This article is a contribution to a symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath, which addresses some of the most fraught issues in historiography, historical remembrance, and contemporary politics. It also reflects on occupation states in Europe and postwar East Asia, while casting important light on contemporary issues of collaboration globally. How are we to assess occupation regimes that emerged in each East and Southeast Asian nation during the Pacific War, as well as in postwar nations including those occuped by the United States or other occupiers. Issues of collaboration in a post-colonial world may be equally salient in reflecting on the experiences of newly independent nations? The issues are closely intertwined with dominant nationalist ideologies that have characteristically obfuscated and dismissed collaborationist politics while establishing their own legitimacy, or what Timothy Brook calls their “untouchability”. In the post Cold War milieu, and at a time when politicians on both sides of the Taiwan straits, and across the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, are redefining their relationships, it becomes possible to revisit the history of war, revolution, occupation and collaboration.

When I first read Inoue Hisashi's novel My Friend Frois in “All Yomimono” magazine some 25 years ago, I was immediately taken with its importance as a recreation of Japanese history. As always with Inoue's work, what also struck me was his erudition, insight and wit.

Being an architect requires patience and endurance. For argument's sake, let's just say it's 2002 and, as the highlight of your career to date, you win the competition to design a new art museum in one of the most prized locations in the world: Manhattan.

Okinawa is simultaneously Japan's periphery and its centre. It is peripheral for obvious geographical reasons, being much closer to the China coast and Taiwan than to Tokyo, but it is also peripheral in the historical sense that its links with the main Japanese islands, and eventually with the modern Japanese state, have been thin, fraught, and relatively recent. Only belatedly incorporated as a prefecture in the Japanese state in the late 19th century, it was then excised from it between 1945 and 1972, and only half restored to it in 1972, since the US bases remained intact. It has continued since then to be governed as if the US-Japan Security Treaty mattered more than the Japanese peace constitution, half-in and half-out of the country, so to speak. Though thus peripheral, Okinawa is also “central” in that it constitutes the fulcrum on which the key security relationship between the US and Japan rests.

A succession of weak Japanese Prime Ministers, the drama of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the current global financial crisis once again have returned the subject of Japanese security policy to a position of relative political marginality. Throughout the Cold War, the analysis of Japanese security was a topic largely overlooked by both American students of Japan and by students of national security. Japan, after all, was the country that had adopted a Peace Constitution with its famous Article 9 interpreted as legally banning the use of armed force in the defense of national objectives. Its professional military had little public standing and was under the thumb of civilians. And Japan's grand strategy aimed at gaining power and prestige and sought to leverage its economic prowess to a position of regional and perhaps global leadership that would complement rather than rival that of the United States. At the same time Japan relied on the continued protection by the U.S. military. To be sure, since the late 1970s the U.S. government persistently pressed Japan to play a larger regional role in Asia and to spend more of its rapidly growing GDP on national defense. But Japan made no more than marginal concessions. On security issues it kept a low regional profile, and since the late 1980s Japanese defense spending consistently stayed below one percent of GDP. Writing on problems of Japanese national security, thus, was left to policy specialists issuing regular conference reports on the ups and downs of the U.S.–Japan bilateral defense relationship. Theoretically informed scholarship was conspicuous by its absence.

Six months ago Sato Junichi and Suzuki Toru were ordinary men looking after young families. But in June they were arrested by a group of uniformed police, taken to a detention center in Aomori, northern Japan and held for 26 days.

Over the last two decades, Japanese popular culture products have been massively exported, marketed, and consumed throughout East and Southeast Asia. A wide variety of these products are prominently displayed in the region's big cities. Many Hong Kong fashion journals, for example, can be found in either the original Japanese or Cantonese versions. Japanese manga are routinely translated into the local languages of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, and China, and they dominate East Asia's comic book market. The Japanese animated characters Hello Kitty, Ampan Man, and Poke'mon are ubiquitous, depicted on licensed and unlicensed toys and stationary items in the markets of every Asian city. Japanese animation, usually dubbed, is the most popular in its field, particularly in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Astro Boy, Sailor Moon, and Lupin are animated characters seen in almost every shop that sells anime in Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. In China's big cities, too, Japanese popular culture products fill local stores, opening doors into the country's expanding cultural market, though in some markets they also face stiff competition from Korean and Chinese products. The success of Japanese popular culture in East and Southeast Asia has occasioned a flood of academic writing, notably in the fields of cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnography. The majority of works have focused on particular examples, emphasizing the reaction of audiences to cultural exposure in relation to the global-local discourse (Allison 2006; Craig 2000; Ishii 2001; Iwabuchi 2004; Martinez 1998; Mori 2004; Otake and Hosokawa 1998; Treat 1996). These studies consist of specific case studies with a strong tendency to privilege the text and its representational practices. No single study has yet comprehensively assessed the newly created Japanese cultural markets in East and Southeast Asia, nor framed these issues within a regional paradigm.

