On 22 March 2011, an exhausting court battle finally ended for over 2000 victims of mercury poisoning in Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectures. In sum, the agreement, decades in the making, was as follows as outlines in the Japan Times (31 March): “Chisso will provide some 90 percent of the plaintiffs with a ¥2.1 million lump sum each as well as a ¥2.29 billion fund, and the central and prefectural governments will shoulder part of their medical costs.” Chisso Corporation's dumping of methyl-mercury in nearby waters caused Minamata disease, as the painful ailment came to be known after it was first recognized in 1956. Half a century later, time is running out for these victims to receive the official recognition they deserve, as their bodies are growing increasingly frail. The mercury that poisoned their bodies was carried through the fish they ate and accumulated as it moved up the trophic tiers in a process called biomagnifications. In this process persistent poisons, such as mercury, concentrate in the upper echelons of the food chain. In biomagnification, organisms at the top of the chain carry higher levels of toxicity in their fatty tissues.

This is the second article by John McGlynn in a series that meticulously dissects US charges of North Korean criminality, notably the forgery of US currency and money laundering, the significance of the legal instruments it has imposed on North Korea through Banco Delta Asia, and the significance of US actions for the resolution of the interrelated issues of North Korean nuclear weapons and the normalization of US-North Korean relations.

This extract from Kang Sangjung's autobiography Zainichi (Kodansha, 2004) describes the experiences of first-generation zainichi Koreans in the city of Kumamoto, as seen from the perspective of a second-generation child growing up in the Japan of the 1950s. Now a professor at the University of Tokyo, in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, where he specialises in politics and the history of political thought, Kang Sangjung looks back at the people and places of his childhood. These personal memories provide a starting point for reflections on identity, ‘homeland‘, and the place of zainichi Koreans in Japanese society and in the wider society of Northeast Asia.

Only two minutes were allowed for the court photographs by the television and newspaper media before the verdict was delivered. The decision, read by Judge Shimada Niro, took just four seconds. The lawsuit questioning the imperial system from a democratic perspective was a landmark event challenging the emperor's accession to the throne from the viewpoint of perspective of thought and conscience, the sovereignty of the people, and the separation of religion and politics. However, the Supreme Court's response was inadequate.

On March 28, 2008, the Osaka District Court dismissed a lawsuit against Nobel Prize-winning author Oe Kenzaburo and his publisher for publishing accounts of the Japanese military ordering “group suicides” of civilians during the Battle of Okinawa. The plaintiffs, a former garrison commander and the brother of a late former commander, had claimed the descriptions in Oe's Okinawa Notes (Okinawa Noto, Iwanami Shoten, 1970) and in the late Ienaga Saburo's The Pacific War (Taiheiyo Senso, Iwanami Shoten, 1968; translation, Pantheon, 1978) were defamatory.

More than 30 years later, a Japanese court is reconsidering an epoch-making media scandal that raised the question of whether unethical conduct by a reporter in obtaining the news should outweigh the significance of the facts he uncovered, no matter how earthshaking they might be.

Three recent statistical releases have led me to revisit the future of Japan's population. On December 20, 2006 the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (NIPSSR) published its latest long-range forecast of the country's population that showed, once again, a faster decline than previously anticipated: the medium variant projects the total population of only about 90 million (89.93) people by 2055, the figure that both Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun found “shocking”. On March 13, 2007 the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) revealed the latest revision of its official long-range population estimates and projections with detailed forecasts for all of the world's countries up to the year 2050. And on March 22, 2007 the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications published its latest nationwide estimate of Japan's population.

An international discourse of China-in-Africa has emerged, particularly in Western countries with dense links to Africa: the US, UK and France. While China's presence in Africa should be critically examined, interest in it in the West is skewed by elite perceptions of China as a rival for resources and influence in Africa and as a rising power, with the tone of the discourse far more negative than that accorded the Western presence in Africa.

The hearings of the US congressional committees on intelligence in Washington in the past two successive weeks make it clear that the administration of President George W Bush has no intention of pressuring Pakistan over the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

When U.S. President George W. Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro took a friendly stroll through the quiet grounds of Kyoto's Imperial Palace last November, it was easy to assume that things just couldn't have been better between the two countries. Yes, there was the issue of U.S. beef, which Japan had banned in 2003 after mad-cow disease was discovered in U.S. cattle. But bilateral trade issues have always taken a back seat to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and it was clear Bush and Koizumi were in Kyoto to celebrate an agreement, signed in October, that would be the first major realignment of U.S. forces in Japan since the end of the Cold War.

Jungmin Kang, Science Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, and Peter Hayes, Nautilus Institute Executive Director, write, “Having tested and failed, the DPRK can no longer rely on opacity as the basis for having a credible nuclear force, at least sufficiently credible to threaten its adversaries with a nuclear explosion. The DPRK might believe that a half kilotonne “mininuke” still provides it with a measure of nuclear deterrence and compellence; but it could not rely on other nuclear weapons states to perceive it to have anything more than an unusable, unreliable and relatively small nuclear explosive device.”

[Beginning in the 1980s, Japan began repatriating thousands of Japanese who remained in China, many of them adopted by Chinese families, six decades ago when Japan was defeated and hundreds of thousands of farmer settlers were abandoned by fleeing Japanese soldiers. This is the story of one survivor. Japan Focus]

Harada Ikuko is haunted by the day she was marked for death. It was August 1945, and she was among a group of 200 Japanese in northeastern China fleeing the advancing Russian army.

A common perception about Japan's justice system is the higher up the court the more conservative the ruling. The most recent decision by the Tokyo High Court in a suit demanding the release of documents proving Japan's secret accord with the US over the 1972 Okinawa reversion did nothing to challenge that cliché. But it did expose the radical legal summersaults required to keep the full truth from seeping out.

In the wake of the 2011 tsunami, the Japanese government is forgoing an opportunity to sustainably protect its coastline and is instead building towering concrete seawalls and other defenses that environmentalists say will inflict serious damage on coastal ecosystems.

This is a revised and expanded version of an article originally published by Yale Environment 360 <link>

From a Western-centric point of view, the United States and its allies are pushing Iran into a corner.

Recently, when a battered, 30-foot sailboat, the Golden Rule, came to rest in a small shipyard in northern California, the event did not inspire fanfare. But, in fact, the Golden Rule was far more important than it appeared, for the small ketch had helped inspire a widespread struggle against nuclear testing, particularly throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

In the first months of 2013, the rhetoric of the Zainichi tokken wo yurusanai shimin no kai (Citizens' League to Deny Foreigners Special Rights) or Zaitokukai has turned more and more extreme. The above quotes are representative of Zaitokukai slogans and placards in 2013. Now there are signs that anti-racism protestors and ordinary citizens are fighting back.

The Japanese government's decision to increase the maximum yearly radiation exposure limit for Fukushima school children by a factor of 20 – from 1 to 20 millisieverts – continues to spark outrage in Japan and internationally.

Five decades after the adoption of the (revised) US-Japan Security Treaty, and two decades after the end of the Cold War, Cold War assumptions still underpin the relationship between the world's leading industrial democracies. A belated Japanese attempt to change and reform the relationship in 2009-2010 ended in failure and the collapse of the Hatoyama government. Whether the Kan government can do better, remains to be seen. The “Client state” relationship that I wrote about in 2007 proves difficult to transcend. The “Okinawa problem” has emerged as a crucial bone of contention, not only between the US and Japanese governments but between the people of Okinawa and both governments. This paper addresses the implications of the now 14-year long attempt to resolve the Okinawan demand for closure and return of Futenma Marine base in Ginowan City.