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.

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.

Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948), professor of constitutional law on the Tōdai Faculty of Law, was one of prewar Japan's foremost legal scholars. The emperor-organ theory is the doctrine with which his name is associated; it held that the emperor was an organ of the state; the repository of sovereignty, he was still a constituent part of the larger entity, the state. Hozumi Yatsuka (1860-1912) and Uesugi Shinkichi (1878-1929), both also professors on the Faculty of Law, provided the theoretical underpinning for an alternate doctrine. Citing conservative European legal theorists (and paraphrasing France's Louis XIV), they argued that the emperor was the state. The two positions framed the legal debate under the Meiji Constitution.

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.

One of the most tested and effective means of maintaining order in society is controlling the meanings of keywords and concepts. In his book, Living in the Number One Country: Reflections of a Critic on American Empire, Herbert Schiller observes that ‘definitional control’ serves “to bulwark, or at least minimize, threats to the prevailing order.” In the context of contemporary Guam, control over concepts of patriotism toward the United States have hardly needed any coercion from the top of the political order as gratitude toward the U.S. military for ending the brutal wartime Japanese occupation of Guam, decades ago, has largely remained fixed in the memory of the indigenous Chamorro people.

The signal to noise ratio on the Korean Peninsula is usually very low with a great deal of noise and only a few signals. Recently, the signals increased in amplitude and frequency, but so too has the noise. Interpreting the signals correctly is even more challenging when the parties are not talking to each other but rather, past each other.

On September 2, 2011, Takarajimasha, a publisher known for its popular magazines, printed an oversized PR piece in the leading national newspapers in Japan. Splashed across the pages of the Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi, Sankei, Nihon Keizai, and Nikkan Gendai was the 1945 black-and-white photograph of General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, emerging from his plane, Bataan, at Atsugi Airport outside Tokyo to commence his reign as head of the occupation forces in Japan.

After two years in which international attention focused on Fukushima as an emblem of disaster, Fukushima's plans for immense floating wind farm projects have begun to attract international attention. This April 15 article “Fukushima Moves Forward With World's Largest Wind Farm” reminds us that the prefecture's projects are bold initiatives which could pioneer a new model of offshore and large-scale deployment. The article also lauds Fukushima's aim of getting 40% of its power from renewables by 2020, and then fully 100% by 2040.

This is part two of a two part series.

For several days, the winds from the destroyed nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi crashed head on into the myth of the radioactive plume.

In December 2012, not a few people in Japan remembered the 75th anniversary of Nanjing Massacre. Those people hoped that the lessons from war crimes committed by the Japanese Army from 1931-1945 would be learned so that Japan would never wage war against another country again, and peace would be achieved in East Asia. These Japanese, however, now face a major challenge.

A Japanese translation of this article is available here

Two leading Agent Orange specialists have weighed in on the recent discovery of 22 barrels buried on former military land in Okinawa City. Richard Clapp, professor emeritus at Boston University School of Public Health, and Wayne Dwernychuk, the scientist previously in charge of identifying defoliant contamination in southeast Asia, likened the levels of dioxin contamination in Okinawa City to dangerous hot-spots in Vietnam where the U.S. military had stored toxic defoliants during the 1960s and ‘70s.

The emerging India-Japan relationship has been met with extreme reactions - from enthusiasm and protests in India and Japan, to concern in China. This new “strategic partnership,” and particularly the nuclear cooperation under negotiation, does not portend well for Asia. P K Sundaram, a strong advocate of better relations between the people of India and Japan, tells us why.

“The utility's glaring ineptitude with crisis - management was noted right from the start of the Fukushima disaster. How and why could TEPCO have kept repeating the same blunders over and over?” (Asahi 7/31/2013)

On August 7, 2013 PM Abe Shinzo finally announced that the government had lost faith in Tepco's ability to manage the ongoing crisis at Fukushima following months of media reports documenting dangerous radioactive water leaks. NHK News (8/6/13) commented, “Once again Tepco is one step behind.” And the following night it described Tepco's efforts as “groping in the dark”. This explains why 94% of Japanese believe that the Fukushima accident has not been brought under control and why 31% want to abandon nuclear energy as soon as possible with an additional 54% supporting a gradual phase out. (Asahi 7/18/2013)

