[The following article presents a critical responses to the proposed changes in national educational policy by Japan's new prime minister, Abe Shinzo. It is one of many appearing in Japanese newspapers and magazines in the past six weeks. The centerpiece of the Abe administration's domestic strategy is revision of the Fundamental Law of Education (also known as the “Charter of Education” (Kyoiku Kensho) or the “Education Constitution” (Kyoiku Kempo)—the basis of post-war Japanese education. This law, passed in 1947 and intact subsequently, mandated the current national educational standards, and was the centerpiece of efforts to eliminate pre-war nationalism and militarism from the curriculum. At a time of mounting discontent with Japanese education, and with a neonationalist drive to revise the Constitution to weaken or eliminate the pacifist provisions of Article 9, the Abe administration has made the Fundamental Law of Education its first target in an effort to exorcise the ghosts of Japan's World War II defeat.

Much has been written on the downstream impact of China's dams on the Lancang-Mekong River, which flows through or along the borders of five other countries after exiting China. Most of the discussion relates to the hydrological impact of impounding water in the eight dams along the mainstream Lancang Jiang in Yunnan Province. Particular concern surrounds the recently completed Xiaowan Dam and the recently approved construction of the Nuozhadu Dam, each of which is of a scale to impound quantities of water that can affect river hydrology throughout the basin. The Lancang Cascade, as it is termed, has caused considerable controversy in downstream countries, most notably during the 2008 floods and the 2010 drought. Both the floods and the droughts were blamed by many in Thailand, and some in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, on China's actions. Recent articles on the downstream implications of altered river hydrology and the need for China to be less disingenuous in its public relations over the issue show the confluence of river hydrology and geopolitics in an international river basin such as the Lancang-Mekong.

A U.S. Army officer's refusal to go to Iraq has touched off an intense, at times furious debate among Japanese Americans, reopening an unhealed wound that dates back to World War II.

Many news articles, op-ed pieces and emotional letters to the editor in the Japanese-American press have featured the case of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, a Japanese American native of Honolulu stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington state. Army officials say he's the first commissioned officer to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq, on the principle established by the Nuremberg war-crimes trial that he is obliged to disobey illegal or immoral orders.

After serving as a Japanese diplomat in Asia and Europe during the first half of the 20th century—helping negotiate with the Soviet Union to purchase the North Manchurian Railroad, saving thousands of Jews from the hands of the Nazis in Lithuania, and being interned in the Soviet Union for a year at the end of World War II—Sugihara Chiune was told by his superiors to resign from the Japanese Foreign Service in 1947.

[Japan Focus introduction: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo recently added another entry to the long, sorry chapter of official Japanese war-crime denials when he said that there was no coercion of the so-called comfort-women by the imperial military “in the narrow sense of the word.” On March 1, an historic day in the history of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, he said: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”

Liberal Democratic Party power broker Nakayama Nariaki further insulted the dwindling group of surviving women when he compared government involvement in the brothels that enslaved them to college canteens. “Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies,” he said.

In the furor that followed and in the lead-up to a potentially booby-trapped visit to Washington, Abe backpedaled and issued a series of unsatisfying but politically expedient mea culpas, saying he stood by the famous1993 statement by Kono Yohei, acknowledging state involvement in the brothels and culminating in an expression of sympathy during his stateside trip that sought to lay the matter to rest.

In a one-hour meeting with US politicians arranged by Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and hosted by Sen. Nancy Pelosi, Abe was reported to have expressed sympathy for the victims: “As an individual, and the prime minister, I sympathize from the bottom of my heart with the former comfort women who experienced this extreme hardship. I'm deeply sorry about the situation in which they were placed.”

Calling such remarks an apology—to the US President not the comfort women—George Bush sought to lay the issue to rest in order to get on to the important issues of redefining the US-Japan military relationship. But the problem is unlikely to end there. On close analysis, the Abe statement is a model of the equivocation that has long characterized many official pronouncements on Japanese war crimes. It managed, for example, to douse the fires in Washington caused by his original denial while still conceding nothing on the key issue of coercion.

