This article examines the impact of acts of blood-sacrifice on the establishment and politics of a nation-state by focusing on the different experiences of the Japanese diaspora on the United States mainland and in the Hawaiian Islands during and after the Second World War.

[The resumption of the railroad link between North and South Korea is emblematic of warming North-South relations and a key to the geopolitics and geoeconomics of Northeast Asia and beyond. This is a two part article on the the significance of the North-South railroad line crossing Korea's DMZ and linking Korea with China, Russia and Europe. The South Korean Yonhap New Agency details the last-minute cancellation of the test run scheduled for May 25, 2006. Russian analyst Georgy Bulychev examines the geopolitics of the project and its importance for North-South and regional accommodation and cooperation.]

Japanese PM Abe Shinzo's win in the July 21 Upper House elections may have given him and his LDP party three full years to reform the Japanese economy. But as some analysts warn, there is still no key theme in Abe's plans for reform and he has already started talking about constitutional revision. All governments have limited capacity to make significant change, so - as in business and indeed life in general - it is essential to choose and focus. This short article argues that Abe would be well advised to follow the advice of a succession of recent white papers and reports from within his own party and government, and focus on the enabling role of information and computer technology (ICT) in energy, health and a range of other services and markets. Much of the Japanese elite want to transform the country into a national version of “industrial internet” General Electric, and are moving to implement those aims. But Abe could derail these efforts with his divisive and dangerous constitutional and historical obsessions.

In this two part article Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick explore the relationship between the atomic bombing of Japan and that nation's embrace of nuclear power, a relationship that may be entering a new phase with the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima.

Takahashi Tetsuya's “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine,” is among the most important statements to emerge from the debate over Yasukuni Shrine, historical memory and war nationalism. The article is here.

Japan Focus is pleased to present chapter seven of Naoko Shimazu, ed., Nationalisms in Japan. Philip Seaton is the translator.

For Korea's confident and well-capitalized film industry, summer is a season to pull out the stops and offer the South Korean – and increasingly international – audience the most spectacular products it can produce. In the summer of 2006, one such blockbuster was the film Hanbando (‘The Korean Peninsula‘). It was produced by a syndicate of major companies headed by market leader CJ Entertainment and directed by Kang Woo-suk, well-known for genre action films like the Two Cops franchise and the Public Enemy films, and the nationalistic action thriller Silmido. The film was backed by a huge advertising budget and saturation bookings: it occupied 550 screens during the opening week, roughly one out of every three in South Korea. The film seemed destined to be the phenomenon of the summer releases.

President George W. Bush has repeatedly presented the American occupation of Japan as the model for Iraq's democratization. Does the Japanese occupation really illuminate contemporary reconstructions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other contemporary war-torn societies? Certain similarities do stand out: as in Japan half a century earlier, the U.S. has proclaimed its intention to return “sovereignty” to a democratic Iraq and assure a democratic transition in Afghanistan while preserving a dominant American military presence in both the Middle East and Central Asia. Yet beyond this obvious similarity lie profound differences in American strategy, goals and commitments, as well as in the nations and peoples it seeks to “reconstruct” and the problems encountered in the two regions and two eras.

Thailand has been in crisis since an armed forces coup overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006, ultimately forcing him into exile. Although his opponents used fair means and foul to keep various incarnations of Thaksin's party out of power, his sister Yingluck Shinawatra became Thailand's first female prime minister following a resounding electoral victory for Thaksin's Pheu Thai (For Thai) party in 2011.

This essay explores the connection between the economy and cultural identity in Japanese nationalism. After World War II Japan was a pacesetter in the global trend toward developmental nationalism, including a transformation of its economy into both a wealthy and a highly egalitarian one. In the 1970s and 1980s, ethnic nationalism re-emerged, with the claim that economic success was the product of Japanese cultural uniqueness rather than of the developmental nationalist policies of the previous quarter-century. The economic downturn of the 1990s thus challenged Japan both economically and culturally, At first, this crisis prompted a critical re-evaluation of national culture, manifested as serious attempts to both resolve tensions with Asia dating from World War II and dismantle domestic social hierarchies. By the mid-1990s, however, this moment had passed and government and business leaders adopted full-fledged neo-liberal policies, reversing the long post-war trend toward income equality, while adopting a more strident and militarist cultural nationalism.

