A friend of mine who lives in the picturesque port city of Otaru, western Hokkaido, is a fish-hunter. He loves to dive, and hunts for fish with a spear gun – seafood is his manna from heaven.

With the worsening food crisis in North Korea in the mid-1990s, thousands of people from the food-deficit areas of the country crossed the border into China. While many returned to North Korea with food or money, some stayed in China. Several thousand of these made their way, usually through great hardship, to South Korea.

“… the only government in the world today that can be identified as being actively involved in directing crime as a central part of its national economic strategy and foreign policy. … In essence, North Korea has become a ‘soprano state’ - a government guided by a Worker's Party leadership whose actions, attitudes, and affiliations increasingly resemble those of an organized crime family more than a normal nation.

From September 2005, the US shifted the primary focus of its North Korea attention from nuclear weapons to crime and human rights, denouncing North Korea as a “criminal state” or “soprano state.” This paper reflects on why it might have done this and considers the implications.

[Amid booming stock markets, record corporate profits, and talk of a Japanese economic recovery, it is easy to forget that the world economy is delicately poised atop twin peaks of debt. US public sector debt is now approaching the size of its GDP while Japan's is well over one and a half times and heading towards double its GDP. This means mountains of debt of about equal size on both sides of the Pacific, roughly 7 to 8 trillion dollars each. Viewed from one angle, the Japanese debt is more chronic not only because of its smaller population and larger share of GDP, but because population decline carries with it a shrinking labor force and greater welfare costs. From another perspective, however, the American debt is more serious because it is owed to foreigners, rather than to US individuals and institutions. Paradoxically, a great deal of it is owed to Japan. Only the most carefully calibrated manipulation of interest rates (for many years, close to zero interest in Japan) makes it possible to keep up the necessary flow of funds to lubricate this system, while the two virtually bankupt countries nervously prop each other up.

Ostensibly for peaceful, non-military purposes, Japan has successfully launched its third intelligencegathering satellite as part of recently revved-up efforts to boost its defense capabilities, either on its own or with its closest ally, the United States.

Monday's launch of the new satellite from Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, came amid growing concern about the missile and nuclear programs of neighboring North Korea, which sparked an international uproar and heightened regional tensions about two months ago by test-firing a volley of ballistic missiles.

In July 2005, the United Nations special rapporteur on discrimination and racism, Doudou Diene, went on a nine-day tour of Japan and talked to minority groups, antidiscrimination campaigners and government and police officials around the country. After releasing his preliminary findings to the press last year, Diene handed the completed 23-page report based on his research to the UN Commission on Human Rights in January. [Doudou Diene Report]

The story of how Japan gained, and then lost, the development rights to one of the richest oil fields in the world has been treated rather casually in the international media despite the fact that it will strongly affect Japan's relations with Iran and other countries for many years to come. The issue of the Japanese involvement in the Azadegan oil field was divisive from the start, but became more and more so as the political situation in the Persian Gulf deteriorated after September 11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This essay traces the development of the Japan-Iran partnership in Azadegan from its inception in November 2000 to its effective dissolution in October 2006.

Takahashi Tetsuya's “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine,” is among the most important statements to emerge from the debate over Yasukuni Shrine, historical memory and war nationalism. The article is here.

Japan Focus is pleased to present chapter seven of Naoko Shimazu, ed., Nationalisms in Japan. Philip Seaton is the translator.

Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neoconservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.

Writing in publications from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neoconservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by “realist” and other critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday's test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with “rogue” states like North Korea are useless and that “regime change” -by military means, if necessary – is the only answer.

Only two minutes were allowed for the court photographs by the television and newspaper media before the verdict was delivered. The decision, read by Judge Shimada Niro, took just four seconds. The lawsuit questioning the imperial system from a democratic perspective was a landmark event challenging the emperor's accession to the throne from the viewpoint of perspective of thought and conscience, the sovereignty of the people, and the separation of religion and politics. However, the Supreme Court's response was inadequate.

