I write as a resident of Kushi district, the site for the planned construction of a Futenma Replacement Facility (the projected Henoko base). Ever since it first surfaced I have been struggling against the plan for construction of a base that would foreclose the future of the children of the district. I am joint representative of the “Association of the 10 Districts North of Futami Who Do Not Want a Base” (formed by the residents of those 10 districts in October 1997) and General Secretary of the “Association of Women Supporting the Inamine City Government” (commonly known as “Iinagu Association”) formed in April 2010. As an investigator for the project to compile Nago City's History, I have been involved in an oral history project into the nature-rooted daily life and history and culture of this region, in particular of the Kushi district. I am also a member of the “Northern Limits Dugong Investigation Team” and I participate in the Okinawa Citizen's Biodiversity Network.

Issues: diplomacy, engagement, ngos, North Korea missile launch, nuclear tests, Northeast Asia Security Dialogue, nuclear weapons, Six-Party Talks, sunshine policy

In recent weeks, North Korea has sent the usual mix of signals about its strategic intentions on the Korean peninsula.

In July it carried out a ballistic missile test in the East Sea (Sea of Japan), in violation of UN resolutions. It also threatened retaliation-including a nuclear strike on the White House-over the annual U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) military exercises, which often involve as many as half a million soldiers. Pyongyang has called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to deal with the threat it believes the August exercises, scheduled to begin August 18, pose—a threat that U.S. officials dismiss, as though the deployment of overwhelming U.S. and South Korean power could not conceivably be taken seriously by the North Koreans

Mark Selden: In discussing the US-China relationship or Chimerica, you note the 200-strong US delegation that visited Beijing at the very moment that the US was toppling the DPJ administration of Hatoyama Yukio as evidence that the US will not back Japan in the current dispute with China over Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands.

However, the US has made a number of contradictory statements, including some suggesting that it would view the issue within the framework of its obligation to defend Japan under the Japan-US Security Treaty. Moreover, the US has moved aggressively to insert itself into other territorial issues, notably those involving the clash between China and Vietnam/Philippines in the South China Sea. The situation is in fact volatile. How are we to understand the Diaoyutai clash in the context of wider territorial conflicts in the region?

This article examines the problems associated with the fact that Japanese nuclear power plants have multiple reactors within one plant and are concentrated in specific regions. It analyzes the situation from international, domestic, and local perspectives, revealing features of Japanese state-local relations.

Kang Sang-Jung (1950-) may well be the most prominent Zainichi Korean intellectual currently publishing in Japan. The first Zainichi Korean to become a faculty member at the University of Tokyo, Kang has written extensively on political issues concerning Zainichi Koreans and the social and historical circumstances that surround them. In the early 2000s, Kang embarked on two paths that have extended his readership to those outside the academy. One was that with the 2004 memoir Zainichi, he started to publish extensively on his family's and his own experiences of growing up as a Zainichi Korean. The other direction Kang took was that he increasingly came to write for non-Zainichi Korean Japanese, especially the young, offering them life advice and suggestions.

Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, the Japanese Cabinet, the Japanese Diet, a private-sector group as well as the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility, TEPCO, each set up an investigation commission to examine the causes of the accident, scrutinize the crisis response and make recommendations for future policies. This article provides some background on the four commissions and then examines and assesses the contents of the reports. Four key conclusions emerge from the analysis. Firstly, the establishment of the commissions was accompanied by immense mistrust, as each of the initiators suspected bias in the other inquiries. Secondly, the comparison demonstrates that while biases can be detected to some extent, the four reports overall agree in their identification of fundamental issues and crucial problems. Thirdly, the article maintains that the four reports used in combination convey a more complete picture than any single one of them. A comparison of the reports highlights diverging interpretations and differing degrees of criticism, while exposing open questions and unresolved issues. Finally, the article argues that the four investigation reports can serve as important reference points, enabling critical assessments of reforms currently undertaken in Japan's nuclear power administration and crisis management system.

During his June 2013 visit to Poland, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo highlighted the crisis management of the post-3.11 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as an argument for the sales and promotion of Japanese nuclear technology. A few weeks before, the French company Areva mobilized to promote cooperation with Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd, Atox and Hitachi-GE during French President François Hollande's visit to Japan.

In the wake of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, much has been said about the character of Japan, and especially about Tōhoku and its people. In the early weeks and months, the exceptionally good behavior of an overwhelming majority of Japanese in the face of a disaster of almost unthinkable magnitude was the object of much admiration. Especially in the foreign press, mixed in with cringe-inducing references to the “Fukushima 50” as “nuclear samurai”-if anything, “kamikaze” would have been the more appropriate image-the tropes of “orderly” and “law-abiding” Japanese and “stoic” residents of Tōhoku were repeated frequently even by scholars whose careers are mostly built around combatting sloppy generalizations. Diverse voices from around the world, including those of Chinese netizens-more often cited as a bastion of virulent anti-Japanese sentiment-were joined in approbation. Sympathy and aid poured in from around the world, and the domestic media proudly relayed this news to their Japanese audiences.

During a visit to Fukushima Daiichi in September, Abe Shinzo told workers: “the future of Japan rests on your shoulders. I am counting on you.”

