In Mongolia today, hunger for coal, copper, gold and uranium wealth is at odds with democracy as the demands of international resource giants collide with a stubborn political culture of resource nationalism.

In time for the June 2012 parliamentary elections, Mongolia's grand khural passed a law subjecting the purchase by “state-owned entities” of controlling interest in strategic Mongolian mining enterprises to government approval (as well as a host of other key industries).

The idea that China and Japan are slipping towards war over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands territorial conflict is deeply shocking. How could the world's second and third largest economies even consider the possibility of war over half a dozen uninhabitable islets? For Australians, the question is more serious still: could Australia be drawn into the dangerous conflict between its two largest trading partners on the side of Japan because of its defence agreements with Japan and because of the pull of the ANZUS alliance?

Japan's diplomacy must always be rooted in democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. These universal values have guided Japan's post-war development. I firmly believe that, in 2013 and beyond, the Asia- Pacific region's future prosperity should rest on them as well. (Abe Shinzo, Prime Minister of Japan, proclaiming Japan “Asia's Democratic Security Diamond”, 27 December 2012)

As influential contributors to national policy, intelligence professionals inevitably face strong political and bureaucratic pressures to shape their assessments to fit official or factional policy. In the modern era, such pressures have contributed to costly, even disastrous, escalations of the Vietnam War, the arms race, and, most notoriously, Washington's conflict with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

A small organization, little known to the public, has helped restore much of Japan's controversial past - and it is only getting started.

Immaculate and ramrod straight in a crisp black suit, Japan's education minister, Shimomura Hakubun, speaks slowly and deliberately, like a schoolteacher. His brow creases with concern when he talks about Japan's diminished place in the world, its years of anemic economic growth and poorly competing universities. Mostly, though, he appears worried about the moral and spiritual decline of the nation's youth.

Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter—the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn—the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. Responding to the high-pressure production regime, the young generation of Chinese rural migrant workers engages in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power.

Reacting to testimonies of workers published in Sekai (a progressive Japanese monthly journal) and recent radio broadcasts, this individual call from Canada echoes the requests of Japanese NGOs that have been engaged in negotiations with the Ministry of Health and Labor since April 2011 to defend the rights of the workers involved in the “cleanup” of the disasterstricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and of those hired to carry out “decontamination” work in Fukushima prefecture.

Article summary: In this interview, Asato Ikeda speaks with artists Ken and Julia Yonetani, the creators of uranium art. The Yonetanis share with us emotions that have motivated them to create the uranium art and their interests in Aboriginal stories and worldviews, and in postwar Japanese cultural images of nuclear power and catastrophe.

For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.

Since 9/11 however, constitutional practices have been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in size, reach and budget, while traditional government has shrunk. As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre - and its entirety…visible only to God.

On August 13, a dozen anti-base demonstrators scuffled with police outside the gates of Futenma Air Station in Ginowan City, Okinawa, as U.S. marines watched from behind the fence cracking jokes and laughing. Such scenes occur daily on Okinawa - saddled with roughly 70% of U.S. bases in Japan - and are usually ignored by the national media. But on this day, Tokyo TV stations had dispatched so many reporters they outnumbered the protesters.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans and Filipinos fought bitterly for control of the Philippine Islands. The United States viewed the Pacific islands as a stepping-stone to the markets and natural resources of Asia. The Philippines, which had belonged to Spain for three hundred years, wanted independence, not another imperial ruler. For the Americans, the acquisition of a colony thousands of miles from its shores required a break with their antiimperial traditions. To justify such a break, the administration of William McKinley proclaimed that its policies benefited both Americans and Filipinos by advancing freedom, Christian benevolence, and prosperity. Most of the Congress, the press, and the public rallied to the flag, embracing the war as a patriotic adventure and civilizing mission. Dissent, however, flourished among a minority called anti-imperialists. Setting precedents for all wartime presidents who would follow, McKinley enhanced the power of the chief executive to build a public consensus in support of an expansionist foreign policy.

President Xi Jinping's call for a “new type of great-power relationship” in meetings in 2013 with President Obama raises important questions about the future of US-China relations. On the surface, it appeared that the two leaders were on the same page. At the June summit, Obama agreed with Xi that “working together cooperatively” and bringing US-China relations “to a new level” were sound ideas. When the G-20 countries convened at St. Petersburg in September, Obama said of Xi's proposed new model: “we agreed to continue to build a new model of great power relations based on practical cooperation and constructively managing our differences.” But he added that “significant differences and sources of tension” remain with China, implying that China's “playing a stable and prosperous and peaceful role” in world affairs remained a matter of US concern.

This is an expanded and edited version of an article that appeared in Yale Environment 360.

Imaizumi Hitoshi pushes back the silver quilting of a tent at the National Research Institute of Aquaculture in Shibushi, southern Japan, steps into the pitch-black interior, and switches on a flashlight. A tall, tube-shaped aquarium emerges from the darkness. Inside, slivers of reflected light flicker through the water: Japanese eel larvae, hatched just six days earlier. With huge black eyes set in skulllike heads and flat, transparent bodies, they look like tiny visitors from an alien world — which, in a sense, they are.

This article examines the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship, on March 26 2010. Known as the Cheonan incident, it resulted in the deaths of 46 seamen and gave rise to subsequent political developments that provide a barometer of the current status and future prospects of Korea's democracy and of North-South relations. From a military perspective, the incident involved a serious breach of national security for the ship sank near the northern maritime border with North Korea.

Beate Sirota Gordon passed away on Dec. 30, 2012

In 1946, when Article 24 of the Japanese Constitution was being written — and finding herself to be “the only woman in the room,” as she put it with inveterate modesty in her memoir titled in those words — she played a key role in formulating that article which established full rights for women in all matters dealing with marriage and family.

If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE, the nuclear weapons era. The latter era of course opened on August 6 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover effective means to destroy itself, but, so the evidence suggests, not the moral and intellectual capacity to control their worst instincts.

Miyazaki Hayao's new film Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) premiered on July 20 and is on pace to become one of the most successful, if not the most successful, Japanese films of 2013. Miyazaki tells the story of Horikoshi Jiro, the designer of the “Zero Fighter”, which was a terrifyingly effective weapon deployed against China, the United States, and its allies in the early war years, but was soon doomed to become the antique target of “turkey shoots” and the funeral pyre of kamikaze pilots as Japan's empire crumbled and its cities burned.

In the wake of the 2011 tsunami, the Japanese government is forgoing an opportunity to sustainably protect its coastline and is instead building towering concrete seawalls and other defenses that environmentalists say will inflict serious damage on coastal ecosystems.

This is a revised and expanded version of an article originally published by Yale Environment 360 <link>