In 2010, 18 employees working for Foxconn in China attempted suicide. These shocking events focused world attention on the manufacturing supply chains of China's export industry and the experience of working within them. What had driven these young migrant assembly line workers to commit such a desperate act? This article provides a first-hand account of the experiences of one of those who survived a suicide attempt, 17-year-old Tian Yu. Her personal narrative is embedded within the broader context of labour process, work organisation and managerial practice at Foxconn, the Taiwanese-owned multinational whose 1.4 million Chinese workers provide products and components for Apple and others. Factory conditions are further shaped by the company trade union and Chinese government policies. The paper concludes with additional contextualisation indicating the emergence of an alliance of workers, students, scholars and transnational labour movement activists who are campaigning for Chinese workers’ rights.

With toxins in the air and dead pigs in the rivers, environmental destruction has become a huge topic in China. The government has closed down hundreds of polluting factories, banks have refused lending for polluters, and protests have derailed numerous destructive projects. For Chinese companies, environmental risks have become business risks.

The same is true internationally. Chinese banks, mining and hydropower companies have faced protests and lost contracts when their projects destroyed the environment. China Southern Power Grid pulled out of Cambodia after concerns emerged about the social impacts of its dam projects, and China Power Investment lost a multi-billion dollar contract for the Myitsone Dam in Burma.

In 2010, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) launched a highly successful TV show called The Gruen Transfer. The title refers to the disorienting psychological effects produced on consumers by the architecture of shopping malls, whose dazzle and noise are deliberately designed to mesmerize: on entering, “our eyes glaze over, our jaws slacken… we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers”. The ABC's Gruen Transfer explored the weird, wonderful and disorienting effects produced by the advertising industry. Its most popular element was a segment called “The Pitch”, in which representatives of two advertising agencies competed to sell the unsellable to the show's audience - creating gloriously sleek videos to market bottled air, promote the virtues of banning religion, or advocate generous pay raises for politicians.

The present paper examines the military chaplaincy in the context of a problem which has long intrigued researchers, namely the reasons for the rapid growth of the Christian (Protestant and Catholic) churches in 1950-80s South Korea compared to Japan or Taiwan. The author suggests that, whereas a general answer to the question may be the use of Christianity as a de facto state ideology in the years 1948-1960 and its functioning as an ideology of capitalist modernisation in the 1960s-80s, a particularly important part of government-induced Christianization of South Korea was the institution of military chaplaincy. In 1951-1968, Christians - despite being a numerical minority! - monopolized the chaplaincy in the military, and fully utilised this monopoly, “solacing” vulnerable youth forcibly conscripted for military service and making many “church family members”. The loyalties won in such a way, often lasted for life, thus providing the churches with new recruits and the hard-core anti-Communist state - with docile anti-Communismt Christian subjects.

Conspicuous of late, in light of this historical moment that marks forty years since the ‘restitution’ of the rights to administrative control over Okinawa from the United States to Japan, have been media special reports which, be they designed for publication in print or for broadcast over the airwaves, have featured in their titles the phrase ‘Fukki 40 Nen [40 Years Since Reversion]’. There are, however, no few individuals in Okinawa who harbor a certain hostility to the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, this word ‘reversion’ is deployed without being bracketed in quotation marks, as if it represented a simple matter of fact.

The economic downturn of the Great Recession has largely brought an end to the wave of ethnic return migration of Japanese South Americans to Japan, a wave that began in the late 1980s. By 2012, the number of South American residents in Japan had dropped by more than a third, contributing to the shrinking of the foreign resident population in Japan to the lowest level since 2005 (Ministry of Justice 2013). This emigration wave from Japan has been encouraged by growth in the Brazilian economy and by financial incentives from the Japanese government for Japanese South Americans and their family members to leave the country. However, despite these changes, the number of non-Japanese children in Japanese public schools who require remedial help in Japanese remains high. While the number of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking children in Japanese-as-a-second-language (JSL) classes has dropped, the number of Chinese- and Tagalog-speaking children receiving these classes has increased (MEXT 2013).