The United States suffered a serious financial deficit as a result of the Korean War in the 1950s. To solve this problem, it moved to reduce the sizes of US forces in Korea and the South Korean military which depended on U.S. financial aid. As President Rhee Syng-man opposed this plan, the U.S. introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea in January 1958. For this purpose, the UN Command removed NNSC personnel from South Korea in June 1956, and nullified part of the Armistice Agreement in June 1957.

As nuclear weapons were deployed in South Korea, North Korea began a massive program of underground construction in the 1960s and deployed its conventional forces in forward positions. North Korea asked the Soviet Union in 1963 and China in 1964 for help in developing nuclear weapons of its own, but was rebuffed. South Korea prepared to develop its own nuclear weapons in 1974 and North Korea began to develop its own program in the late 1970s.

North Korea seeks, through development of nuclear weapons, to secure international recognition as well as economic aid and national security. Thus for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, provision must be made for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons without a sense of insecurity. In addition, it is unrealistic to urge North Korea to unilaterally dismantle its nuclear weapons without a breakthrough in U.S.-North Korea relations, preparing the withdrawal of US forces in South Korea, eliminating the U.S. nuclear umbrella for South Korea, and abolishing the U.S.-South Korea Alliance.

Japan to date has provided an inspiring role model for Asian workers trying to ban the importation and mining of asbestos in Asia. Japanese money has enabled international gatherings of workers and officials trying to end the importation and use of this deadly dust.

For more than five decades after the end of the World War II, Japan articulated an official identity as a pacifist, anti-nuclear nation both domestically and in the international arena (its formidable Self Defense Force notwithstanding). Since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, however, the debate over revising Japan's “Peace Constitution” intensified. In particular, Article 9 of the Constitution, by which Japan renounces offensive war, has been under attack by politicians proclaiming the goal of becoming “a normal nation”, and the present Abe administration has prioritized Constitutional revision. Along with politicians and the citizenry, many intellectuals and artists have spoken against the possibility of Japan identifying itself as a “nation that wages war”–thus rejecting its assumed role as advocate of peace and foe of nuclear arms. In June 2004, Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo, along with artists and intellectuals Inoue Hisashi, Komori Yoichi, and Kato Shuichi and others, formed the Article 9 Association, which advocates “protection” or preservation of the present Constitution.

Will Japan recover more quickly?

Conventional wisdom sees Japan faring among the worst of the industrialized countries in the ongoing economic crisis. Tanaka Kiyoyasu does not dispute this view directly; he concedes that “trade in Japan has declined at a much faster pace than that in the US” even if the overall “impact of the economic crisis on Japan has so far been relatively moderate.” But he maintains this does not tell us the whole picture. He cites studies to demonstrate a strong link between “vertical specialization and international trade” and then goes on to note that “vertical specialization is particularly clear in the case of FDI by Japanese multinationals” as opposed to those in the US.

Takehara, Hiroshima Prefecture- Yamauchi Masayuki guides a group of junior high school students through the hills and forests on the tiny island of Okunoshima in Hiroshima Prefecture.

[For forty years, beginning with a desert test visible from the Sky Bar at Las Vegas’ Desert Inn, 928 nuclear devices were exploded at the Nevada test site, many of them above ground. In March 2005, the 8,000 square foot Atomic Testing Museum opened its doors near the Las Vegas strip. As Greg Mitchell records in the following piece, the museum is as notable for what goes unmentioned as for the events it depicts: these include the victims of the first atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the plight of the “downwinders”, more than 12,000 of whom have filed claims in relationship to cancer and other illnesses that may be linked to the nuclear tests or uranium mining.]

“The aims of the Olympic Movement are to promote the development of those fine physical and moral qualities which are the basis of amateur sport and to bring together the athletes of the world in a great quadrennial festival of sports thereby creating international respect and goodwill and thus helping to construct a better and more peaceful world.” Baron de Coubertin, 1894

The internet has become an increasingly influential medium throughout East Asia. In this article we examine the case of Kenkanryu (‘“Hating ‘The Korean Wave’“), a manga published in 2005 in hard copy, but available online as a web comic for many months prior to print publication. We argue that the content, while nationalist, xenophobic, and ‘toxic’ is only one of a number of other, media-related reasons for the sales success of this comic in Japan. Other factors are the influence of online chat groups, the web as a means of communicating and selling ideas and products, and the internet-savvy way in which supporters of the views expressed in the comic communicated with online readers. In the context of increasing fears that Japanese youth are becoming more ‘nationalistic’ we argue that it is important to examine the medium as much as the message in assessing whether we are witnessing the emergence of a significant and dangerous social movement, or something rather different.

