The potentially powerful corrective offered in this provocative book to the contemporary U.S. political and media definition of “terrorism” calls to mind one of Mark Selden’s editorial efforts from a comparable time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Selden was among a group of young Asian studies specialists who pointedly challenged the then prevailing Cold War premises that were the basis of dominant American perceptions of and official policies toward Asia. Whereas McCarthyite censure had largely silenced criticism of the U.S. government by more senior scholars in the field (lest one appear to be “un-American”), this group argued against an unexamined acceptance of American benevolence as being at the heart of American intervention across Asia since the end of World War II.

I was eight or nine when M samchon (“Uncle M”) arrived at our house in Japan on one of his regular late-night visits. In fact, it seemed as if he chose to visit at this hour, as if he was hiding from something or someone. Although he was not really related to us, he came from the same part of Korea, Jeju Island, and we referred to him using the term samchon, a Jeju term used when addressing uncles and aunts. He spoke in the Jeju tongue, which was unlike any of the other versions of Korean that I had heard at that time. Although my father was born in Jeju, even he had a hard time communicating with our samchon. This was because my father had grown up in Japan, his parents having taken him back to Ōsaka, where they ran a small business, soon after he was born. The visitor's Japanese was quite poor, but it was slightly easier for me to understand than Jeju-style Korean. Using the few words that I was able to understand, I could figure out that his childhood friend, Beomdori (Mr. Beomdol to us kids), was in the process of slowly recovering his speech. Given that Uncle M was in his late twenties or early thirties, my childishly inquisitive mind found it odd that a grown-up, such as Uncle M's friend, was learning how to speak. Not to speak a foreign language, like Japanese, but to speak, period.

The wars in Korea and Vietnam were of a piece, directly related by virtue of U.S. global strategy and China's security concerns. This paper, focusing mainly on the U.S. side in these wars, argues that three characteristics of American policy had enduring meaning for the rest of the Cold War and even beyond: the official mindsets that led to U.S. involvement, the centrality of the China threat in American decision making, and the common legacy of intervention against nationalism and in support of authoritarian regimes. It is part of a continuing Asia-Pacific Journal series on the Korean War on the sixtieth anniversary of its outbreak.

Japanese war memory has diversified since 1945, but the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have retained their importance.

Scholars and critics have written in detail about how Japanese neo-nationalists have attempted to whitewash or deny war crimes committed by Japanese troops across Asia. Less widely discussed, however, is the fact that their revisionist school textbooks have also given short shrift to Japanese wartime suffering, or the understanding of Japanese as victims. Notably, while the Atarashii rekishi kyokasho (New History Textbook) failed to give even tentative numbers of the victims of Japanese wartime violence, the editors of the controversial first edition also left out the number killed by the atomic bombs. Since the early 1990s, neo-nationalists have argued that the Japanese population suffers from heiwa boke—a sort of “senility” brought on by peace. Since most Japanese oppose an expanded military role for the country or the development of nuclear weapons, neonationalists accuse their countrymen of unrealistic idealism. Downplaying the atomic bombings and focusing instead on “heroic sacrifice” and “service to the nation,” as Kobayashi Yoshinori does in Sensōron, is a way of undermining what scholar Thomas Berger has described as postwar Japan's “culture of anti-militarism.”

As the region's economy grows, a common Asian currency will gain favor, says Mr. Yen. ‘The current calm Japan-U.S. economic relationship basically means Tokyo is no longer seen as an economic threat to Washington.’

Sakakibara Eisuke, the man known internationally as Mr. Yen from his time as head of international monetary affairs at the Ministry of Finance, believes that Washington's unilateral action in Iraq has triggered the beginning of the decline of the ‘Pax Americana.’ He foresees that in the mid- to long term, creation of an Asian version of NATO and a common Asian Monetary Unit could become a reality.

In recent months, officials at the Bank of Japan have been scratching their heads at a puzzling phenomenon. In spite of nearly three years of robust economic growth, a run of dazzling corporate profits and recent signs of a tightening labour market, wages have been falling.

Even in the second quarter of 2004, when the economy was growing at an exhilarating 6 per cent a year, total remuneration was still falling by 1.1 per cent. This has been the seventh straight year of decline. If the US has experienced a largely jobless recovery, Japan is going through a wageless one.

Like the reporter Nobuko Tanaka, whose 2010 interview with artist Tomiyama Taeko is published below, I vividly remember my first encounter with Tomiyama's art. That was in 1984, when I visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to see Maruki Iri and Toshi's newly completed mural of the Battle of Okinawa, on display before travelling to its permanent home at the Sakima Museum in Ginowan, Okinawa (https://sakima.jp/exhibition-okinawasen.html). The adjacent room held a linked exhibit of Tomiyama's black-and-white lithographs depicting Japan's coal miners, including Koreans who had been forced to work in Japan's wartime mines. I was just then writing about the history of labor relations in Japan's coal industry, including the horrific treatment of Korean and Chinese slave workers during the war. Tomiyama's images, such as “Sending off the Spirits of the Dead,” which evoked not only the Koreans who disappeared into the mines but also the families they left behind, impressed me as both social and aesthetic creations.