He is perhaps the best-known governor in Japan, largely because he has been breaking with tradition ever since he took office in Nagano Prefecture in October 2000.

After converting his private office into a glass-walled room to make his work as transparent as possible, Gov. Tanaka Yasuo defiantly declared “No More Dams” in a direct counter to the local economy's heavy reliance on public works projects at the expense of ecological concerns. He also abolished the traditional, self-serving press club system in his prefecture, and has been busily promoting environmental protection in his mountainous domain since day one.

Miyazaki Hayao, director of famous animated films such as My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001), is one of the most popular and influential media figures in Japan. The premiere of a new Miyazaki film is a major event and on July 20, Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises), his first project since the 2008 hit Ponyo (an eco-fable discussed here by Susan Napier), arrives in theatres across Japan.

Despite centuries of subjugation by larger neighbours—Joseon Korea, Imperial Japan, and South Korea—Jeju island society has maintained a distinct identity and a measure of autonomy. Relations with both Korea and Japan have at times had devastating effects on the islanders, but also contributed to the dynamism of Jeju island society and opened up new routes for islanders to continue traveling as a vital part of their social life.

The most surprising aspect of the recent unexpected terrorist violence in Norway is that, in retrospect, it is not surprising. Our revived hopes after the end of the Cold War, that we might finally be emerging into a world of diminishing bloodshed, have been abundantly disabused. Events of seemingly random irrational violence, such as that which so shocked us when President Kennedy was assassinated, have become a predictable part of the world in which we live.

On April 17, 2012, the day that Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarô went public with his plan for the metropolis to purchase the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, the government of Yilan County in Taiwan responded, “The only way to carry out a sale of the Diaoyu Islands is through an official open, competitive bidding process.”

One year ago this month, an advance team from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) arrived in Iraq on a mission – so the Japanese public was told – to help rebuild the wartorn country. The rest of the main contingent of 600 troops soon followed.

Then, on Dec. 9, 2004, amid simmering debate over whether the dispatch fell foul of Japan's war-renouncing Constitution – and after an Asahi Shimbun poll registered over 60 percent opposition to it – the Cabinet of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro extended the Self-Defense Forces' stay by another 12 months.

The story told here will be familiar to students of Asia: an American military base established overseas in the aftermath of war and occupation; contractual terms reflecting vast asymmetries of power; local society transformed by the facility's demands for raw materials, goods and labor, including sexual labor; recurring tensions with “host” governments over questions of jurisdiction and sovereignty.

[John Embry and Andrew Hepburn provide a valuable entry into the world of finance. The two analysts illuminate the shadowy trail of the “Plunge Protection Team” in its apparent mission to rig the American stock markets. Their account is backed up by considerable indirect evidence as well as statements by credible insiders. If their account is correct, it means that US markets look a lot like the Japanese markets that were long derided for being a site of repeated official manipulation. A more important conclusion may be that US markets are even shakier than many believe.

George and Junichiro, two great buddies (if the Japanese media is to be believed) meet again, on 15 and 16 November, in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto. Since Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro is one of the dwindling band of ever-faithful Bush supporters, and since officials on both sides have been working hard to clear away all possible obstacles from the negotiating table between them, the mood may be expected to be warm: Japanese troops will remain in Iraq till September 2006; the ban on US beef imports, till recently cause of great congressional anger, is about to be lifted; the Japanese Post Office, sitting on the world's largest pool of funds, is about to be privatized; and, perhaps most important, a deal has just been done on the re-organization of US forces in Japan. The ground should therefore be clear for an untroubled meeting, plenty of windy rhetoric about the world's “closest and most important” relationship, some photo-ops, and perhaps some quiet tippling under the red and yellow-hued autumn foliage of the old Kyoto palace.