The essence of the “Korea Problem” lies not in the threat of North Korean development of atomic weapons, nor in the existence of a rogue regime in North Korea, as the international press and some American presidents would have it. The central problem is the division of the Korean peninsula, an outcome of half a century of Japanese colonial rule and a legacy of the incomplete character of independence resulting from US-Soviet division of Korea and the Korean War that has now continued in various forms for more than six decades. This article reflects on Korea within an Asia-Pacific and global framework. It also examines possible steps toward resolving the core conflicts, solutions that can only succeed if they find regional and global support. Korea is the most dangerous legacy of the US-Soviet division of Asia, a war without end that continues in the form of military standoff that threatens the peace of Northeast Asia.

China's economic boom has an environmental dark side. While China's economy continues to grow at a rate of more than 8% annually, as it has for more than two decades, the country's environment and the Chinese people are paying a steep price. China now boasts five of the ten most polluted cities in the world; 70% of the water that flows through China's urban areas is unfit for drinking or fishing; and severely degraded land or desert, which now claims 1/4 of China's land, is advancing at a rate of 1300 sq. miles per year.

TOKYO - Japan's population is shrinking and graying, at a rate probably unprecedented in history, and there is no sign the trend will stop soon: the nation's birth-rate figures for 2005, due to be released shortly, are expected to hit a new record low. Not only is Japan's birth rate already among the lowest in the industrialized world, but its pace of decline is the fastest, raising grave concerns about a possible erosion of the economy's international competitiveness as the population thins out.

In response, a number of Japanese firms have started to improve their child- and elderly parent-care programs, driven not only by concerns about a possible labor shortage after the baby-boomer generation starts retiring next year but also by growing awareness of the need to secure qualified workers, especially women, over the long term amid the dwindling working population. Some electrical appliance manufacturers have even introduced programs granting their employees leave to receive fertility treatment.

[In an unprecedented move, Japan has agreed to pay $6.1 billion to relocate 8,000 US Marines from Okinawa to Guam. As the Asahi and Yomiuri reports show, many important questions remain unanswered. They include: why is Japan paying to establish US bases thousands of miles away? Does this mean that Japan's, and above all Okinawa's faithful service in providing a launch pad for US forces in Korea, Vietnam, in Iraq and elsewhere were inadequate? Or is this more in the nature of the kind of payoff required to encourage an unwelcome visitor to leave one's neighborhood? Why did Japan finally accept the inflated US estimates of the costs of such a move and double the share it agreed to pay? And what will be the costs for Japan of the other side of the agreement, the construction of a heliport at Heneko and troop transfers at Iwakuni and elsewhere, moves bitterly fought by local citizens? The Yomiuri speaks of costs in the range of two trillion yen, dwarfing the costs of the Guam move.

Though it would be difficult to find anyone in the United States who would praise North Korea for its dismal human rights record, this consensus by no means extends to practical foreign policy. In other words, there is broad agreement on what is wrong in North Korea, from the political labor camps to the lack of basic freedoms of speech and assembly, but little agreement on what to do about it or who should be doing it.

Fresh from a serious setback in Iran, where it lost its controlling stake in the huge Azadegan oilfield, Japan has launched diplomatic efforts in earnest to secure petroleum in neighboring Iraq.

Recently, Tokyo invited Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to Japan and they issued a joint communique pledging Japanese assistance for improvements to the oil and gas infrastructure in the war-torn country. Japan specifically pledged loans of about 20 billion yen (US$170 million) to Iraq as part of the $3.5 billion aid package already committed.

Worried for years about a water shortage, the vast Tokyo metropolitan area is now overflowing in the stuff.

Water-saving appliances, bottled drinking water and good old-fashioned conservation have helped the average Tokyo household in fiscal 2004 use 6 percent less tap water than six years earlier.

March 4, 1994, marked a rare moment in the annals of Japanese postwar responsibility when the Japanese state engaged reparations activists in direct dialogue. Parliamentary supporters of Korean forced labor redress efforts, mainly from the then-Japanese Socialist Party, arranged for a room at the Diet and officials from five government agencies took turns negotiating and responding to questions for several hours.

In Japan, China, the United States and beyond, arguably no Japanese wartime atrocity against China is more widely known than the Nanjing Massacre. Whatever the significance of mere name recognition, however, the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre are profoundly complex. Indeed, even the phrase “Nanjing Massacre” (hereafter NM) remains contested, and to this day there are circles within which the words cannot be spoken without stirring deep feeling and disagreement.