This extract from Kang Sangjung's autobiography Zainichi (Kodansha, 2004) describes the experiences of first-generation zainichi Koreans in the city of Kumamoto, as seen from the perspective of a second-generation child growing up in the Japan of the 1950s. Now a professor at the University of Tokyo, in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, where he specialises in politics and the history of political thought, Kang Sangjung looks back at the people and places of his childhood. These personal memories provide a starting point for reflections on identity, ‘homeland‘, and the place of zainichi Koreans in Japanese society and in the wider society of Northeast Asia.

New Delhi — Sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven in part by high growth rates in gross domestic product and in part by mercantilist attempts to lock up supplies, has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are beginning to threaten rapid economic modernization, prompting the building of upstream projects on international rivers. If water geopolitics were to spur interstate tensions through reduced water flows to neighboring states, the Asian renaissance could stall.

Dolphin and humpback whale are just two of the items on the menu in the fishing village of Taiji where the locals battle Hollywood environmentalists and ‘racist’ foreigners. David McNeill mingles with the suspicious locals and witnesses a clash of cultures. Below, too, see his interview with dolphin trainer turned activist Ric O'Barry.

Introduction

The large monetary awards to the family members of eight men executed in 1974 as members of the “People's Revolutionary Party” have no precedent, and mark another milestone in South Korea's remarkable record of historical reckoning and reconciliation. The twin pillars of this are the reconciliation with North Korea ongoing since Kim Dae Jung was elected president, and the 1995 trials of former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo for treason in carrying out their serial coup d'etat in 1979-80, which involved the bloody suppression of the Kwangju Rebellion. (Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to life in prison, but President Kim pardoned both of them so they could sit fidgeting on the podium while he was inaugurated in February 1998). Few other countries with long histories of dictatorship have managed democratization with the same measure of justice and magnanimity. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission comes to mind, and it was indeed a model for both Kim Dae Jung and his successor, Roh Moo-hyun.

It is a commonplace of recent writing on Japan that the Abe Shinzo government is in trouble. Yet comment on Abe's disastrous Upper House election of July and on his subsequent cabinet reorganization of August, with few exceptions, ignores Okinawa, the prefecture where the burden of the reorganized US-Japan alliance is heaviest, the veneer of Abe “reformism” thinnest, popular discontent deepest, and the consequences of failure potentially most serious.

The phenomenon is unmistakable (albeit largely unnoticed), and the contrast lends itself to all kinds of symbolic interpretations: Japan's unending retreat from being a highly respected polity and economic powerhouse, widely expected to become the 21st century's global ichiban, has entered troubled waters. As a result of that downward economic trend, whose beginning was signaled by the collapse of the Nikkei index in 1990, Japan's GDP managed the real (inflation-adjusted) annual growth of just 1.1% between 1991 and 2006, while during the preceding 15 years the country's GDP had nearly doubled. But this long-lasting economic and social malaise has been accompanied by a substantial (17%) increase in Japan's primary energy consumption. This is remarkable because pre-1990 Japan was the world's most consistently, and most admirably, energy-efficient economy that had always managed to do with relatively less energy.

The nationwide uprising of June 1987 put an end to the tyrannical rule of Chun Du-hwan's regime and opened a new chapter in South Korea's contemporary history. True, it has had its background in the April 19th Student Revolution of 1960, the Pusan-Masan Uprising of 1979 and the May Democratic Struggle of Kwangju 1980.

TOKYO - Japan rolled out the red carpet for Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar when, at Tokyo's invitation, he arrived on Monday for a five-day visit for talks with Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and a luncheon hosted by Emperor Akihito in his honor at the Imperial Palace.

World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.

It is January 15 1998. Standing grim-faced and with arms folded, Michel Camdessus, the International Monetary Fund managing director, peers down as President Suharto of Indonesia signs his acceptance of the latest list of 50 IMF demands. Mr Suharto has no choice, even though many of the intended reforms are politically unpalatable. Such has been the outflow of money from Indonesia over the past six months that the economy would implode if a second international bail-out were refused.