The exchange of artillery fire between South and North Korea on 23 November, 2010 had predictable results – a great increase of tension on the peninsula, a show of force by the United States, and a torrent of uninformed media articles and pontificating from the security industry. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor armed the Mujahideen in order to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, thereby starting that long and continuing war (and paving the way to 9/11 for that matter), opined that

If these actions are deliberate it is an indication that the North Korean regime has reached a point of insanity. Its calculations and its actions are difficult to fathom in rational terms. Alternatively it is a sign that the regime is out of control. Different elements in Pyongyang, including parts of the military, are capable of taking actions on their own perhaps, without central co-ordination.2

It is abnormal for a country to host foreign troops in peacetime.

For such a situation to remain in place, there must be an international agreement between the sender and receiver of the troops. In the case of U.S. armed forces stationed in Japan, the two countries have an agreement in the form of international law – in this case, the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. In other words, U.S. forces are allowed to stay in Japan only under “the rule of law’ as stipulated by the treaty.

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Connie Bruck's account of billionaire Sheldon Adelson using his millions to refashion the politics of Israel strikes several familiar notes. Around the world states are in standoffs against their richest citizens. In Thailand Thaksin Shinawatra has challenged the traditional monarchist establishment of the country. The Russian oligarchs dominated Russian politics for a decade in the Yeltsin era. In Mexico a similar role has been played by oligarchs such as Carlos Hank González (d. 2001), and Carlos Slim Helù, today the second richest man in the world.

On 31 May 2012, Professor Mizukami Tetsuo (Institute for Peace and Community Studies, Rikkyo University) hosted two lectures on the problems associated with reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. The speakers were Professor Frank von Hippel (Princeton University), former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology and co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), and Professor Gordon MacKerron, Director and Head of SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research) at the University of Sussex.

Traveling through East Asia, one can view historic imperial palaces in Beijing and Tokyo, and royal palaces reconstructed from the ruins left by fire and war in Seoul and Naha. Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago. The Shuri palace in its capital, Naha, was constructed more than six hundred years ago by the rulers of the Ryukyu kingdom, which played a crucial role in maritime East Asia from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Today, it takes barely an hour to fly from Taipei to Naha, and the Shuri castle, reconstructed three times in the last century, has been designated a World Heritage Site in an attempt to evoke its former grandeur.

In 1979, Kim Min Gi and other activists from South Korea's democracy and labour movements clandestinely released the collective radio play “Light of a Factory” (Kongchang'ui Bulbit). This work was used to mobilize factory workers into the broad-based minjung or people's movements that were challenging the dictatorship. The play documented the lives of Korean workers and the suppression of their desires under the authoritarian regime. The plot centered on female workers in an export factory who decide to organize a union. It was loosely based on real struggles such as the massive strike by female employees at the Y.H. Trading Company in 1978-9; a strike which spilled over into the struggles of the Korean democracy movement. The music was a cacophony of different styles and influences: from US camptown progressive rock, to Western and Korean folk music, to shaman ritual and other traditional styles. Cassettes of the play were rerecorded on home stereos and passed around from hand to hand.

Japanese lawyers and activists supporting compensation lawsuits for Chinese forced labor in wartime Japan once called Chinese attorney Kang Jian the “window.” The term acknowledged Kang's pivotal role in coordinating between plaintiffs typically located in the Chinese countryside and Japanese legal teams pressing claims on their behalf in a dozen courtrooms across Japan over the past decade.

The recent arrest near Johor Bahru, Malaysia of Mas Selamat Kastari, a fugitive Singaporean member of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) group is an important achievement in the effort to stamp out Southeast Asian terrorism. Other actions by the Indonesian police over the past 18 months, including the arrest of JI members in Palembang and Central Java, have dealt a further blow to the organisation.

A dramatic paradigm shift appears to be underway in contemporary Japanese society, with public discourse suddenly focusing upon internal divisions and variations in the population. At the beginning of the 21st century, the nation has observed a drastic shift in its characterization from a uniquely homogeneous and uniform society to one of domestic diversity, class differentiation and other multidimensional forms. The view that Japan is a monocultural society with little internal cultural divergence and stratification, which was once taken for granted, is now losing monopoly over the way Japanese society is portrayed. The emerging discourse argues that Japan is a kakusa shakai, literally a ‘disparity society’, a socially divided society with sharp class differences and glaring inequality. The view appears to have gained ground during Japan's prolonged recession in the 1990s, the so-called lost decade, and in the 2000s when the country experienced a further downturn as a consequence of the global financial crisis.