The prime minister's exhortation was directed at almost 6,000 technicians and engineers, truck drivers and builders who, almost three years after the plant suffered a triple meltdown, remain on the frontline of the world's most hazardous industrial cleanup.

One hundred years ago, Gurdit Singh Sirhali chartered the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru and brought 376 Indian passengers to Canada in a direct challenge to Canada's immigration colour bar. The ship's forced departure from Vancouver harbour on July 23, 1914 ended an extraordinary two-month standoff between the passengers, determined to enter Canada, and a Canadian government determined to enforce its anti-Asian exclusion policies, come what may. The ship's departure, however, was not the end of this saga—the passengers faced unimaginable hardships on the return voyage only to be met by the iron fist of British authorities upon their arrival in India.

The new Abe administration in Japan plans to re-examine the 1993 Kono statement in which Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei, apologized and admitted the Japanese government's responsibility for the comfort station operations. If it proceeds with this plan, the Abe government is likely to whitewash or revoke the Kono statement, which has been the consistent object of resentment and criticisms among neonationalists. Mr. Abe has been arguing that no historical documents exist to support the claim of forcible recruitment of girls and young women into wartime military sexual slavery. Suga Yoshihide, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, has stated that the government will invite a group of historians to study the warfront brothel operations (Morris-Suzuki 2012).

Introduction - The Servile and the Autonomous

As Japan moved to conduct House of Representatives elections in December 2012, attention in Western media and academic circles turned, as it does from time to time, to the question of whether the country was in decline, or even in some sort of crisis. Already five years have passed since the Minister for Economic Policy declared to the National Diet that “in economic terms Japan is no longer a first-class country,” by which she meant that its GDP had shrunk below 10 per cent as a proportion of the world's for the first time in 24 years. It has continued to fall since then. As a proportion of global GDP, Japan was 15 per cent in 1990, fell below 10 per cent in 2008, is expected to fall to 6 per cent in 2030 and 3.2 per cent in 2060, while China's rises steadily, from 2 per cent in 1990 to a predicted 25 per cent in 2030 and 27.8 per cent in 2060. It is that shift in relative weight, perhaps more than anything (national debt, aging, shrinking population) that disturbs Japan.

Before World War Two American government, for all of its glaring faults, also served as 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. All that changed with America's emergence as a dominant world power, and further after the Vietnam War.

Translator's foreword: For the last two and a half years, I have been studying the inhabitants of Nagadoro, one of the twenty small hamlets in Iitate village, which has been evacuated and barricaded due to particularly high levels of radiation. Present government policy is to maintain the status of Nagadoro as a no-go zone for at least another four years. Among the 250 inhabitants is Shoji Masahiko, who until the nuclear disaster supported his wife and

In Part I of this series on D.T. Suzuki's relationship with the Nazis, (Brian Daizen Victoria, D.T. Suzuki, Zen and the Nazis readers were promised a second part focusing primarily on Suzuki's relationship with one of wartime Japan's most influential Nazis, Count Karlfried Dūrckheim (1896-1988).

However, in the course of writing Part II, I quickly realized that the reader would benefit greatly were it possible to present more than simply Dürckheim's story in wartime Japan. That is to say, I recognized the importance, actually the necessity, of introducing Dürckheim's earlier history in Germany and the events that led to his arrival in Japan, not once but twice.

A signal flaw in Japan's much-debated “Abenomics” package of economic policies is the failure to include ambitious goals and fiscal support for energy efficiency. Many question whether Japanese PM Abe Shinzo's YEN 10.3 trillion fiscal stimulus and other measures will lift Japan from recession and deflation. But as this article will show, only a program that combines aggressive energy efficiency with a renewable energy drive can put Japan's economy on a sound, sustainable footing that maximizes job creation, domestic demand, and the nation's competitive prowess in advanced technology.

“What is important, I think, is to feel that something is real. I feel that “sloppy” things are real. If I were asked “Why?,” though, I could only reply, “Because that's who I am.” I suppose I could puff myself up and say “Because the world is a sloppy place, that's why.” This world is half-baked, half-assed, all Buddhist “impermanence” - such that when you say this, it is really that, and when you think you have it here, it is over there. So yes, all that we know for sure is that we are always in the process of change. So what happens when the world changes? Well, the world is going to end, of course. So there you have it, that's why I want to continue to be half-baked and half-assed. People are born sloppily, are treated sloppily, go on to die sloppily - we are the king of sloppy. What about human life, “a person's life is worth the weight of the world,” you think, but a stupid-ass war comes along and life is easily lost and its worth re-calculated irresponsibly there on the spot. If you try to attain perfection, you’ll just be fooled. Deceived by others, by yourself, by your body, by time, by the world, you’ll just be fooled. If you see a joyous person saying “Perfect…!” you can go ahead, kick his knee in from behind…”

While all eyes have been focused on China's dramatic recasting of the global solar PV industry, and the trade disputes engendered with the US and EU, there is another solar frontier now emerging, involving grid-connected concentrating solar power (CSP) plants. China is committed to developing capacity of 3 GW by 2015 (more than doubling cumulative world capacity) and 10 GW by 2020, which would make it by far the world's CSP leader, with consequent dramatic impact on cost reductions, driving the diffusion of CSP around the world as key challenger and alternative to nuclear and fossil power.