After checking them against a list of prize-winning numbers, a family member of tender age handed me my New Year cards, informing me that I had won three sheets of post-office stamps. One of the cards was from Rui. I read it again: “I am leaving the hospital as I reach retirement age; I plan to enjoy the afternoon tea time of life.” “Now I finally know your age. Bravo,” I said. I had said the same thing on first reading the card that New Year's morning.

The Japanese Supreme Court's fall 2007 ruling in favor of Korean hibakusha medical compensation rights represents an important, though only partial, victory. The decision denied these Korean atomic victims, who were forced laborers at Mitsubishi's Hiroshima Shipyard, compensation for unpaid wages. Resolving outstanding forced labor cases, as well as fully recognizing, apologizing and compensating all hibakusha, requires a broader international solution of “mutual apology and mutual compensation” by both Japan and the United States.

A Canadian diplomatic mission led by Rodolphe Lemieux in November 1907 shares an anniversary with the much-maligned Japanese immigration controls, introduced on 20 November 2007. The themes underlying the Lemieux mission - racial profiling, xenophobia, discrimination in immigration, and claims of unassimilability in the host country - resonate deeply with the current political climate in Japan. The anniversary of Lemieux's arrival in Japan 100 years ago serves to remind us how little attitudes have changed in regards to immigration and racialization.

One morning this September, Mantani Yoshiyuki, Yamamoto Mineteru and Hirano Isamu were told by prison wardens they would shortly be dead. As is common under Japan's death penalty system, the three men, all in their sixties, were given about an hour to get their affairs in order before being blindfolded and hanged. Their deaths brought the total number of people executed in Japan this year to 13 and ended any hope by anti-death penalty advocates that new justice minister Yasuoka Okiharu might slow the pace of executions. Two more executions on October 28 brought the number this year to 15, the largest number in 33 years according to the Japan Death Penalty Information Center.

China is spending nearly $1 trillion to revive its economy. Will it work? John Garnaut reports from Wenzhou City, Zhejiang.

Wenzhou, the heartland of Chinese capitalism, is once again fighting for its survival. The city was famously forsaken by Maoist China but it stayed alive and later thrived by building one of the most entrepreneurial and dynamic marketplaces on the planet.

Hamish McDonald, in a far-reaching examination of the shifting geopolitical sands emerging from the six-party talks on North Korea-US security issues, offers a post-hegemonic vision of a new region-centered order in East Asia. Envisaging a region in which a China- or China-Japan centric structure emerges, it is premised on a withdrawal of American military force as the geopolitical core of coastal East Asia to a still powerful military position centered on Guam. But can the US-North Korea agreement hold, and is such a strategic withdrawal in fact in the cards? Is the predominance of Condoleezza Rice's State Department the future of US global policy? Can China and Japan work out a modus vivendi that accommodates both the two major Asian powers and lesser regional powers? Time will tell. MS

Is there a more enduring World War image than the kamikaze pilots: those super-patriots who, according to the stereotype, willingly, even joyfully, pledged loyalty to their beloved emperor as they flew their doomed planes into Allied ships? The image still produces sympathetic tears and angry sneers: prime minister-to-be Koizumi Jun'ichirÅ▯ weeping at the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots in 2001; an American college history textbook referring to Japan's late-war air force as “a band of fanatical suicide pilots called kamikazes.” Indeed, Risa Morimoto began working on her provocative new movie, “Wings of Defeat,” out of a desire to understand how her own uncle, “a funny, kind, and gentle man,” could have been such a “crazy lunatic,” one of those “jumping at the chance to die for their emperor.”

While much of Japan was enjoying the extended holiday of Golden Week this year, supporters of Article 9, the war-renouncing clause of Japan's constitution, were hard at work. The first Global Article 9 Conference to Abolish War drew 15,000 people to its plenary session and concert outside of Tokyo on May 4th, while 7,000 gathered on May 5th to participate in a day of symposiums and workshops. The crowds far surpassed the expectations of the organizers, who hastily staged an ad hoc rally in a nearby park for several thousand people who were unable to get into the main arena on the first day.

The Republic of Korea is a county like most others in that it has no or insufficient fossil fuel reserves of its own and depends on imports of oil, gas and coal for various vital purposes, including electric energy production, heating, and fuel for its transportation system. Like many other countries it now feels the pinch of high prices for oil and other raw materials, and like most others it is affected by the downturn in global stock markets and the failure of major banks in the aftermath of the subprime crisis in the United States. This interdependency in good and in bad times is the price of globalization.

