Despite having ratified the 1951 Convention on Refugees in 1981, Japan accepts relatively few refugees compared with other countries. The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) reports Japan received 3,544 applications for refugee status between 1982 and 2004 but granted only 330 requests. In 2004 Japan accepted 15 persons as refugees, while the UK accepted 12,925 and the US 21,148. Low numbers aside, there are also a number of problems in Japan's refugee recognition procedures that pose threats to asylum seekers’ personal well being. For example, during the application process asylum seekers are often held in detention centres where many suffer mentally and physically from both fear of deportation and poor conditions. Between 2001 and 2002, several ethnic Hazara Afghani asylum seekers detained in these centres attempted suicide. Responding to criticism of its harsh refugee recognition procedure, the Japanese government amended its Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (ICRRA) in 2004 for the first time in 23 years and the amended measures have been in force since May 2005. There have been improvements, but a number of important issues were not addressed.

In August 2006, Japan-Russia relations were strained when a Russian patrol fired warning shots at a Japanese fishing boat, killing a member of the crew. The boat was near disputed islands—what the Japanese call the Northern Territories and the Russians call the Southern Kuriles. The incident occurred in the 50th anniversary year of the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration (signed on October 19, 1956, and in effect from December 12 of that year).

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was the Pacific counterpart of the first Nuremberg trial. A panel of eleven judges, one each from the victor nations and from the Philippines and India (neither gained independence until after the war), heard evidence against twenty-eight Japanese prominent during the period 1928-1945, sixteen of them generals and admirals. The trial lasted two and a half years. The verdicts: seven death sentences, sixteen life sentences, and two shorter sentences. Unlike Nuremberg, the Tokyo tribunal found no defendants innocent (two defendants had died, and one—the ideologue Dr. Okawa Shumei, whom Takeyama mentions in passing—had been declared insane.)

For 60 years the world has faced no greater threat than nuclear weapons. Yet nuclear politics, in principle the most urgent for human survival, has been in practice the most ridden with hypocrisy.

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.” [1] While he did not spell out particular countries, the nuclear superpowers plainly fill the category of countries that “rely on.., refine…, postulate plans for” use of nuclear weapons, while they undoubtedly see as “morally reprehensible” the attempt of other countries, notably North Korea and Iran, to do likewise. While plainly hypocritical, the former is the position of the United States (and its allies, such as Japan).

[It is well known that Japan's neighbors, especially China and South Korea, are unhappy at what they see as Japan's failure to accept responsibility, apologize and compensate victims for its wartime crimes and colonial abuses. What is less well known, however, is the Japanese state's reluctance to address the same questions of justice and human rights in the case of its own citizens who were victims of crimes committed by the prewar or wartime state. No Japanese court has ever adequately addressed the criminality of any action by the prewar or wartime state, including its armed forces. Courts have been, and continue to be, deeply reluctant to consider any possible claim of state criminality.

[Hiroshi Ono assesses the repeated claims that Japan's long-term, or “lifetime,” employment system is dead. Examining recent surveys of the different ways in which lifetime employment has been defined and measured, he shows, not surprisingly, that whether you see lifetime employment as shrinking or not depends on how you measure it.

Ono points out that some people define lifetime employees as those who work at large firms with more than 500 employees and for the government. By this measure, the share of the workforce covered declined from 23.4 percent in 1985 to 19.2 percent in 2003.

“The Man Who Turned Foreign Policy Into a Fight.” That is the title of a booklet published by the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun about Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro's approach to diplomacy during his five years in office. The Japanese title uses the word “kenka.” It is usually translated as “fight,” but the nuance it carries is closer to a “fistfight” or “verbal scuffle” among little schoolboys.

[The long-simmering global whaling debate is entering a new phase as Japan is poised on eliminating international strictures on whaling and Green Peace intensifies its Southern Oceans campaign to halt Japanese and other whaling. Japan Focus presents two articles on whaling, one focusing on the view from Japan, the other on the changing international climate as Japan lobbies successfully to assure that whaling will continue.]

Two appalling concrete structures are sprouting from the lush grass of one of the finest botanic gardens in Southeast Asia. The stench of fresh asphalt is overpowering the gentle scent of tropical flowers; heavy mobile cranes are intruding where, just a few days ago, couples and families came to spend quiet days admiring giant water lilies, as well as varieties of orchids, palms and bamboos.

In 1965, Japanese journalist Magoroku Ide accepted an invitation from the government of the People's Republic of China to visit the country. Still seven years before the resumption of diplomatic relations between Japan and China, travel to China was restricted to those officially invited and even they were subject to state surveillance. Among the places he and his fellow Japanese journalists visited was the city of Anshan in northeast China. Having boarded the train to return to Beijing at the conclusion of their visit, they heard the clear voice of a woman saying, “Please take care of yourselves, good bye,” in Japanese. Not visible from their train window in the crowd of Chinese who came to bid farewell, Ide and his colleagues were stunned to hear the voice of a Japanese woman. Although they wondered whether it was possible that Japanese were living in Anshan in 1965, they could not make the connection between her and the approximately 10,000 Japanese who were then living in northeast China, much less to the Japanese imperial past (Ide 1993).

