Prime Minister Abe Shinzo announced in April 2007 that the government was planning to establish a “panel of experts” to examine the question of whether to “revise the current interpretation of the Constitution” in order to permit Japan to engage in certain specified collective self-defense operations. The Americans have long pressed for greater Japanese involvement in collective security, and the announcement came shortly before Mr. Abe's first trip to meet with President George W. Bush. Yet Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, among other things, renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes”. This has been understood by the courts and all past governments of Japan to prohibit Japan's participation in collective self-defense operations, or engagement in any use of force, for any reason other than the direct defense of Japan.

This essay explores representations of Japanese imperialism and war in museums of the People's Republic of China. With the post-Mao reforms, there has been a general trend in such representations toward an emphasis on atrocity and victimization and away from the narratives of heroic resistance that dominated in the Mao era. Yet, the museum curators in these museums must negotiate between these two representations in trying to make the war relevant to a young audience generally more attracted to the pleasures of popular culture than history museums.

Liu Xiaobo, the primary drafter of Charter 08, has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. The award signals international recognition of the Chinese people's quest for justice, universal human rights and democracy in a rational way through peaceful means.

In 1895, the Chinese scholar Kang Youwei was on his way to Beijing on a Chinese steamer when his ship was abruptly boarded and searched by a party of Japanese soldiers on the North China Sea. “I was enraged when the Japanese came and searched our ship,” he later wrote. “If the court had listened to my advice earlier, we would not have to endure such humiliations.” But following China's defeat by Japan in the 1894-5 Sino-Japanese War, this was just the sort of humiliation that China was now forced to endure. That war had been fought over influence in Korea and it marked the end of Korea's tributary relationship with China. It was the beginning of China's decline and Japan's ascendancy in East Asian affairs. For the first time since the founding of the Chos⊖n dynasty in 1392, China would have little influence over the Korean peninsula.

In recent years, the mayors of cities hosting American bases in Japan, and particularly in Okinawa, propelled by powerful citizen movements, have resisted American plans for base reorganization that would expand the US military presence in their communities. In many cases, powerful pressure from Tokyo, in the form of threats to cut off development aid to local communities, and offers to buy off local opposition, have succeeded in dividing local communities and forcing local officials to yield to the power of the center. The Hiroshima-based Chugoku Shinbun here examines realignments involving Atsugi Air Base, Iwakuni Marine Base and Yokosuka Naval Base, three locales experiencing major upgrading of U.S. military power and changes in the structuring of U.S. forces in Japan. ms

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.

Japan's neonationalists have launched three major attacks on school textbooks over the past half century. Centered on the treatment of colonialism and war, the attacks surfaced in 1955, the late 1970s, and the mid-1990s. The present study examines three moments in light of Japanese domestic as well as regional and global political contexts to gain insight into the persistent contention over colonialism and the Pacific War in historical memory and its refraction in textbook treatments.

On 26 December 26, 2012 Abe Shinzo is to resume the position of Prime Minister of Japan, following the resounding victory of the Liberal- Democratic Party (LDP) under his presidency in the elections two weeks earlier. He came to power with an explicit agenda: seeing the US alliance as central to Japan and therefore attaching priority to carrying out Japan's obligations under it, revising the constitution so as to convert the current Self Defense Forces into a Kokubogun or National Army and adopting a stance of authorizing participation of Japan's forces in “collective security” operations (i.e., fighting wars shoulder-to- shoulder with American forces), establishing a national “Takeshima Day,” (to reinforce the Japanese claim to the island that South Korea knows as Tokdo and refuses to consider yielding), and adopting a hardline stance towards China, insisting there was “no room for negotiation” on the matter of conflicting claims to the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. “What is called for in and around the Senkaku Islands,” he wrote, “is not negotiation but physical force incapable of being misunderstood.”

Just over one hundred years ago, in 1902, Americans participated in a brief, intense and mostly forgotten debate on the practice of torture in a context of imperial warfare and counter-insurgency. The setting was the U. S. invasion of the Philippines, a war of conquest waged against the forces of the Philippine Republic begun in 1899. Within a year, it had developed into a guerrilla conflict, one that aroused considerable anti-war opposition in the United States.

Fifty years ago, the mass repatriation of ethnic Koreans from Japan to North Korea was reaching its peak. In towns and cities all over Japan farewell gatherings were being held, as “returnees” to North Korea packed their bags and boarded trains that would take them to the port of Niigata where, after various formalities including a “confirmation of free will” by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), they would board Russian ships for the voyage to Cheongjin in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Over 49,000 people embarked on this journey in 1960 alone, and 93,340 over the full span of the “repatriation project”[帰国事業, 북성사업) from December 1959 to July 1984.

Sonia Ryang possesses “double vision” in that she is a U.S.-based anthropologist as well as a cultural insider who grew up as a Zainichi Korean. Her family supported Chongryun (the North Korea-affiliated Zainichi Korean organization), which stood in contrast to the twentieth century's other Zainichi Korean organization Mindan that was affiliated with South Korea., Zainichi Koreans during the last century was largely divided in their identification either with Chongryun or Mindan. She reached adulthood after attending Chongryun-run ethnic schools including the Korea University in Tokyo and worked as a journalist for a Chongryun newspaper before starting her graduate studies in the United Kingdom. This background endows her Zainichi Korean studies with depths, insights, and a distinctive ethos. In this article, she describes the contours of Zainichi Korean history after 1945 and why “Zainichi Korean” as an ethnicity separate from Koreans in Korea remains relevant today.