Recent reports of Kim Jong-il's death may have been, to quote Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated,” but they did reveal a great deal about South Korean thinking regarding the future of North Korea. Anonymous officials leaked information that the government was looking at operationalizing ConPlan 5029, the contingency plan for joint US-South Korean intervention in the North that had been suspended under the previous administration. Given the lack of any signs of unrest in Pyongyang, the urgency of such planning was questioned by critics.1 But it reflects an ongoing concern that has been building in South Korea over the years: that if North Korea ever does collapse, the opportunity to determine the future of the peninsula may not fall to South Korea, but rather to China.

By the end of World War II, the U.S. government had recognized how important a cultural dimension of foreign policy was to accomplishing its broad national objectives. International relations in the twentieth century was no longer just a matter of relations between governments; it was a matter of people-to-people contact as well. President Harry Truman clearly sensed the advent of a new age. On August 31, 1945, he proclaimed that “the nature of present-day foreign relations makes it essential for the United States to maintain information activities abroad as an integral part of the conduct of our foreign affairs.” In September 1945, Assistant Secretary of State William Benton articulately expressed similar beliefs about the importance of an international information program: “The development of modern means of communication has brought the peoples of the world into direct contact with each other. Friendship between the leaders and the diplomats of the world is important, but it is not enough. The people themselves must strive to understand each other. We must strive to interpret ourselves abroad through a program of education and of cultural exchange.”

After serving as a Japanese diplomat in Asia and Europe during the first half of the 20th century—helping negotiate with the Soviet Union to purchase the North Manchurian Railroad, saving thousands of Jews from the hands of the Nazis in Lithuania, and being interned in the Soviet Union for a year at the end of World War II—Sugihara Chiune was told by his superiors to resign from the Japanese Foreign Service in 1947.

The exhibit was in Tokyo from August 6-24, 2008. An exhibit is also planned for Okinawa in 2009.

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” 〠€ Article 9, Japanese Constitution

In July 2008 the world media heralded the arrest of “the world's most wanted war criminal,” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. He had been in hiding for thirteen years, ever since he was charged with genocide by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for his role in the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. These events were subsequently termed “Europe's worst slaughter of civilians since World War II.”

The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America's troubles. Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.” But asking Asia's business and governing elites to repress shivers of pleasure at the meltdown of the American financial system is probably demanding more than flesh and blood can bear. The spectacle of the politicians, pundits and academics of Washington and Chicago thrashing about in attempts to justify the vast amounts of money being shoveled at their, um, cronies on Wall Street is just a little too rich. Particularly since much of the money will have to be borrowed from the very people who a decade ago at the time of the so-called Asian Financial Crisis were being pooh-poohed for their “crony capitalism,” “opaque” banking systems, “incestuous” government-business relations, not to mention their supposed absence of transparent financial reporting, good corporate governance, or accountable executives and regulators.

This is the first of a multi-part article on the South Korean massacres of 1950, the US direct and indirect involvement in those massacres, and the subsequent cover up of the events in South Korea and the United States.

Will Japan ever overcome its distrust of foreigners? This question has been forcefully posed in various guises, most notably perhaps by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights Doudou Diene. In 2005 he concluded after a nine-day investigation in Japan that the authorities were not doing enough to tackle what he called Japan's “deep and profound racism” and xenophobia, particularly against its former colonial subjects. The report appeared to vindicate the work of campaigners such as naturalized Japanese Arudou Debito, who argue that Japan needs, among other things, an antidiscrimination law.

A bloody dispute between two rival Yakuza groups in a southern Japanese city has led to a historic fight-back by local people. But rooting out the mob from society will not be easy.

“Get lost.” Not a promising start to an interview but this is hardly a standard interviewee: a flint-eyed gangster sporting a crew cut and a boiler suit. His two colleagues glower from behind oversized sunglasses and thick layers of suspicion. Rippling tattoos snake out of the rolled-up sleeves of Goon No. 1. “Kieusero,” [Fuck Off], he growls before slamming down the shutter of his office garage.

In a boon for tourism, record numbers of spotted seals have appeared along the Sea of Japan coast of Hokkaido. Visitors are flocking to the areas to shoot pictures of the popular sea mammals affectionately known as goma-chan.

More than six decades after the end of World War II, responsibility for wartime suffering remains a highly sensitive political issue in Asia, nowhere more so than in the Japan-Korea relationship. When the two countries normalized relations in 1965, one treaty provision was intended to settle claims by the Korean government and its people for compensation for injuries suffered during the era of Japanese rule (1910-45). More than forty years later, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs still keeps documents created during treaty negotiations hidden from public view.