections brought peace.

The pace of Japan's economy is picking up again after more than a decade of stasis. During this long period of economic stagnation, the many personnel practices favoring employees known by the rubric “lifetime employment” have been subjected to increased criticism by pro-investor, neo-liberal voices. Yet other less-well-amplified voices in Japan offer an alternative criticism of, and look for opportunity in, the changing status quo as well. In the last quarter of the 20th century efforts to create worker-owned and democratically governed businesses in Japan began to emerge with the support of a wide variety of economic actors – among them labor unions and union organizers, consumer cooperatives, incomeseeking housewives, the elderly, employees of small businesses, farmers and farm workers, employees of failing firms and maverick employees of large firms. And as worker owned and managed businesses have increased in size and number, their awareness of each other and their common interest in alternative ways to organize production has also grown.

In September 1951 Japan signed a peace treaty with 48 countries in San Francisco. This postwar peace treaty fell far short of settling outstanding issues at the end of the Pacific War or facilitating a clean start for the “postwar” period. Rather, various aspects of the settlement were left equivocal, and continue to have significant and worrisome implications for regional international relations. The treaty's handling of territorial disposition is a case in point. Close examination of treaty drafts reveals key links between the regional Cold War that was unfolding in 1951 and equivocal language about the designation of territory, which can be related to several contentious frontier problems in the contemporary Asia-Pacific. More than half a century later, the so-called Acheson Line and Containment Line still divide countries of the region, part of a legacy of unresolved problems. The global shift to the postCold War era does not negate the significance of the Cold War origins of these problems. In fact, it is appropriate to pinpoint their common origin and consider solutions in a multilateral context.

In 1942 the U.S. War Relocation Authority hired documentary photographer Dorothea Lange to photograph the World War II internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. Lange is now a world-famous documentary photographer, best known for chronicling the Great Depression of the 1930s. Her work is the subject of more than a dozen glossy art books. Even those who do not know her name will recognize some of her pictures. One of her photographs has been called the most famous image in the U.S.

Contrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America's national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented development that most US policy-makers have recklessly disregarded, as evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-Communist Russia during the past fifteen years.

The rapid and spectacular rise of Shanghai as a global city has, regrettably brought back to life a series of arguments that overemphasize intercity competition and leave out the growing importance of networked inter-city systems and dynamics. The scales of such networked systems vary; they can be global, regional, subnational. There is competition, and as a city like Shanghai gains power, others such as Tokyo and Taipei lose some power-investment, prestige, and perhaps more than anything else, clout. But inter-city competition is only half the story, and overemphasizing it leads to misunderstandings of how the global economy actually functions. Overemphasizing competition also leads to missed opportunities for cities, such as developing parallel networked inter-city policy initiatives centered on the growing economic importance of intercity networks for firms and markets.

The Japanese administration of Formosa from 1895-1945 changed the island's social landscape forever; not least by bringing the Austronesian First Nation people of eastern and central Taiwan under the administration of the modern nation-state for the first time. The Taroko tribe of Northeastern Taiwan (formerly part of the Atayal tribe) was the last tribe to submit to Japanese rule, but only after the violent subjugation of an anti-Japanese uprising in the 1930s. Shortly thereafter, however, Taroko men were recruited into the Japanese Imperial Army. The names of those who died during the war are now honored at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a situation that occasionally becomes the object of protests by Taiwanese politicians. This article, based on field research in a Taroko community in Hualien, looks at how social memories of the Japanese administration have contributed to both Taroko identity and to various other forms of nationalism in contemporary Taiwan. How do Taroko individuals and collectivities remember the Japanese? How do these memories articulate with nationalist ideologies in the larger Taiwanese society?

[The Nuclear Proliferation Treaty seeks to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons by preventing non-nuclear powers from developing nuclear weapons and requiring that nuclear powers dismantle their stockpiles. Mohammed ElBaradei, Director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has described as “unworkable” the way of thinking that it is “morally reprehensible for some counties to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.” In the latest U.S. flouting of NPT obligations, the National Nuclear Security Administration has now announced plans for a new generation of nuclear warheads. Japan Focus]

It comes as no surprise that the recent resurgence of neo-nationalist thought in Japan would find expression in cinema.[1] With the issue of the nation and its ability to fight war, currently prohibited by Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, being vigorously challenged by the ruling party and the right, in part through actual deployment of Self-Defense Forces in Iraq and other danger zones, it is significant that the year 2005 saw the release of four big budget spectaculars offering particular visions of Japanese fighting wars. Two, Lorelei (“Rorerai,” director: Higuchi Shinji) and Samurai Commando: Mission 1549 (“Sengoku Jieitai 1549,” director: Tezuka Masaaki), are outright fantasies, albeit ones that offer alternative narratives of historical wars (World War II in the former, the sixteenth century civil wars in the latter).

TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States has informally asked Japan to suspend its plans to develop an Iranian oil field as part of world efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, a Japanese newspaper said on Thursday.

Resource-poor Japan has been planning to develop Iran's Azadegan oil field, estimated to hold the world's second-biggest single oil reserve, despite objections from Washington.

In this article Mark J. Valencia, a maritime policy analyst based in Hawaii writes, “such interdictions, without the permission of the flag state, on or over the high seas, could be considered an act of war. Some thought North Korea was bluffing when it said it would launch ballistic missiles. They thought it was bluffing when it said it had a nuclear weapon. They also thought it was bluffing when it said it would test a nuclear weapon. Now it has threatened war if its vessels or aircraft are interdicted. Given this history of miscalculation on both sides, the United States and its friends in the region need to carefully consider if they want to contribute to the cause of a possible Second Korean War.”

Japan's expat rebel with many causes blends music and a wider world view

Former Japanese pop heart-throb and musical pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto talks to David McNeill about music, the state of the planet –and why he still reluctantly lives in New York City.

On August 18, 2006, the entire collection of English language commentaries was abruptly pulled from the website of the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) following an attack by a columnist in the nationalist Sankei Shimbun. When the site reopened, all texts by Japanese authors had been eliminated.

The controversy hinges on the fact that the Institute, whose English language website describes it as “an academically independent institution affiliated with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs” (MOFA), also describes itself as Japan's “foremost center for producing and disseminating ideas on international relations.” (The official, Japanese language site is silent on the subject both of “independent” and “affiliated with MOFA”.)

The unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution condemning North Korea's Taepodong-2 missile test give both North Korea and the Bush administration an excuse not to negotiate. As such, it misses the point.

The Taepodong-2 test is no bolt from the blue just to get attention. It is Pyongyang's reaction to backtracking by Washington in the ten months since a breakthrough was reached in six-party talks.

[Michael Klare, who has written compellingly on oil as a driving factor in US policy in the Middle East and globally, here turns his gaze toward yet larger dynamics driving US military strategy. He concludes that in a world in which there is only one potential military threat to US primacy, the single logical explanation for the continued growth of the US military budget, its drive to expand its nuclear arsenal and to extend its nuclear hegemony to outer space, can be summed up in one word: China.

Three US administrations have failed to avoid North Korean breakout from the NonProliferation Treaty and a gaping hole in the IAEA safeguards system. Nuclear war is once again conceivable in Korea after a brief interlude in the early 1990s when this prospect all but disappeared. The North's announcement on October 4, 2006 that it intends to test a nuclear weapon underscores this failure.