From Rarotonga, the Cook Islands. The sea is blue, beaches with golden sand boast palm trees bending almost to the water surface. Beneath barely detectable waves, marine life is fascinating and diverse. On hotel terraces, coconut juices cool the refined throats of jet setters. Traditional huts rub shoulders with some of the most expensive resorts in the world. 500 US dollars would hardly sustain a couple for more than a day here in one of the most expensive parts of the world. Together with neighboring French Polynesia, this has become one of the most expensive parts of the world.

There is nothing wrong or unusual about the food at Ang's Chinese restaurant. In fact, the roast duck served there is excellent, and the Lonely Planet's guidebook assures you that its hot-and-sour soup is special. It's just the way the place looks. The yard is surrounded by high walls with razor wire and surveillance cameras. Two security guards watch the entrance and open the sliding gate only if customers, in their vehicle, appear to be genuinely wanting to have just a meal. Having satisfied the guards and parked the car inside the gate, lunch or dinner guests are met by another steel door guarded by more watchmen. They will not only shut the door but lock it once the guests are in the actual restaurant building. They guests may enjoy Ang's oriental fare in peace.

Military alliances are always sold as things that produce security. In practice they tend to do the opposite.

Thus, Germany formed the Triple Alliance with Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to counter the enmity of France following the Franco-Prussian War. In response, France, England and Russia formed the Triple Entente. The outcome was World War I.

In the study of China's rural development, economists and political scientists have frequently examined land policy, while demographers, sociologists and anthropologists look at family planning. Yet in real life the two domains are closely related as households attempt to match and manage their land and labor resources. This article brings together questions about land, gender and family planning in relation to both policy and practice. It draws on fieldwork in rural north China and comparative data to examine and assess local and regional variations in the critical gender imbalance in contemporary rural China.

In April 2008, Ma Wanli, a professor of American history at Nanchang Hangkong University in Nanchang, China, emailed me to introduce himself as the translator of the Chinese version of my U.S. best seller, Lies My Teacher Told Me. He also invited me to write a preface for this new edition. I agreed.

Lies exposes seamy aspects of the U.S. past. The preface I wrote for the Chinese edition suggests that a similar exposé might be useful in China. As I wrote, I realized that saying this in China might be problematic, but on behalf of the publisher, Central Chinese Compilation & Translation Press, one of the largest publishers in China, Ma Wanli assured me that my preface would not be censored. I finished the preface in late fall, and the Chinese translation reached me in December of 2008. My U.S. publisher had it translated back into English and assured me that my meaning had not been changed. All seemed well.

While China was at the center of Japan's war, by 1942 Japan had occupied much of Southeast Asia, home of many ethnic Chinese. Often Chinese nationalists in those places were potential leaders of resistance to Japan. On the other hand, Japanese authorities knew that educated Chinese could be useful in subordinating other Southeast Asians to the Japanese empire, since they had played this role for European imperialists. Hayashi Hirofumi's “The Battle of Singapore, the Massacre of Chinese and Understanding of the Issue in Postwar Japan” and Vivian Blaxell's “New Syonan and Asianism in Japanese-era Singapore” both discuss the complexities of Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia. Hayashi shows that killing ethnic Chinese was explicit Japanese military policy because Chinese were assumed to be innately opposed to Japanese empire, showing the military's skepticism about Pan-Asianism. Nonetheless, as Blaxell shows, other Japanese simultaneously worked to win the support of two groups, Chinese and Eurasian Christians (usually part Chinese) through construction of two model villages, New Syonan and Fuji Village. In both cases, the actual ways that Japanese Singapore functioned was far more chaotic and contingent than high-level policy would suggest. The ironic contrast between Japanese war crimes happening side-by-side with Japanese attempts to find Chinese allies to build a new Asia was common everywhere.

In his personal narrative Atomic Quest, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, who directed atomic research at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory during the Second World War, tells of receiving an urgent visit from J. Robert Oppenheimer while vacationing in Michigan during the summer of 1942. Oppenheimer and the brain trust he assembled had just calculated the possibility that an atomic explosion could ignite all the hydrogen in the oceans or the nitrogen in the atmosphere. If such a possibility existed, Compton concluded, “these bombs must never be made.” As Compton said, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.” Certainly, any reasonable human being could be expected to respond similarly.

The most urgent political challenge to the world today is how to prevent the so-called “pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like the 19th-century so-called “pax Britannica” before it, into major global warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” in its final stages, became less and less peaceful, less and less orderly, more and more a naked imposition of belligerent competitive power based on inequality.

To define this prevention of war as an achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are above all achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic reassessment and progressive scaling back of two discredited policies that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive.

Lhamo Thondup was born on July 6, 1935 in Taktster, a small village in the Amdo region of northeast Tibet. But neither his parents — farmers who grew barley, buckwheat and potatoes — nor his three elder brothers and one elder sister (a younger sister and brother came later) were to discover his true identity until a few years later.

Then, when the little boy was 4, a party of senior Buddhist monks and officials from the distant capital of Lhasa arrived in the village searching for the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama – the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, whose title means “ocean of wisdom.” The party was led by Kewtsang Rinpoche, a respected monk who had chosen to head northeast as that was the direction in which the face of the embalmed 13th Dalai Lama (known as “the Great 13th”), who died on Dec. 17, 1933 was said to have mysteriously pointed.