I write as a resident of Kushi district, the site for the planned construction of a Futenma Replacement Facility (the projected Henoko base). Ever since it first surfaced I have been struggling against the plan for construction of a base that would foreclose the future of the children of the district. I am joint representative of the “Association of the 10 Districts North of Futami Who Do Not Want a Base” (formed by the residents of those 10 districts in October 1997) and General Secretary of the “Association of Women Supporting the Inamine City Government” (commonly known as “Iinagu Association”) formed in April 2010. As an investigator for the project to compile Nago City's History, I have been involved in an oral history project into the nature-rooted daily life and history and culture of this region, in particular of the Kushi district. I am also a member of the “Northern Limits Dugong Investigation Team” and I participate in the Okinawa Citizen's Biodiversity Network.

The 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima has encouraged comparisons in many quarters with the tragic experience of Minamata more than 55 years earlier, when mercury-poisoned industrial runoff caused widespread illness and death in the human and animal populations. Rather than viewing these disasters as the unfortunate side effects of modern industrial capitalism (to be addressed, in the capitalist view, with financial compensation) Yoneyama Shoko draws on Minamata victim's advocate Ogata Masato to imagine a more humane and life-affirming vision of our obligations to one another. In crafting his response to the Chisso Corporation and the Japanese government, Ogata (who eschewed financial compensation) drew on elements of the popular Japanese religious heritage to affirm an ethos of interdependence and the responsibility that follows. This can be seen, for example, in Ogata's use of the term tsumi, an indigenous Japanese category of ritual impurity that encompasses both physical pollution and moral transgression. Combining notions of “defilement” and of “sin,” tsumi is a principle that (as Brian Victoria notes) has justified some in shunning the victims of chemical or radioactive contamination. Ogata, however, employs the traditional imagery of tsumi to describe, not the victims of pollution but its perpetrators, thereby presenting ecological damage as a profoundly moral matter, one that cannot be reduced to economic impacts or financial compensation.

In this essay, Robert Stolz takes us back to the Meiji period to examine the ideas of an early environmental activist, Tanaka Shōzō. Stolz describes Tanaka as a “modern environmental thinker” whose theory of the relationship between “poison” and “flow” informed his Meiji-era activism against both the Ashio Cooper Mine's pollution of rivers and the Meiji state's designs for flood control on the Kantō plain. Tanaka's concern with humanity's relationship to nature should be read alongside the attitudes of his contemporaries discussed in the Blaxell and Fedman essays. In addition, Stolz's discussion of how Tanaka's ideas might be relevant to present-day controversies over dams enables a consideration of how state efforts to control nature have, and have not, changed over the course of the modern period.

In the twenty-first century, American-Chinese relations offers both a challenge and an opportunity for the United States, China, and the entire world. Since both countries reopened their doors to each other in 1971, their economic and financial ties have been widely viewed as the “ballast” (ya cangshi压舱石) of an uneasy relationship.

This article brings together three Counterpoint columns published in The Japan Times on December 2, 9 and 23 and slightly edited here. Novelist, playwright, film director and translator Roger Pulvers provides a personal tour of Japan's disastrous experiment with nuclear power, compares the consequences of the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters, and charts the uncertain future of Japan's nuclear industry. While the first two articles appeared prior to Japan's election, the victorious LDP leader Abe Shinzo has made plain his administration's determination to restart many of Japan's closed power plants in the face of public opinion polls revealing widespread opposition to the restarts, and scientific evidence of the high risk of restarts in earthquake-sensitive regions. Abe said on TV Asahi on December 23, “It is not yet clear what caused the Fukushima Daiichi accident.” He added, “We will go ahead [with the reactor restarts] with the people [regulators and scientists] that we already have.” His “people” appear to omit the strong Japanese majority that public opinion polls reveal are opposed to restarts. Abe appears poised to push forward with the status quo of ineffective regulation, business cronyism, and hand-picked subservient experts described below.