This article provides a genealogy of the argument for kengai isetsu, or the relocation of US military bases outside of Okinawa to another part of Japan. It shows how kengai isetsu has been reduced to a politics of NIMBY, or “Not In My Back Yard” when understood through a politically conservative vs. progressive grid of intelligibility. Instead, a colonial vs. anticolonial reading informed by postcolonial studies is offered to show how kengai isetsu reveals Okinawa as the lynchpin holding together the US-Japanese security relationship. In particular, this paper problematizes the reluctance on the part of international and Japanese progressive activists and intellectuals to criticize Japan's role in maintaining US military bases in Okinawa because of the deeply entrenched desire to posit Japan as a passive victim of American power, thereby maintaining the Eurocentric position of the US as the more aggressive agent.

2010 is the centennial year of Japan's takeover of Korea. The history of this event is of enormous significance to the 20th century, and not simply because it garnered Japan a foothold on mainland Asia. Although Koreans see it very differently, for Japan, the 1910 annexation of Korea established Japan's entry as a power on the world stage.

Through the ANZUS alliance, Australia, like Japan and South Korea, has been a key part of the United States “hub-and-spokes” Asia-Pacific alliance structure for more than sixty years, dating back to the earliest years of the Cold War and the conclusion of post-war peace with Japan. An historical chameleon, the shape of the alliance has continually shifted - from its original purpose for the Menzies government as a US guarantee against post-war Japanese remilitarisation, to an imagined southern bastion of the Free World in the global division of the Cold War, on to a niche commitment in the Global War On Terror, to its current role in the imaginings of a faux containment revenant against rising China. As one hinge in the Obama administration's Pacific pivot, Australia is now more deeply embedded strategically and militarily into US global military planning, especially in Asia, than ever before. As in Japan and Korea, this involves Australia governments identifying Australian national interests with those of its American ally, the integration of Australian military forces organizationally and technologically with US forces, and a rapid and extensive expansion of an American military presence in Australia itself. This alliance pattern of asymmetrical cooperation, especially in the context of US policy towards China, raises the urgent question of what alternative policy an Australian government concerned to maintain an autonomous path towards securing both its genuine national interests and the global human interest should be following.

In Japan at War: An Oral History, Hideo Sato recalls being forced to hoist the hinomaru, the Japanese flag, in tandem with the playing of Kimigayo — “His Majesty's Reign,” the Japanese national anthem — as a schoolchild in the 1940s. If the flag reached the top of the pole too early the teachers would beat him. More than 60 years later, he's “chagrined that they still raise the flag.”

Japan's defeat in World War II transformed East Asia into a Cold War arena of East-West confrontation. With China's involvement, the bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union flared during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. This article explores the impact of these wars on the people of East Asia.

“In the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos.” - George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays.

Japan Focus presents two complementary perspectives on the challenges facing China and the world economy in the context of global over-accumulation. In 1997, China emerged unscathed from the economic collapse that set back Japan and then Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and other high-flying Asian economies. The present analyses pose the question of whether China, too, is now vulnerable, with consequences that will be felt throughout the world economy. Posted at Japan Focus on February 9, 2007.

The southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago has been a source of contention between Japan and China since 2004, when Chinese officials started to refer to it as “rocks” not as an “island.” In international law, rocks cannot be a basis for claiming an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). After the Chinese challenge to its territorial right over Okinotorishima, Japanese officials reacted vigorously, notably Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, within whose jurisdiction Okinotorishima falls. Ishihara ordered installation of a 330 million yen radar system for surveillance and set up an address plate at the “island.” The two countries continue to dispute the issue.

What are the links among Japan, China and the United States that will shape the outcomes of the current economic and financial crisis that appears to have metastasized into a global crisis of the whole postwar international order? Because that order rests heavily on Asian export-led export growth strategies and the transfer of massive Chinese and Japanese trade surpluses that support the dollar's role as the universal currency, any solution for the US and the international order will require the cooperation of the two Asian economic powers. John Judis looks far beyond the US treasury bailouts to offer thoughtful perspectives on the crisis and its resolution. MS

North Korea's nuclear blast last October signaled the end of a cycle that started in October 2002 when the United States accused Pyongyang of running a clandestine uranium program. (The preceding cycle - 1994-2002 - was a period of a more-or-less stable “crisis freeze”). The 2006 nuclear test - regardless of the measure of its success - ended the longstanding argument about whether the North Korean nuclear program was the real McCoy or a bluff aimed at extorting benefits from the West. Assuming the latter, it was concluded that the answer to the bluff should be toughness and the refusal of concessions. Only by such toughness could North Korea be forced to drop its brinkmanship and stop its nuclear program (This was the application of negative motivation - “the stick”).

Four times now since August 2003, the government of China has been host to what have become known as the “Six-Sided Talks.” The key protagonists, the United States and North Korea, are as asymmetrical as any two countries could be, on one side the greatest military and industrial power in history and on the other one of the world's poorest and most isolated small states.