Every time it looks as if US-DPRK negotiations are on the verge of a breakthrough someone in Washington throws a spanner in the works. This is what happened in 2005 as the Chinese were forcing through the Joint Statement of 19 September which seemed to put the negotiations, under the aegis of the Six Party Talks, on a course for a successful resolution. The US Treasury designated the Macau bank used by North Korean entities (and British companies and joint ventures in DPRK), Banco Delta Asia, as a “Primary Money Laundering Concern under USA PATRIOT Act”. Although the allegations were subsequently discredited, partly through the investigative reporting of the US chain McClatchy Newspapers, the action put the Six Party Talks in limbo for over a year, as well as having a serious impact on DPRK foreign trade, and hence on the economy itself, which reportedly shrank 1.1% in 2006. Negotiations between US Under Secretary of State Christopher Hill and DPRK Vice Minister Kim Kye-gwan resulted in a couple of agreements in 2007, one in February the other in October, which seemed to offer a way forward. These hopes have been dashed and prospects at the moment look dim.

On 23 June 2006 the UN proudly launched its Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) seeking to reverse a situation where international efforts to rebuild war-torn societies had, more often than not, failed. In the words of its charter, the PBC will “marshal resources at the disposal of the international community to advise and propose integrated strategies for post-conflict recovery, focusing attention upon reconstruction, institution-building, and sustainable development in countries emerging from conflict.” As an advisory body made up of 31 member countries including four permanent members of the Security Council, and currently chaired by Japan, the PBC purports to offer tailor-made solutions to target countries making the transition from war to peace.

With the regional and global spike in food prices it is naturally imperative that East Timor corner crucial sources of food, joining a queue of food deficit countries from the Philippines to Singapore. But how and why has East Timor – a land of subsistence agriculturalists and one of the world's poorest nations- been turned into a net food importer? And what is the future of East Timor's agriculture? The answers are complex but we are reminded of the “Timor problem” described Dutch geographer F.J. Ormeling in the mid-1950s in a book of the same name, a reference to Timor's delicate environmental niche including highly invariant rainfall, that always threatens to breach self-sufficiency. Apparently the food security “problem” was not understood by the World Bank which, from 1999 to 2002, prioritized irrigated rice development over and above East Timor's traditional basket of staples of which corn was dominant. Indonesian rule after the 1975 invasion did extend wet-field rice, but they also left the rice paddies abandoned in 1999. With the crisis apparent, FAO in East Timor has only belatedly acknowledged the need to address non-rice agriculture. The “problem” today, as addressed by Douglas Kammen, is that East Timor faces down the curse of other states drawing upon hydrocarbon rents for quick fixes, namely that it is cheaper to import just about everything – food included – and that agriculture – the life and blood of the country for millennium - is left to the market or to wither. But as Kammen also stresses, problems of overcoming cronyism and corruption at the interface of state and market are central to East Timor's future. This is the third in a continuing series on the world food crisis. See Walden Bello, How to manufacture a global food crisis: The destruction of agriculture in developing countries; C. Peter Timmer, Japan and a Solution to the World Rice Crisis Japan Focus

This article is a contribution to a symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath, which addresses some of the most fraught issues in historiography, historical remembrance, and contemporary politics. It also reflects on occupation states in Europe and postwar East Asia, while casting important light on contemporary issues of collaboration globally. How are we to assess occupation regimes that emerged in each East and Southeast Asian nation during the Pacific War, as well as in postwar nations including those occuped by the United States or other occupiers. Issues of collaboration in a post-colonial world may be equally salient in reflecting on the experiences of newly independent nations? The issues are closely intertwined with dominant nationalist ideologies that have characteristically obfuscated and dismissed collaborationist politics while establishing their own legitimacy, or what Timothy Brook calls their “untouchability”. In the post Cold War milieu, and at a time when politicians on both sides of the Taiwan straits, and across the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, are redefining their relationships, it becomes possible to revisit the history of war, revolution, occupation and collaboration.

Until March of 2007, Stephen Roach was the chief economist for Morgan Stanley and the analyst to read on the Morgan Stanley Global Economic Forum page. But his repeated warnings of a bubble economy about to burst went unappreciated by his paymasters and - rumor has it - many Morgan Stanley investors. Yet even as they moved Roach to the Morgan Stanley Asia desk, far away from his forum, the housing bubble he warned of was already showing strong evidence of impending collapse. Late last summer, of course, the subprime market in the financial sector slipped suddenly into meltdown mode, leaving not only homeowners in the lurch, but striking deep into the profits of the likes of Citibank. Now it seems that not only the US economy but others, too, are sliding into something truly ominous. So inside the year since Roach was silenced, we have moved from bubble-era euphoria to the growing possibilities of a major recession, and some believe even a 1930s style collapse. So Roach is clearly someone worth listening to, in this instance comparing the US with Japan's 1990s implosion.

