[This article illuminates the geopolitical background and implications of the continuing Russia-Ukranian gas dispute whose reverberations extend across Western Europe and beyond. Many market analysts regarded Russian President Vladimir Putin's early January decision to threaten cutting gas supplies to the Ukraine (and by extension, Europe) as insane. The business press filled with claims that Putin was shooting himself in the foot and that he had embarrassed Russia just as it was slated to assume leadership of the G-8 in January (on a platform of energy security, no less!).

LONDON – “Economic reform” has been the banner slogan of Japanese governments for the last 10 years, and the new government promises more of it.

For Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, it is not quite the strident claim to fearless determination that it was for his predecessor, but there is no doubt about the general direction of economic institutional change. Abe's chief Cabinet secretary is a dedicated neoliberal, and the appointment of renowned market fundamentalists as academic members of his Economic Council is a clear sign of which way some of the long-standing controversial issues are likely to be resolved. Expect tax reforms to make it easier for foreign firms to take over Japanese firms, for instance.

Uchihashi Katsuto is a well-known political and economic critic. Born in Kobe in 1932, he worked as a journalist with the Kobe Shimbun newspaper until 1967, when he became a freelance journalist and writer. He is the author of more than seventy books and frequently appears on radio and television. This ‘essay’ is his keynote address at a June 2005 symposium celebrating the 60th anniversary of the influential monthly Sekai (The World).

The title of this essay, ‘The Lost “Human Country,” ‘may appear bewildering, but the central term has a long history in Japanese discourse. ‘Human country’ (ningen no kuni) was used by Christians to translate biblical expressions such as those given in English as ‘kingdoms of this world’ (Rev. 11:15) or ‘human society’ (Daniel 4:31). Christians in Japan have a history of social and political activism since at least the Heiminsha (Commoners’ Society) was established to oppose the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. This spirit of resistance has provided ethical support for many contemporary opposition movements.

History, like the cinema, can often be a matter of perspective. That's why Clint Eastwood's decision to narrate the Battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and the Japanese point of view is not really new; it had been done before in Tora Tora Tora (1970), for instance. But by dividing these perspectives in different films directed at Japanese and international audiences, Eastwood makes history not merely an issue of which side you are on, but of how to look at history itself.

A long time ago, I visited Seizo Kaikan in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, while covering a Lower House election. The facility was the local base of Lower House member Kato Koichi. It also served as an assembly hall for his supporters.

The hall was built in 1961 for Kato's late father Seizo, also a politician, with money raised by his supporters. Since Kato succeeded his father and won his first election in 1972, the walls were said to have been covered by campaign posters from 12 elections. The histories of the two politicians were deeply ingrained there.

[Why is the news of a plan to move 7,000 US Marine troops from southern Okinawa to Guam creating no good vibes in Okinawa? Because nothing much is changing. The Japanese Government is proceeding with construction of a new US Marine Corps Air Station in Nago, to ‘replace’ the old Futenma base. Throughout the last decade, locals have resolutely fought the US military presence. Period. However, Tokyo and Washington have basically ridden roughshod over locals’ democratic expression of opposition, including, the outcome of the 1997 Nago citizens’ referendum against the relocation of Futenma to Henoko and, since April 2004, residents’ non-violent blockade action to prevent the government's preliminary site investigations and ocean floor drilling.

When Hokamura Kenichiro's kidneys failed, he waited over four years for a transplant before going online to check out rumors of organs for sale.

As a native of Japan, where less than 10 kidney transplants are performed a year, the 62-year- old businessman was desperate. “There are 100 people waiting in this prefecture alone and there were just three operations performed here last year. I would have died before getting a donor.”

By drawing attention to Iraq and the obvious role oil plays in US policy today, the George W Bush-Dick Cheney administration has done just that: it has drawn the world's energy-deficit powers’ attention firmly to the strategic battle over energy, and especially oil.

This is already having consequences for the global economy in terms of US$75-a-barrel crude-oil price levels. Now it is taking on the dimension of what one former US defense secretary rightly calls a “geopolitical nightmare” for the United States.

Just after 9/11, the United States allegedly threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” unless it joined the war on terror. In his new book, Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf attributes the ultimatum to Richard Armitage, who flatly denies it. Sounding slightly less sure, President Bush says he was “taken aback by the harshness of the words.”

QUESTION: Choose the correct statement about Korea under Japanese rule.

1. 1) A government-general was established and Ito Hirobumi was the first governor-general.

2. 2) Korea was the first foreign territory acquired by Japan after the Meiji Restoration.

3. 3) The system of giving Koreans Japanese names was implemented at the time of annexation.

4. 4) Koreans were forcibly transported to Japan during World War II.

Yasukuni Shrine, home for a century and a half to the spirits of Japan's fallen soldiers, has fueled controversy in every decade of my academic career. When I arrived in Tokyo as the 1970s were about to dawn, great numbers of students and young radicals across the nation were working in concert with writers, professors, and Christian theologians of all ages in opposition to the state's ties to the Shinto institution. In the mid-1980s, I attended a dinner at which Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro sought (and received) the support of several prominent American scholars for his much-criticized visits to Yasukuni as prime minister. While I was visiting Beijing several years ago, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro made one of his periodic visits to the shrine, touching off a level of anger that I could only grasp by being in China. And today, as I write this from Tokyo, the Chinese assert that they will judge Japan's next political leader by one issue above all others: whether he visits Yasukuni.

With recent developments in Iraq and elsewhere, an argument is beginning to appear—or re-appear– that much of twentieth century imperialism might better be thought of as a kind of federalism. Thus, Anthony Pagden, who provides the most cogent version of this argument, believes that “it would be far wiser to look upon both the United States and the European Union as, in their very different ways, attempts to revive a federalist rather than an imperial object.” Pagden traces his ideas to thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and Jean Monnet (credited with the idea of a “United States of Europe”). According to Pagden, the ages of conquest and commerce were, by the twentieth century, being replaced by a global order in which the 18th century European idea of sovereignty was transferred from the nation-state to “something more amorphous: a modern, or postmodern, global society.” At the base of this development was the idea of empire, which survived the competitive nationalisms of the 19th century, as an “extended protectorate” and in the words of Edmund Burke, a “sacred trust”.

Richard Weitz in “The Sino-Russian Arms Dilemma,” clarifies important elements of strategic dimensions of their deepening and expanding relationship. In previous articles, notably

In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military,” whom New York Times' columnist William Safire soon branded “creeps”–a line that few in the press had reason to challenge.

Eric Johnston's two-part article examines the issues in Okinawa's gubernatorial election and the implications for the continuing US-Okinawa conflict over the transfer of the Futenma Air Base to Henoko in northern Okinawa where a strong anti-base movement has long thwarted base relocation efforts by the US and Japan.

“We have heard that in March of Showa 21 [1946], the directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [MOFA] compiled such an investigative record. However, it was thought that if the documents were used for war crimes prosecutions they would cause trouble to a great many people. Therefore, all of the documents were burned and MOFA does not now possess even a portion of the documents”

Tokyo - The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday - laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.

A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as American forces occupied the Japanese capital.

[Chua and Yeo in this tour d'horizon of nuclear proliferation reveal the large number of players edging toward nuclear weapons capacity. They also hint at another central theme in US policy toward India: creating one more powerful link in the chain of China encirclement. The net effect is to doom hopes for a viable NPT regime, with the US leading the way in its demise. MS]