Fifty-five years after the armistice that halted, but failed to formally end, the Korean War, many diplomats are optimistic that the nuclear standoff with North Korea can be resolved as a first step toward a peace treaty and restoration of US-North Korea relations. Some leaders and scholars are even urging the transformation of the Six-Party Talks over the Korean nuclear issue, involving the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the two Koreas, into a permanent peace structure in Northeast Asia.

This is in response to Charles Hayford's piece, “Samurai Baseball vs. Baseball in Japan.” In his interesting and well-written essay, Hayford calls Bushido the invention of twentieth-century Japanese Nitobe Inazo. He quotes William Kelly, who says that “Samurai Baseball” was “shaped by important elements of the nation in the early 20th century—education, industry, middle class life, the government, and above all the national project.” And he also quotes Ruth Benedict, who called Bushido “a publicist's inspiration,” But surely, he must be aware of the antecedents—the various forms of budo, as well as the seventeenth century version of Bushido as described by Yamaga—which were already there, be they invented tradition or otherwise.

“Atomic John,” an intriguing article that appeared in the New Yorker on December 15, 2008, is particularly remarkable for what it reveals about the inability of some Americans to confront the consequences of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.

On the surface, it is the story of John Coster-Mullen, a 61-year-old “truck driver” from Waukesha, Wisconsin, who, through years of painstaking effort, has succeeded better than the ostensible experts have in constructing a precise model of the weapon that annihilated Hiroshima. This is a formidable intellectual achievement, and the author of the article, David Samuels, emphasizes this fact. Moreover, Coster-Mullen has made available his findings about the bomb's technology in a self-published book and on the Internet.

If the only certainties in life are death and taxes, in recent years struggles over tax policy and tax reform in Japan have become fierce indeed.

At the heart of the struggle is the bleak situation of Japan's public finances. The downside of attempts to revive the moribund post-bubble economy through fiscal stimuli (public works spending and tax cuts) is that in 2007 government gross debt soared to 179% of GDP. This is the highest level ever recorded in the OECD area. (OECD Economic Survey of Japan, April 2008). The near doubling of social security payments since the early 1990s as the population rapidly ages has only aggravated the situation. Further, in fiscal 2007, taxes accounted for just 64.5% of total revenues, with 30% of total revenues coming from issues of government bonds. This substantially increases future liabilities.

Raphael Kaplinsky and Dirk Messner have launched an important project on “The Impact of Asian Drivers on the Developing World,” in a special issue of World Development (36, 2, 2008). The central issue is the impact of the surging economies of China and India on the world economy. Japan Focus reprints their introduction to the issues, and a comment by R. Taggart Murphy on “New Asian Drivers, Japan, Korea and the Lessons of History” that raises historical issues with particular respect to Japan and Korea, including the impact on the world economy of these earlier developments, and the nature of their rise in global perspective. In future articles we hope to extend this discussion with respect to other issues pertaining to the impact of Chinese and Indian development on the Asian regional and global economy, and the impact on Chinese and Indian societies of the development paths chosen. We also draw attention to Giovanni Arrighi's contribution on “Historical Perspectives on States, Markets and Capitalism, East and West.”

By early November 2008, every major newspaper and mainstream television station in Japan had reported on the events surrounding Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff Gen. Tamogami Toshio: his dismissal from the Defense Ministry for provocatively contradicting national policy on the Asia-Pacific War and his later unrepentant testimony before a committee of the National Diet.

For Korea's confident and well-capitalized film industry, summer is a season to pull out the stops and offer the South Korean – and increasingly international – audience the most spectacular products it can produce. In the summer of 2006, one such blockbuster was the film Hanbando (‘The Korean Peninsula‘). It was produced by a syndicate of major companies headed by market leader CJ Entertainment and directed by Kang Woo-suk, well-known for genre action films like the Two Cops franchise and the Public Enemy films, and the nationalistic action thriller Silmido. The film was backed by a huge advertising budget and saturation bookings: it occupied 550 screens during the opening week, roughly one out of every three in South Korea. The film seemed destined to be the phenomenon of the summer releases.

We have recently crossed the five-year mark since the American invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush used the occasion to triumphantly declare that, due to his decision to invade, ‘the world is better, and the United States of America is safer.‘

I see the lines of imperial flags on the southern isle and think, oh how dazzling the Emperor's reign! I see the exotic stars of the Southern Cross in my window at dawn, but the rooster's call sounds just the same I see the strange sight of a soldier with a gibbon for a pet; yet in time regard it quite without suspicion.

Tanaka Katsumi, Syonanto [Singapore], 1944

The spiritual remains of the unknown war dead take on a vital presence in popular Vietnamese religious culture and their everyday ritual life. They are also a powerful means of historical narration and reflection in contemporary Vietnam. This article introduces some of their vigorous actions and claims for social justice, and explores how we can make sense of their existence in the terms of sociology of religion.

