While a great deal of attention focuses on the chain of islands dividing the East China Sea from the Pacific Ocean between Japan's Kyushu and Taiwan, it tends to focus heavily on those that are part of Okinawa prefecture and to neglect those in the northern part of he chain that are close to Kyushu and administratively part of Kagoshima rather than Okinawa prefecture. Mage is one such. Mage (literally: Horsehair) island sits well north of the line that separates Kagoshima from Okinawa prefecture. It is not Okinawa but is worthy of attention because it shows the same general trends as does Okinawa - of “remote island” blues (especially depopulation), dependence on whims of the central government, and the insidious workings of a military base mentality (even though not one soldier has yet set foot on it).

“Adding insult to injury” sounds like a lawyerly phrase compared to its painfully evocative Japanese equivalent 泣面に蜂 nakitsura ni hachi – literally “a bee to a crying face”. But even that stinging proverb fails to convey what Japan has been through during the recent past. In March 2011 its economy, slowly recovering from the worst global post-World War II downturn, was hit by a powerful earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. That twin disaster disrupted many supply chains of Japan's important manufacturing sector and caused a catastrophic failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant; the ensuing fears led to the eventual shut-down of all of the country's nuclear generating stations, limited electricity supply, increased imports of fossil energies and the first annual foreign trade deficit in a generation.

While the debate about the use of children in war is relatively new, the practice is ages old. Long before education became a right rather than a privilege it was common for boys to be recruited into the military in roles that saw them face death at the front line. Joining the army or navy was the accepted fate of many young lads from poorer backgrounds, and in that respect, the boys who carried armor for Spartan hoplites or stood watch on a juggernaut at Jutland had much in common. Nowadays, insurgents and pro-government militia groups throughout the world use brutal coercion to recruit children. Boys and girls are forced to carry supplies, act as spies, messengers or lookouts, and in extreme cases, even to serve as human mine detectors or to take part in suicide missions. In addition to those who volunteered at a young age, ending up as drummer boys at Waterloo or Gettysburg, and the contemporary boy soldiers compelled to fight by their masters in Sierra Leone, East Timor or Angola, there is a third category, a group caught up in a whirlwind of nationalist fervor, “willingly” answering the call to face an invading enemy portrayed by propaganda as being bent on total destruction.

Why did ROK President Lee, Myung-Bak, changing his position on the issue of “comfort women”, forcefully demand for the first time in December 2011 in Kyoto that Japan's Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko act to settle this issue? The reason is that the ROK government was compelled to do so by the August 30, 2011 decision of the Korean Constitutional Court. As of January 2013, however, there has been no tangible Japanese action on the issues. This article considers possible ways to resolve the issues that continue to poison relations between two neighbors with extensive economic, financial and cultural bonds.

We have known Iwata Wataru for more than two years, and when he decided to depart to Fukushima from Kyoto, he asked us to locate Geiger counters in France because at that time there were none available for his use in Japan. Despite active searching we found none. However, we contacted the independent radioactivity measuring laboratory CRIIRAD, which was created in France following the Chernobyl accident. The CRIIRAD people decided to send counters and other measurement accessories free to Wataru's recently created “Project 47”. In May 2011, we joined the CRIIRAD measurement mission to Fukushima and witnessed the first steps in “Project 47” and their collaboration with CRIIRAD. The link was made and the idea to create a Japanese version of CRIIRAD came to mind and Iwata took the lead: in July 2011 CRMS was born. Iwata became the founder and technical director, with the technical support of CRIIRAD and of the Umweltinstitut in Munich, with the financial support of Days Japan and other donors. Iwata's experience engagement and commitment is the topic of the new book by Nadine and Thierry Ribault:

KAWASAKI, Japan - The shrill voice of one old woman with humped shoulders still leaves a distant but lasting memory. When I was an elementary and junior-high-school student in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, I frequently visited my ethnic-Korean friends after school. One day, on the way to a Korean friend's house, an old woman just down the way suddenly snarled at me, saying, “Ilbon ka!” I was stunned. Later I found that what she meant by those few words was something like “Hey, Japanese!” or “Are you Japanese?” (Ilbon means “Japan” in Korean, and ka is an interrogative in Japanese.) She had expressed her deep distrust of all Japanese nationals, even of a boy like me. I was definitely intimidated. As can be readily understood, the older the Koreans, the more distrustful they were. Today I understand why.

A story broke last week that was noted by the foreign media but not dealt with in great detail in South Korea. The Japanese government acknowledged “for the first time” that in the late stages of the Pacific War, 300 Allied prisoners-of-war were forced into labor at a coal mine affiliated with Aso Mining, which has been run for generations by the family of Japanese Prime Minister Aso Taro.

In tough bargaining, the United States has stopped North Korea from producing more plutonium for nuclear weapons. It has induced the North to disable its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, making them more difficult and time-consuming to restart. Washington has also persuaded Pyongyang to declare how much nuclear material it has and the equipment and components it has acquired to make more – a necessary step to negotiating their elimination in the next phase of the ongoing six-party talks. Instead of applauding these real gains for US security, however, opponents would slow the disablement and declaration of North Korea's nuclear programs in the hopes of extracting a full accounting of the North's nuclear assistance to Syria. In essence, these critics want to put the North Koreans on trial, insisting they tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them God. Yet they surely know that all states lie – some more than others.