The New York Times on October 12, 2006 featured an article describing fierce opposition by some US investors and employers in China to modest improvements to Chinese labor legislation. I have just visited China with labor lawyers and industrial relations experts who have worked to advance these proposed changes in China's employment law. The labor law reformers paint a vivid picture of the imbalance to the detriment of workers in Chinese industrial relations and the resulting abuses of employees, and of the urgent need to redress this imbalance if China's social and investment environment is to remain stable.

From early in 1945, Okinawa's geopolitical location at the southern border of ‘Japan proper’ made it an obvious and immediate target for the Allies' invasion of the mainland of Japan. In the most intensive land attack launched against Japan by the United States, the so-called ‘typhoon of steel’ rained down on Okinawans for months as the Japanese military dug in for a war of attrition.

“To Hell and Back” is a phrase that can bear a pretty heavy metaphorical load when it comes to talking about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It's also the title of a book by Charles Pellegrino.

Pellegrino's book is a moving and grueling close-up look at the horrors experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both on the day of the bombing and in the days and years afterward. I have the heart of a dried-up raisin but even I got a little teary in places.

Assessing the Economic Aftershocks of Japan's March 11 Earthquake Stephen S. Roach warns us not to be complacent about the effects of the March 11 earthquake in Japan on the global economy. After outlining a “narrow view” based on a declining global profile for the Japanese economy – a shrinking percentage of both global exports and GDP, a rising China, and an irreplaceable position in only a handful of critical upstream industrial components – Roach urges us not to accept the “superficial” conclusions that might flow from this view: that Japan “doesn't really matter any more” and that disruptions to global economic activity from the March 11 earthquake and its aftermath will be “transitory” and “small.”

Japan is more fluid than it has been in years. The end of Japan's “nejire kokkai” (“divided Diet)” via Abe's resounding win in the July 21 Upper House elections was hailed in many circles in Japan and internationally as heralding three years of stability in government. But perhaps this sense of stability has very weak foundations.

The Fukushima nuclear accident spurred expectations in the Japanese public and around the world that Japan would pull the plug on nuclear energy. Indeed, in July 2011 Prime Minister Kan Naoto announced that he no longer believed that nuclear reactors could be operated safely in Japan because it is so prone to devastating earthquakes and tsunami; by May 2012 all of Japan's 50 viable reactors were shut down for safety inspections. Plans to boost nuclear energy to 50% of Japan's electricity generating capacity were scrapped and in 2012 the government introduced subsidies to boost renewable energy. Incredibly, an aroused public took to the streets in the largest display of activism since the turbulent 1960s as the summer of discontent featured numerous demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of anti-nuclear protestors. Moreover, public opinion polls indicate that more than 70% of Japanese want to phase out nuclear energy by 2030.

While Kawabata and Kitazawa's article regarding the whitewashing of history and erasure of the term “group suicide” from history textbooks shows the Japanese government trying to hide its crimes of the colonial period, Underwood describes a more positive— albeit small—step forward in redressing colonial harm. Due to former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's actions between 2003 and 2008, the process of repatriating the remains of Koreans to South Korea has begun, after several attempts by previous administrations stalled.

In 2011, the recently established South Korean broadcasting network Channel-A launched Ije mannareo gamnida (Now on My Way to Meet You), a program whose format brings together a group of a dozen or more female talbukja (North Korean refugees) on a weekly basis. These women interact with host Nam Hui-seok, an additional female co-host (or, in the earlier episodes, two), and a panel composed of four male South Korean entertainers. Episodes typically open in a lighthearted manner, with conversation about daily life in North Korea alongside mild flirtation between the Southern male and Northern female participants, often involving song and dance, but climax with a talbuk seuteori, an emotionally harrowing narrative from one of the border-crossers detailing her exodus from North Korea. Via this framework Ije mannareo gamnida attempts to nurture the integration of North Korean refugees into South Korean society; personalization of their plight occurs in conjunction with reminders of a shared Korean identity maintained despite the regime they have fled, which is depicted as cruel, repressive and backward. The show has proven a minor hit within South Korea and received coverage from local and global media (see, e.g., Kim 2012; Choi 2012; Noce 2012).

As heroic workers and soldiers strive to save stricken Japan from a new horror–radioactive fallout–some truths known for 40 years bear repeating.

An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can't contain 90% of meltdowns. The U.S. has 6 identical and 17 very similar plants.

The article posted here by Dai Qing appears in a December 2008 special issue on The Heritage of Beijing Water, guest edited for The China Heritage Quarterly by the Beijing-based writer, historical investigative journalist and water activist. The issue focuses on the aqueous heritage of China's capital city. Reflecting on the well-springs of the Olympic year and the bountiful supply of water during 2008, Dai Qing discusses the diminishing heritage of a resource that sustained the ancient city in the past, shaped much of its life, and determines its future. The issue features a map of Beijing Waterways and an important study, ‘Beijing's Water Crisis, 1949-2008’ with important contributions by Probe International, an independent Canada-based think-tank and environmental protection group.

China's energy strategies have attracted a huge amount of attention, precisely because they have been so effective. Chinese energy companies - from global oil and gas giants, to new wind and solar power success stories as well as electric grid operators, not to mention rising Electric Vehicle (EV) producers - have all had an impact on the industry, and sometimes shaken it up. In solar Photovoltaic (PV) cells there are aggressive counter-moves being made by both the US (and potentially the EU) against Chinese subsidized exports. These threaten to spill over into related sectors, and could trigger an all-out trade war.