This essay investigates the relationship between art and politics by exploring the wartime activities of a Japanese photographer, Natori Yōnosuke, during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). Natori was an active participant in the production of propaganda photos and photo magazines that were aimed particularly at reaching non-Japanese speaking audiences, such as different groups of Asians living in Asia or Americans and Europeans in North America and Europe. Germer analyzes the political significance of Natori's aesthetics, his wartime political agency in China, his activities in the contexts of tourism and imperialism, and his direct involvement in the state's cultural propaganda. The author focuses on Natori's political agency as it is reflected in three particular areas: his creative work, his visual strategies, and the management of magazines that he edited.

Germer introduces some of the representative state-sponsored photo magazines in which Natori was directly involved, such as Shanghai (1937), which justified Japan's invasion in China, and Manchukuo (1940), which represented Japan's rule of Manchuria as benevolent. This essay discusses the format, visual strategies, and the management of the state-sponsored magazines and the private Nippon; and problematizes Natori's postwar silence about his wartime activities. This essay includes images of photo magazines and provides Natori's views on the role of photographs in propagating wartime ideologies.

Peter Lynch, an expert on the renewable energy sector, offers a concise introduction to the central role of feed-in tariffs (FITs) in fostering the ongoing transition from conventional, carbon-laden sources of generating electricity to renewables such as solar, wind and geothermal. As the author points out, FITs guarantee markets and prices for renewable power, and drive down their cost through deployment and the encouragement of yet more technical advance. FITs thus offer much hope to a world that seems unable to reach any sort of global agreement on cutting emissions which have continued to spiral since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

I would like to start with by defining what I mean by “Greater China.” It is a term used commonly in economics and investment communities around the world. It includes mainland China (hereafter China), Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan (Singapore, given its sizable Chinese community, is often included), despite the uneasiness of some Taiwanese scholars about the concept. At a cultural level, “greater China” corresponds with the term “cultural China,” coined by Tu Wei-ming during the 1990s when he spoke about the revival of Confucianism in the postwar period, arguing that instead of an impediment, Confucian values and ideals actually paved the way for the advance of economic expansion in many East Asian countries and regions. This economic expansion continued subsequently powered by globalization. Here, I offer a brief survey of the differing interests in, and engagements with, the study of globalization and global history in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I argue that in the face of globalization, each of these regions developed distinct strategies to perceive and interpret its multifaceted impact. Thus, though I use the term “Greater China,” I intend to emphasize the very different approaches to the regional and the global in the case of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The efforts of two Japanese citizens, Matsuura Akio and Murata Mitsuhei, to raise awareness of the risk of a further major accident at Fukushima are to be commended. More than 13 months after the accident began - the threats from the Fukushima Daiichi site are multi-dimensional and on-going, but the under reporting of these risks as a result of nuclear crisis fatigue tied with the 24 hour news cycle can lead to a complacency on the current and future reality at the site.

The specific issue highlighted by Matsumura and Murata is the risk and consequences of the failure of the spent fuel pool at the destroyed reactor unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi. As they report the spent fuel inventory at this pool is the largest of all 4 reactors that were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

We have all made poor decisions, and some such questionable decisions are artistic in nature. When looking back on one’s early work, it is easy to have tinges of embarrassment that are counterbalanced by nostalgia. John Baldessari made this dynamic tangible in 1970 through his Cremation Project, an undertaking in which he burned all of his paintings and baked some of the resulting ashes into cookies. Viewing some of these cookies/ex-paintings several years ago, I felt that Baldessari’s approach to his previous work, simultaneously embracing, annihilating and remaking, was a fitting way to let go of one’s artistic past. My user-driven installation Confessional provides the opportunity for composers to briefly take pleasure in and (symbolically) destroy one of their dubious creations. This process is accomplished with a computer running Max and a user-provided recording that is processed live. The audio processing unfolds in stages that mirror the phases of animal decomposition. Through this series of transformations, the user’s piece transitions from its original state to nearly imperceptible bits of noise. In this article, I examine Confessional, focusing on the work’s conceptual background, related issues such as memory and hierarchy, and the structure of the Max patch that is used for processing.

The examples above suggest governmental paralysis in the face of a pervasive corruption which impacts severely upon every important policy and institution in the republic. The President takes initiatives but hesitates fatally to follow through, and compromises his own reputation and effectiveness in the process. Most government ministries, for whom tactical funds and off-budget budgets are the stuff of life, do not even have a reform plan in front of them which would permit them to parlay their own essential income-boosting black funds (civil service pay being universally inadequate) against budgetary reform and a big boost to salaries.