As a long-time observer of the Japanese economy, I found myself growing irritated as I read Raphael Kaplinsky's and Dirk Messner's Introduction to “The Impact of Asian Drivers on the Developing World.” Of course China and India have already had a huge impact on the global economy and that impact shows every sign of getting yet larger. Two new economic behemoths pushing their way into the club of great powers are naturally going to upset many apple carts. No reasonable person could disagree with the proposition that the “questions” posed by the rise of “Asian Drivers,” to use the authors' label for India and China, “need to be addressed in a systematic framework” and the list of such questions the authors volunteer on page 202 – what are the consequences; who wins and loses; what are the implications for the environment, for institutions of global governance, for other developing country plans and so forth – is a worthy enough start.

In the following opinion piece, which appeared in the March 20, 2008 issue of the Asahi Shimbun, Jayantha Dhanapala—the distinguished former Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs at the United Nations—not only makes the case for a nuclear-free world, but argues that it is a viable possibility.

Bullying (ijime) and school nonattendance (futoko) have been the key ‘behavioural problems’ among students in Japan since the mid-1980s. School nonattendance has been consistently dealt with by the Ministry of Education and Science (MoE), but there have been few systematic efforts to curb bullying by the school administration either at national or local levels. The contrast is clear also at the grassroots level. Unlike school nonattendance, which led to the development of a major social movement in support of futoko students and their parents, bullying has rarely been considered by Japanese citizens to be an issue deserving of coordinated action.

Prisoners of conscience, communists, antiwar activists, martyrs for Japan's tottering pacifist constitution: Obora Toshiyuki, Onishi Nobuhiro and Takada Sachimi have been called many things since February 2004.

In the world of right-wing bloggers, they represent the dying strains of a 60-year-old refrain: no matter how the world changes, Japan must stay out of international conflict and remain true to a yellowing document written under US occupation in 1947. For others, including supporters who contributed 3-4 million yen to their legal fees, they are the stubborn keepers of the antiwar flame, the personification of pacifist ideals in the face of huge odds.

In March and April 1948 Koreans across Japan rose up in protest after the Japanese government began to enforce an order handed down to them by the American Occupation administration to close Korean ethnic schools. One such protest took place in Kobe on April 24 when Koreans stormed the Hyogo Prefecture offices in an attempt to get the governor to rescind the order to close the four Korean ethnic schools in the prefecture. American and Japanese administrations reacted harshly to the Korean actions. Police arrested thousands of Koreans and inflicted stiff penalties on the incident's leaders. As was often the case, the Occupation administration misinterpreted Korean intention to keep the schools open as a leftist attempt to disrupt U.S. occupations in Korea and Japan. Here the incident is examined through the eyes of one Occupation employee, Elizabeth Ryan, a 31-year old court reporter who included detailed information on the incident and its participants in personal letters that she sent to her family in the United States.

Most Americans have a rough idea what the term “military-industrial complex” means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime,” he said, “or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

The sharp rise of oil and gas prices has enabled Moscow to utilise its mammoth energy reserves to achieve domestic and foreign policy goals. The new Russian ‘power politics’ have already been tested on the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, and recently the Czech Republic. Russia's Far Eastern frontier is now turning into the place where energy export becomes a political tool in shaping the country's relations with regional neighbours. China, the two Koreas, and Japan are hungry for energy, natural resources and, at the same time, seek economic and political cooperation. In these circumstances, the opportunities offered by trans-national railroads and pipelines appear to be more powerful than weapons. Given this new leverage and understanding, can Russia exert its soft and hard power upon North Korea to promote the goals set in the Six-Party Talks?

What Japan can teach Americans and the world about financial crises is a question that has been cropping up for some time. References to Japan in fact appear to be increasing, with a recent turn to worries of “becoming Japanese” through a decade or so lost to malaise and marginal growth, perhaps interspersed with bouts of financial panic. Heralding this Japanization is America's seeming onset of deflation and a liquidity trap in tandem with a virtually zero interest rate policy. These developments have largely eroded American policy options on the financial side. In Japan, this impotent, “pushing on a string” stage of the post-bubble shakeout left the state sector largely moribund, especially after it vainly tried to spend its way out of the crisis. It remains to be seen whether the US, under Obama, will pursue an effective fiscal policy or repeat this year's tax rebates, the equivalent of simply throwing money in a hole. This commentary reviews the highlights of our current crisis as well as what we can learn from Japan and whether we are, in fact, learning from Japan.

“I think that we need to elect female representatives to national assemblies to address women's issues and into local assemblies to help solve community problems surrounding children and the family.” Ichikawa Fusae

“Increasing the number of female representatives alone will neither change politics nor increase the autonomy of the local community. Women who belong to existing parties and organizations that pursue vested interests have been unable to change the political system. It is broadly citizen-based independent female representatives who are given a free hand … who can make a difference.” Teramichi Midori