Out of the thick political fog produced by Japan's G8 Summit in Hokkaido emerged one key pledge: the world's second-largest economy has announced a 60-80 percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2050, one of the most ambitious national targets. The pledge has since come under intense scrutiny, particularly over the telling lack of mid-term targets and deliberate fudging on the starting or base year for cuts – 1990 or 2008? But one thing remains very clear: nuclear energy will shoulder much of the burden of the country's climate-change strategy.

The Yomiuri Shinbun has announced the formation of the “Ito Kazuya Fund” on November 5th to help rehabilitate Afghanistan. Ito is the young aid worker who was kidnapped and killed in Afghanistan in August. The fund will be initially based on a US$30,000 posthumously awarded to Ito as part of the 15th Yomiuri International Cooperation Prize. Ito's parents, Ito Masuyuki and Junko, were honored at the ceremony at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Ito Masuyuki announced that the prize will be used “to help Afghanistan, via agricultural assistance, to become a country that can provide its people with enough to eat.” Japan Focus

For more than three decades, historical memory controversies have been fought over Japanese school textbook content in both the domestic and international arenas. In these controversies, Japanese textbook contents, which are subject to Ministry of Education examination and revision of content and language prior to approval for use in the public schools, repeatedly sparked denunciations by Chinese and Korean authorities and citizens with respect to such issues as the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, and coerced labor. In 2007, the most intense controversy has pitted the Ministry of Education against the residents and government of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. The issue exploded in March 2007 with the announcement that all references to military coercion in the compulsory mass suicides (shudan jiketsu) of Okinawan residents during the Battle of Okinawa were to be eliminated. The announcement triggered a wave of anger across Okinawan society leading to the mass demonstration in Ginowan City of 110,000 Okinawans addressed by the top leadership of the Prefecture. It was the largest demonstration since the 1972 reversion of Okinawa, exceeding even the response to the 1995 rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl by three US GIs.

Benedict Anderson's “Exit Suharto” examines the life of the late Indonesian dictator in a wide-ranging political-cultural analysis. The article is reprinted from New Left Review 50, March-April, 2008.

In 1971, the Indonesian presidential machine informed the public that Suharto and his wife were planning a mausoleum for themselves on a spur of Mount Lawu, the dormant, 3,000m sacred volcano that lies to the east of the cidevant royal Javanese city of Surakarta. The site had been carefully chosen, respectfully situated some metres below the early tombs of the Mangkunegaran dynasty—the second most insignificant of the four small Central Java principalities instituted by colonial authority in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Mrs Tien Suharto—by then already quietly mocked as Tientje (Ten Per Cent)—claimed some connection with the little dynasty which had barely survived the revolution of 1945–49.

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle's plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools. Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who subsequently died of polonium poisoning in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).

Among the many false assumptions around North Korea is the claim that this country and its leadership are not predictable. The opposite is true; North Korea has one of the most predictable regimes on earth. Speculations about the future are an extension of the past. The bigger the knowledge base of past experiences is, the easier such an extrapolation becomes. As a byproduct of the totalitarian system, political leadership in North Korea exhibited enormous stability and continuity. In fact, since 1948 it had only two leaders, both from the same family, the same party, and operating under the same agenda. We had six decades to study that system and its behavior. Compare this to the ten very different leaders of South Korea with their shifting agendas.

Part of a continuing series on the impact of the financial and economic crisis on the Asia Pacific.

Back in June 2006 Indonesian environment watchdog Walhi urged the government to shutdown and investigate PT Lapindo Brantas' gas prospecting operation in East Java after a botched drilling operation that caused hot toxic mud to flood surrounding land and to poison local villagers. By mid-2008 some 50,000 people had fled their homes. An international team of scientists who studied the phenomenon is convinced that the mudflow is an “unnatural disaster.” Lapindo, as the article mentions, was then part of the conglomerate owned by Indonesian billionaire and member of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's cabinet, Aburizal Bakrie. Sale of Lapindo in 2006 was widely viewed in Indonesia as an attempt by Bakrie to reduce his financial exposure.

The past is haunting Northeast Asia. The China-Japan-Korea triad has been on a repeated collision course over how each perceives the shared past. Bound by dense memory webs, cultural affinity and geographical proximity, each of the three nations has made conflicting historical claims against the other, giving rise to conflict throughout the region and beyond.