The Japan-United States relationship seems abnormal. “Abnormal” because, even if it didn't begin all of a sudden, since Koizumi came to power, and especially since 9.11, a situation that can only be described as “extreme abnormality” has become the norm.

Since we tend to take water for granted, it is almost a bad sign when it is in the news; and lately there have been plenty of water-related stories from South, East, and Southeast Asia. They have ranged from the distressingly familiar – suicides of North Indian farmers who can no longer get enough water – to stories most people find surprising (evidence that pressure from water in the reservoir behind the new Zipingpu dam may have triggered the massive Sichuan earthquake last May). Meanwhile, glaciers, which almost never made news, are now generating plenty of worrisome headlines.

From the Taiwan Strait to the Strait of Malacca, security concerns are growing around the South China Sea. While the Bush Administration sees a resurgent Chinese military threat across the Taiwan Strait and a terrorist threat in the Strait of Malacca, many countries between the Straits are more concerned about security for their maritime resources from the threats of competitors, traffickers, poachers, and pirates.

At the beginning of the third week of September in Hanamaki our thoughts turn, with the hand of the clock, to another world. The autumnal equinox certainly reinforces this; for this is the season in Japan of recalling those who came before us, a time when many Japanese people choose to visit the gravesites of their ancestors.

Raphael Kaplinsky and Dirk Messner have launched an important project on “The Impact of Asian Drivers on the Developing World,” in a special issue of World Development (36, 2, 2008). The central issue is the impact of the surging economies of China and India on the world economy. Japan Focus reprints their introduction to the issues, and a comment by R. Taggart Murphy on “New Asian Drivers, Japan, Korea and the Lessons of History” that raises historical issues with particular respect to Japan and Korea, including the impact on the world economy of these earlier developments, and the nature of their rise in global perspective. In future articles we hope to extend this discussion with respect to other issues pertaining to the impact of Chinese and Indian development on the Asian regional and global economy, and the impact on Chinese and Indian societies of the development paths chosen. We also draw attention to Giovanni Arrighi's contribution on “Historical Perspectives on States, Markets and Capitalism, East and West.”

This past fall I was thinking once again about the intractability of Japan's part in the Pacific phase of World War II when the news came: Okinawans had staged a huge rally to protest the Japanese government's banning of textbook references to the military's role in “group suicides” among civilians during the Battle of Okinawa. According to some reports, a single examiner at the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science, with dubious outside connections, made the change. To explain it, he pointed to a suit recently filed against Oe Kenzaburo's 1970 assertions.

Upon his arrival at Seoul's Incheon airport in September 2003, Song Du Yol, professor of philosophy and sociology at Germany's Munster University, was arrested and indicted for offences under South Korea's National Security Law. Prosecutors demanded a fifteen-year sentence. In March 2004 he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. On appeal, this was reduced to three years, suspended for five years, and on 21 July 2004 he was released. Though now free, he is still not completely free from the web of the National Security Law, and a final “not guilty” verdict still lies somewhere in the future.

The exceptions can be brutal, such as the Twitter comments by Alec Sulkin and Gilbert Godfried, but overall, online and print media have conveyed an incredible outpouring of sympathy for Japan in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake. This trend seems particularly pronounced among Japan's neighbors, many of whom have often been at odds with it over historical and territorial issues.

The mercury discharged into the sea by the Chisso factory in Minamata, and the radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are not entirely different “accidents,” although one was the result of a “natural disaster” and one not. Minamata offers hints of future developments as Japan attempts to respond to and recover from Fukushima.

If ever the constitutional democracy of the United States is overthrown, we now have a better idea of how this is likely to be done. That may be the most important contribution of the recent Iran-contra congressional hearings.

– Theodore Draper, “The Rise of the American Junta,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 1987.

In 1989 I published the following article, “Northwards without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power.” It is of interest today because of its description of how the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees, in their investigation of Iran-Contra, assembled documentation on what we now know as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, only to suppress or misrepresent this important information in their Report. I was concerned about the committees' decision to sidestep the larger issues of secret powers and secret wars, little knowing that these secret COG powers, or “Doomsday Project,” would in fact be secretly implemented on September 11, 2011. (One of the two Committee Chairs was Lee Hamilton, later co-chair of the similarly evasive 9/11 Commission Report).

[The press is filled with reports on the multiple conflicts erupting in the China seas: territorial conflicts, resource conflicts, and historical conflicts. Rarely is there serious discussion of the efforts by the nations of the world's most dynamic economic region to achieve amity and cooperation on issues of mutual interest. Fisheries and the resources of the sea is one such realm, and David Rosenberg explores the impressive progress among the powers of the region in attempting to regulate fishing, while highlighting the continued conflicts and difficulties in regulating fishing at a time of sharp decline in catch. Japan Focus.]