This essay proposes looking back at a story which is one of the most unusual winners of Japan's best-known literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. Kara Juro's Letters from Sagawa (Sagawa-kun kara no tegami) first appeared in November 1982 in the journal Bungei; it was announced co-winner of the 88th Akutagawa Prize in January 1983, and subsequently reprinted that March in the official prize-confirmation section of the quality monthly which hosts the award, Bungei Shunju. Kara's publisher Kawade Shobo Shinsha had already published a slim single-volume version the preceding January.

He unleashed sudoku on an unsuspecting world - and within months, millions were hooked. But Japan's master of the mind-bender didn't stop there. From his workshop in the heart of Tokyo, Maki Kaji is devising a new, even more fiendish wave of puzzles.

In January of 1906 in the northeastern Japanese city of Sendai, China's most famous modern writer, Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren 1881-1936), claimed to have experienced a life-changing epiphany that led him to abandon his medical studies and “devote himself to the creation of a literature that would minister to the ailing Chinese psyche.” The now famous “magic lantern (slide) incident” allegedly took place at the end of Lu Xun's bacteriology class at the Sendai Medical School. The lesson had ended early and the instructor used the slide projector to show various images to students from the recently concluded Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). Lu Xun later recounted that the Japanese medical students were roused into a patriotic frenzy by scenes of the war, culminating in reverberating chants of “banzai!” One scene showed a Chinese prisoner about to be executed in Manchuria by a Japanese soldier and the caption described this man as a Russian spy (see image 1). Lu Xun reported that rather than the sight of a fellow Chinese facing death, it was the expression on the faces of the Chinese bystanders that troubled him deeply. Although they appeared to be physically sound, he felt that spiritually they were close to death.

With the Bush administration in deep trouble on many fronts, the government of Japan is striving to carry out a reorganization that will integrate Japanese forces in American strategic actions throughout the Arc of Instability. For ten years, from 1996, Japan's longest unfulfilled promise has been to build a new base for the US marines in Okinawa to replace the inconvenient, obsolescent and politically charged Futenma. All efforts at construction have been blocked by a coalition of local Okinawan residents and citizens.

The recent Yomiuri report on the treatment of valuable fifty-year old records “kept in the basement of the ministry” highlights the careless attitude of the Japanese government toward preservation of historical records. Will this ever change? If Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda follows through on his earlier efforts, there is hope that records like these will be moved from ministry basements to a modern national archive.

When Fukuda served as Chief Cabinet Secretary in the spring of 2003, he formed a panel of experts to advise the government on policies concerning the proper “management, preservation and use” of public documents. This committee has produced a pair of lengthy reports that present recommendations for a new national system of record preservation.

It is over forty years since the Shinkansen (‘bullet train‘) began operating between Tokyo and Osaka. Since then the network has expanded, but other countries, most notably France and Germany, have been developing their own high speed railways, too. As other countries, mainly in Asia, look to develop high speed railways, the battle over which country will win the lucrative contracts for them is on. It is not only a matter of railway technology. Political, economic & cultural influences are also at stake. This paper will look at these various aspects in relation to the export of the Shinkansen to China in light of previous Japanese attempts to export the Shinkansen and the situation in Taiwan.

Days after the broken body of British teacher Lindsay Hawker was discovered in a fourth-floor flat in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, when the media feeding frenzy was at its most intense, a newspaper editor called me from London.

And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together and went northward, and said unto Jephthah: Wherefore wentest thou to fight with the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? We will therefore burn thine house upon thee, with fire.

And Jephthah said unto them: I and my people were at great strife with the children of Ammon. And the LORD delivered them into my hands. Wherefore then are ye come upon me to fight with me.

Ten years after the Asian financial cataclysm of 1997, the economies of the Western Pacific Rim are growing, though not at the rates they enjoyed before the crisis. The region has been indelibly scarred by the crisis. There is greater poverty, inequality, and social destabilization than before the crisis. South Korea's painful labor market reforms, for instance, have produced the quiet desperation behind one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries.