Neo-nationalists forced the cancellation of the theatrical launch of a Chinese-directed movie about Japan's controversial war memorial Yasukuni in early April, 2008. In the weeks that followed, the incident became a cause célèbre, with some 30 film, media, and civil liberties organizations issuing declarations of protest. A number of theaters throughout Japan signed on to screen the film, and its Tokyo premiere was scheduled for May 3.

Two reports follow on the vast, and vastly expensive, Tokyo International Conference on African Development designed to showcase Japan's aid to Africa. The conference, held in Yokohama with the presence of 51 of 53 African nations, was attended by 40 Presidents of African nations. The first report by Ramesh Jaura concentrates on the proposed Japanese aid package, as Japan proposes to double both trade and investment in Africa within five years. The second report by the Yomiuri Shimbun's Kawakami Osamu highlights the real stakes for Japan: the effort to outbid China whose burgeoning trade, investment and presence in Africa is a cause of Japanese, and the continued pursuit of the chimera of a Japanese UN security council seat. Neither report mentions either oil and energy or military strategic issues. MS

Indonesia since the fall of Suharto in 1998 under reformasi remains subject to powerful tendencies for disintegrasi—both province-based “separatism” and general socio-political decay. These tendencies are greatly aggravated by the failure of democratically elected presidents and parliaments to effectively tackle endemic corruption or reform the armed forces, which continue to enjoy near-total immunity as a major practitioner, guarantor and enforcer of corrupt business practice and extortion. This article notes the activism of civil society and liberal media on the corruption issue and the commendable new array of anti-corruption institutions. But it argues that reform efforts have been virtually nullified by broad collusion of Indonesia's political, bureaucratic, military and business elites in sustaining—while “democratizing” and decentralizing—the system of corruption inherited from Suharto. The reform effort is now subject to political stasis or gridlock induced by money politics. Some reformers believe that politics in Indonesia has been effectively replaced by “transactions”. In arguing that “KKN” “ruins everything”—people's well-being, investment prospects, government budgets and development planning, democratic politics, the justice sector (including its corruption-fighting capacities), military professionalism, the environment and more—the author is serious. The article suggests that real change must await new social and political constellations and struggles initiated outside the parliamentary arena.

On January 30-31, 1968, the Tet holiday, the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF, known to Americans as “the Vietcong”) struck at five of the country's six largest cities, 34 provincial capitals, 64 district capitals, and numerous military bases. NLF sappers even briefly captured part of the heavily fortified American embassy compound in the center of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon.

No sooner had the guns fallen silent and the terrorist carnage ended in Mumbai than a keen three-way diplomatic tussle began involving India, Pakistan and the United States. The two South Asian nuclear powers are locked in race to get the US on their respective side.

On a gentle hillside on Jeju, a communal graveyard has a unique name and history. Surrounded by the reed fields that abound on this beautiful island near the southern maritime border of Korea, the gravesite consists of a large stone-walled compound, where one hundred and thirty-two modest, well-tended grave mounds lie in neat lines, and a tall stone-made memorial stands in the middle of the compound. Visitors can easily recognize that it is no ordinary graveyard. The site is distinct from the stone-walled individual or family tombs familiar to the island population, or from the traditional family ancestral graves commonly found on the hills of mainland Korea. There are simply too many graves concentrated in one place in this graveyard, and moreover, none is marked by the usual gravestone or a stone tablet, where visiting relatives can place offerings of food and alcohol for the dead according to the traditional custom of commemoration. The graves here are nameless, and they stand in a strangely ordered fashion, in tidily organized rows—an organization that people would expect to see in a military cemetery, not in a village graveyard.

Japan is routinely depicted as a leader in addressing the global community's ominous energy and environmental challenges. A recent issue of Newsweek, for example, incorrectly assumed that Japan had the “feed-in tariff” mechanism that Germany in particular has used to vault itself into global leadership in renewables. Japan's reputation as a leader is neither inexplicable nor, to be frank, entirely undeserved. Japan certainly responded adroitly to the oil shocks of the 1970s, instituting tight energy conservation goals and investing heavily in the promotion of renewable technology. And note that Japan's public transport systems rank among the world's best for widespread diffusion, low cost and reliability. This is true not only of Tokyo, Osaka and other major cities, but also of its national high speed rail network.

In the 1960s, a subculture of Americans became obsessed with alien abductions. Their ur-narrative revolved around the experience of Betty and Barney Hill, a sober, middle-aged, interracial couple who told of being taken from their car one night in 1961 and subjected to medical investigation by extraterrestrials with small bodies and large foreheads. They were not the type to fabulize simply to draw attention to themselves, so their story attracted interest beyond the usual UFO fans. Gradually others came forward with similar tales.

Eight years ago, on the eve of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, a bipartisan group of Washington experts released the Armitage Report, named after Richard Armitage, one of the main authors and an eventual deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush.

Bangkok - Seared into Southeast Asia's collective memory is the iconic image of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, where International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Michel Camdessus towered with crossed arms over a bent-down Indonesian President Suharto as he signed a sovereignty-eroding bailout agreement for his distressed economy.

Ken Watanabe is back from a year of self-imposed retirement after his acclaimed roles in Last Samurai and Letters from Iwo Jima. He talks about his new movie project, his life out of the limelight and the dangers of Asian stereotypes.

This article assesses the significance of China's recently announced investments in large copper and oil development in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively, with potential significance not only for development and peace in the two war-torn nations, but also for China's global role and the US-China relationship. With foreign and domestic investment in both nations barely trickling in despite UN, World Bank, NATO and US efforts, the Chinese plans are highly significant.

As international pressures build to create a new international financial and currency order in the wake of the most severe global crisis since the 1930s, interest—and fantasy—center not only on the critical role of the United States but equally on China. China is now in the spotlight not only because of its position as a rising economic power, not only because of its vast financial currency reserves in the range of $2 trillion, but also because of currency strategies that align the yen to the dollar to keep its value low in order to maximize exports. Here Sebastian Mallaby looks back and forward to envisage a new financial order that would place China at the center. Japan Focus

In the last week of 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo made an official visit to China. The tone of the trip was set by positive rhetoric on both sides and at one point, Fukuda expressed his conviction that now “Bilateral ties have become increasingly complementary, and one cannot do without the other.” Fukuda is working under the assumption that closer Sino-Japanese relations are a key to the future of Japan and East Asia. This article shares that view. As Slavoj Zizek and other contemporary philosophers have noted, imagination has an important impact on political realities. To build a progressive international relationship, the future of that relationship must first be imagined, diverse visions contested, and concrete strategies for a way forward defined. Given the extraordinary degree of economic connectiveness between Japan and China and the seeming ability of both markets to complement the strengths of the other within an expansive regional economy, there are compelling incentives When Koizumi stepped down in September 2006, his successor, Abe Shinzo, quickly chose to visit China in early October. That trip was reciprocated in the following April when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao went to Japan. Fukuda's trip to China in late 2007 extends the constructive diplomatic chapter inaugurated by Abe.

In 2004, we visited the Altai Republic, a remote mountainous region in Southern Siberia, bordering on Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. For some time, the republic had been supposedly involved in an international collaboration called “Altai: Our Common Home,” supported by the German government. The project focused on economic development, tourism, and — somewhat contradictorily — environmental protection. One of the plan's central elements was a road linking the Altai Republic and China: currently, traffic between them has to detour via Kazakhstan or Mongolia. By the end of 2004, a 140 km road on the Chinese side had been completed, but no progress had been made on the Russian side.

Immediately following the ruling by the Osaka District Court on the Okinawa Mass Suicides Suit (March 28, 2008), I was being interviewed by a correspondent from a foreign newspaper, while the plaintiffs were already engaged in the appeals process. Almost by way of greeting, I was asked by the correspondent, “What has this trial meant to your life?” I replied by saying, “If I have spent half my life writing essays and novels, then I have spent the other half of it reading books, or more precisely, focusing my reading on certain topics continuously for three year periods. During the two and a half years of this suit, my job has been to read the preparatory documents submitted by both the plaintiffs and defendants as well as the books named in those documents. This part of my life, trying as it was, was spent reading the works of distinguished writers whom I never would have had the chance to know otherwise.”

“Why do you want the records of all these horrible criminals?” asks the clerk at the National Personnel Records Center.

I don't believe they're criminals. These GIs were all around twenty years old, from the lowest ranks. For most it was their first offense and many have ribbons from the most terrible battles in the Pacific. J. Robert Lily, Michael Thomson and Alice Kaplan describe the scant preparation for the hasty trials of black servicemen in particular, where the defendants were so cowed by the court-martial process they didn't even speak up for themselves. They also tell of the lack of due process, and of missing witnesses. The Senate's 1946 Committee on Military Affairs Report notes further flaws in the trials: “the officer senior in rank often uses his weight and influence to dominate without even a pretense of impartiality; that even when votes are taken in inverse order of rank, the junior officers are perfectly well aware whether they are voting in accordance with his wishes; that the votes are taken orally; that no record of the proceedings is given the person most concerned.”

Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced an increase in the number of single parent families due to a significant rise in the divorce rate. In response to this trend, the Japanese government introduced welfare reforms in 2002, which aimed to limit welfare expenditures for single mothers and strengthen mothers' self-sufficiency through work. Becoming self-sufficient through work, however, is not just a matter of will and effort. As I will show in this paper, a single mother's ability to find employment is strongly influenced by her educational and class background, an issue which until recently has received comparatively little attention. In what follows, I examine single motherhood in Japan from the perspective of social class. Poverty and social class are rarely discussed in studies of Japanese society, in part because Japan is widely considered to be a quite affluent and egalitarian society. However, social class, which is chiefly explored through educational background in this paper, is an important factor that affects the living conditions of single mothers in contemporary Japan.

The examples above suggest governmental paralysis in the face of a pervasive corruption which impacts severely upon every important policy and institution in the republic. The President takes initiatives but hesitates fatally to follow through, and compromises his own reputation and effectiveness in the process. Most government ministries, for whom tactical funds and off-budget budgets are the stuff of life, do not even have a reform plan in front of them which would permit them to parlay their own essential income-boosting black funds (civil service pay being universally inadequate) against budgetary reform and a big boost to salaries.

In the summer of 1950, at the start of the Korean conflict, the government of Syngman Rhee in the South ordered the massive execution of over one hundred thousand (perhaps two hundred thousand) civilians simply suspected of being communist sympathizers. This war crime by any standard, civilized and uncivilized, has only been unveiled recently and officially by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea http://www.jinsil.go.kr/English/Commission/index.asp.