Buried beneath the heaps of hot words on North Korea's nuclear test, the announcement in Moscow on Monday about the Shtokman natural-gas deposit off Russia's Arctic coast almost escaped attention, despite its comparable lethal fallout in world politics.

[This is the second of a two part series on the strategic and constitutional implications of Japan's expansive naval role in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. See Richard Tanter's “Japan's Indian Ocean Naval Deployment: Blue water militarization in a “normal country”.]

The building that houses the Ghibli Museum would be unusual anywhere, but in greater Tokyo, where architectural exuberance usually takes an angular, modernist form-black glass cubes, busy geometries of neon-it is particularly so. From the outside, the museum resembles an oversized adobe house, with slightly melted edges; its exterior walls are painted in saltwater-taffy shades of pink, green, and yellow. Inside, the museum looks like a child's fantasy of Old Europe submitted to a rigorous Arts and Crafts sensibility. The floors are dark polished wood; stained-glass windows cast candy-colored light on whitewashed walls; a spiral stairway climbs-inside what looks like a giant Victorian birdcage-to a rooftop garden of world grasses, over which a hammered-metal robot soldier stands guard. In the central hall, beneath a high ceiling, a web of balconies and bridges suggests a dream vision of a nineteenth-century factory. Wrought-iron railings contain balls of colored glass, and leaded-glass lanterns are attached to the walls by wrought-iron vines. In the entryway, a fresco on the ceiling depicts a sky of Fra Angelico blue and a smiling sun wreathed in fruits and vegetables.

Adopt “a correct view of history,” China and South Korea demand of Japan. Fair enough. We can all agree on the merits of a “correct view” of anything. The difficulty is to define “correct.”

As the intensifying acrimony unfolds over who did what to whom and how horribly, you'd almost think historical relations between the three countries began in 1895, when newly Westernized Japan defeated China in Korea, and ended in 1945 with Japan prostrate and guilty at the end of World War II.

There was a meeting on the weekend of December 9-10 in Cochabamba in Bolivia of major South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn't read that wire service report, I'll read a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

Many studies of postwar Japan have emphasized that an ideology of ethnic homogeneity has been an important element in Japanese society since 1945. Oguma and others have argued that this ideology contrasts with the view of a multi-ethnic empire that was prevalent prior to 1945. It has been widely proposed, we believe correctly, that this ideology of ethnic homogeneity —the idea of the tan'itsu minzoku —has been used by political and business elites to weaken class unity and to exacerbate other divisions among working people. The term “cultural nationalism” probably best encapsulates this ideology. A vast pseudo-scientific literature known as Nihonjinron (literally “theories of Japanese(ness)”) has grown up in support of this cultural nationalism and has in turn been widely critiqued, both in Japanese and in English.

The election for Governor of Okinawa on 19 November is unique among prefectural elections in Japan in its national, regional and even global implications. The Japanese state has been struggling for more than a decade to secure the compliance of Okinawan people with an agenda whose core is priority to the US alliance over the constitution and priority to military (songun) over civil or democratic principle, something that it abhors when practiced by North Korea.

[Hisane Masaki provides an excellent survey of the energy challenges confronting Japan while suggesting some of the problems with the new energy policy regime about to be officially adopted by the Koizumi Administration. The issues are pertinent not only to Japan but throughout the Asia Pacific and globally.

First the challenges: Japan, like all other nations, now faces the strong possibility that fossil fuel supplies and energy politics will be fraught in the coming years, resulting in upward pressure on prices. In Tokyo and other parts of Japan, for example, unseasonably cold weather has boosted the demand for fuel, and sharply driven up the cost of heating oil along with winter vegetables and other products. The country's heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels is thus keenly felt by consumers. But it is systemic problems at the regional and global levels that pose the largest problems. Robust economic growth elsewhere, notably in China and India, presents a seemingly insatiable global appetite for more oil and gas. At the same time, the major oil producers have at best minimal margins of spare production capacity. While producers are investing in new sources of supply, the cost of exploration is skyrocketing due to the demand for rigs and other equipment as well as the risks, remoteness and other challenges attendant on new finds.

[Following Japan's unconditional surrender in the Asia Pacific War, Japanese leaders had good reason to expect that the American Occupation would be harsh. GHQ's initial focus on war crimes prosecutions, purging militarists from public life and dismantling zaibatsu conglomerates, however, soon yielded to “reverse course” policies that emphasized economic recovery and political stability rather than deep democratic reform. The Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 and the Korean War broke out in 1950, dramatically altering Northeast Asia's geopolitical landscape. Consistent with the lenient terms of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951, the United States persuaded its reluctant wartime allies and many of Japan's former colonies to waive reparations claims against Japan as the US sponsored the former foe back into the community of nations.