In the rise of participatory, networked and social media epitomised by Web 2.0 and user created content (UCC), mobile media has been central in ushering in new types of consumer agency, creativity and collaboration. Through its rapid uptake across the world, the mobile phone has become a compelling symbol for contemporary post-industrial modes of labour and intimacy. In particular, the icon of the mobile phone is most palpable in the Asia-Pacific where a diversity of innovative production and consumption practices can be found. One of the dominant symbols of the region's mobile media has been the conspicuous symbol of the female mobile media user. And yet, the phenomenon—and its gendered implications—has been relatively under-explored. By charting the rise of gendered mobile media practices, we can gain insight into how technology, gender, labour and intimacy are being conceptualised and how this, in turn, is reconfiguring the region within the twenty-first century.

In this paper I draw from a longitudinal cross-cultural case study of gendered mobile media conducted in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and Melbourne from 2000-2007. Deploying on interdisciplinary, ethnographic research conducted over a seven-year period, this paper examines the relationship between gender, technology, labour and intimacy through ‘imaging communities’. Imaging communities can take multiple forms — form of texting, camera phone practices or mobile novels (keitai shôsetsu). These communities provide fresh ways for conceptualising the region's multiple cartographies of personalisation. Cartographies of personalisation are new socio-emotional and political economic maps for imaging and imagining the Asia-Pacific in an age of personalised media and Web 2.0.

Take a man-made island, roughly the size of London's Hampstead Heath. Fill it with state-of-the-art schools, hospitals, apartments, office buildings and high-end cultural amenities. Import architectural features from around the world, including New York's Central Park and Venice's canals, make English the lingua franca, and hang a sign at the gates that says: “Open for business.”

The media claim that North Korea is trying to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States, which opposes this strategy, has used or threatened to use such weapons in northeast Asia since the 1940s, when it did drop atomic bombs on Japan.

THE forgotten war – the Korean war of 1950-53 – might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States' air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem.

“We got on the boat in Busan. Don't know where we got off… We came on a fishing boat. A little boat, it was. The waves were that high, and we went right over them. What month would it have been? Can't remember now.

They say you really get to know people when you go on a boat with them, or live with them. It was so dark in that boat, you couldn't even tell who was in there. Everyone jammed together in this little space - so small, we were sitting right on top of one another. When people said their kids were being smothered, they were just ignored. There were dozens of people - thirty or forty in that little boat. That's why we were sitting on top of each other. It was so crowded you couldn't eat rice or anything like that. Two nights we went without eating. Of course in those days it was a people-smuggling boat [yami no fune]. People came on those boats from Jeju or Busan - that was when I was twenty-nine”

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).

The Historical Science Society of Japan's (HSSJ) on December 7, 2014 issued a public statement on the wartime comfort women controversy that has gone viral in recent months in Japan and internationally. The text, made available at its website one week prior to Japan's snap election, is an English translation of the group's statement made in the fall of 2014. For more than half a century, the JSSJ has been a progressive voice for historians on social, cultural, and political issues of contemporary Japan. Now it is speaking out at a time when the media and government are mobilizing to silence independent and critical voices.

UI Jun (1932-2006) was well known as an environmental activist and scholar. He was working at the University of Tokyo when Minamata came to light and was frustrated by his colleagues’ disregard for his findings that methyl mercury caused the disease. He went on to research other forms of water pollution, and in 1986 moved to Okinawa where he became a vocal critic of the environmental degradation caused by the U.S. military bases there. This essay, which was published in Japanese in 2003, should be read as a primary source authored by a citizen activist. Note how Ui not only describes some of the environmental issues relevant to the U.S. military presence, but also criticizes how the Japanese government has handled them.

Neo-nationalists forced the cancellation of the theatrical launch of a Chinese-directed movie about Japan's controversial war memorial Yasukuni in early April, 2008. In the weeks that followed, the incident became a cause célèbre, with some 30 film, media, and civil liberties organizations issuing declarations of protest. A number of theaters throughout Japan signed on to screen the film, and its Tokyo premiere was scheduled for May 3.

I was travelling in the UK in the first half of September and the news of Abe's resignation reached me in London. The local media too were reporting on this unexpected event in some detail. Newspapers which would normally differ in their comments such as The Financial Times (“Abe posed as a samurai but was a weakling after all”) or The Guardian (“Japan does not have a leader befitting her national wealth”) agreed in criticising the absence of leadership in Japanese politics.

On August 18, 2006, the entire collection of English language commentaries was abruptly pulled from the website of the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) following an attack by a columnist in the nationalist Sankei Shimbun. When the site reopened, all texts by Japanese authors had been eliminated.

The controversy hinges on the fact that the Institute, whose English language website describes it as “an academically independent institution affiliated with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs” (MOFA), also describes itself as Japan's “foremost center for producing and disseminating ideas on international relations.” (The official, Japanese language site is silent on the subject both of “independent” and “affiliated with MOFA”.)

After censorship was eliminated in 1996, a new breed of writer-directors created a canon of internationally provocative and visually stunning genre-bending hit films, and new and established producers infused unprecedented venture capital into the local industry. Today, a bevy of key producers, including vertically integrated Korean conglomerates, maintain dominance over the film industry while engaging in a variety of relatively neartransparent domestic and international expansion strategies. Backing hits at home as well as collaborating with filmmakers in China and Hollywood have become priorities. In stark contrast to the way in which the film business is conducted today is Korean cinema's Golden Age of the 1960s - an important but little- known period of rapid industrialization, high productivity and clandestine practices. To develop a fuller understanding of the development of Korean cinema, this article investigates the complex interplay between film policy and production during the 1960s under authoritarian President Park Chung Hee, whose government's unfolding censorship regime forced film producers to develop a range of survival strategies. A small but powerful cartel of producers formed alliances with a larger cohort of quasi-illegal independent producers, thus - against all the odds - enabling Korean cinema to achieve a golden age of productivity.