The Japanese government buried an official report in March 2011 outlining a worst-case scenario, including the evacuation of Tokyo, while emergency workers struggled to contain the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi, according to numerous media reports. Combined with separate revelations that a task force chaired by the prime minister failed to keep records of its meetings, these developments raise serious concerns about the government's willingness to communicate openly and to accept public scrutiny over its management of the nuclear crisis.

The comparative study of death penalty policy is a relatively new and unpracticed discipline, and few of the existing studies concentrate on regional rather than global comparisons. This article makes the case for a regional approach by summarizing some of the most important findings from our book about capital punishment in Asia. That book is based on five major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China (chapters 3-7), and seven shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India (appendices A-F).

World War II produced many great villains, but as for the supreme Monster, many would award that dishonor to Adolph Eichmann, the man who administered the deaths of six million Jews, and who made “I was only doing my job” into an expression laden with bitter irony in the post war world. Hannah Arendt, after attending his trial in Israel, shocked the world by announcing that she found him to be not a Monster at all, but rather a Nobody – or worse still, an Anybody. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banality of Evil was attacked on the reasonable grounds that where there are monstrous acts, there must be a Monster. But as terrifying as Monsters are, Arendt was pointing to a truth more frightening still: that monstrous acts can be carried out by ordinary (banal) bureaucrats.

This paper proposes the creation of a Northeast Asian Biodiversity Corridor (NEABC) that would connect in a consistent manner critical habitat in Russia, China, and the Korean Peninsula. Such a corridor may be considered now because of decades of scientific and policy work to establish a DMZ Peace Park, a mountain-watershed ecosystem network in the ROK, nature reserves in the DPRK, and cross-border mega-species migration corridors between the DPRK, China, and Russia. The paper reviews each of these stepping and foundation stones, and refers to proposed regional biodiversity corridors in other regions. It emphasizes parallels between the Northeast Asian context and that of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), an existing regional biodiversity corridor which involves eight Central American countries that, like the two Koreas, are trapped in inter-state conflicts. It suggests that the Korean traditional concept of “The Baekdudaegan” that integrates the cultural and ecological landscapes of the mountains and rivers of Korea may be an important cultural device that frames the ecological basis of a regional NEABC. The paper reflects on how indirect and incremental social and political engagement may be a necessary attribute of strategies that build ecological security in a conflict zone. It concludes by contrasting this approach to the characteristics of what the author terms “nuclear insecurity” and suggests that a Northeast Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone may be a form of nuclear insecurity that relies less on balances of terror, and thereby is more conducive to the creation of sustainable security in this region.

[In the following article, published in the May/June 2005 issue of FOREIGN POLICY, Robert McNamara makes a powerful case for ending the U.S. government's reliance upon nuclear weapons as an instrument of U.S. policy. Pointing to their enormous destructiveness, the likelihood that they will be employed deliberately or accidentally, the immoral and illegal nature of their maintenance and use, and their incitement to proliferation, the former U.S. secretary of defense argues for prompt action “toward the elimination – or near elimination – of all nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, he argues, the Bush administration is moving in precisely the opposite direction, by turning its back on treaty commitments to nuclear arms control and disarmament and, instead, promoting a U.S. nuclear buildup.

Okinawan calls that the dangerous Futenma Air Station be closed and no new bases be built in the prefecture continue. On April 27, the Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper addressed an open letter in English to Carl Levin, Chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee stating “If the governments of the United States and Japan push through the construction of a new base, the U.S. military will not only find itself surrounded by hostility from the people of Okinawa and mainland Japan, but also from members of conservation movement groups all over the world.” The plan to build a new base in the environmentally sensitive Henoko has sparked outrage and the opposition of 84% of Okinawans according to recent polls. The Okinawa Times, highlighting pollution, accidents, and crimes, echoes the Ryukyu Shimpo's call that the controversial US-Japanese plan be reconsidered.

In 1942 the U.S. War Relocation Authority hired documentary photographer Dorothea Lange to photograph the World War II internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. Lange is now a world-famous documentary photographer, best known for chronicling the Great Depression of the 1930s. Her work is the subject of more than a dozen glossy art books. Even those who do not know her name will recognize some of her pictures. One of her photographs has been called the most famous image in the U.S.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the death of the postwar poet Ibaragi Noriko (1926-2006). She was prepared: three months earlier, at age 79, she had written out a farewell letter and had it printed, ready to send to some two hundred of her friends and correspondents. Leaving blanks for the date (February 17, 2006, though it was two days later when she was found in her bed) and cause of her death (a brain hemorrhage), she expressed her wishes that there be no funeral or memorial and that no flowers be sent to her now vacant suburban home. Instead she made one request: “If you will pause for a moment, just a moment, and say to yourself ‘So now she is gone…, ‘that will be enough.”

In June 2013, construction workers unearthed more than 20 rusty barrels from beneath a soccer pitch in Okinawa City. The land had once been part of Kadena Air Base - the Pentagon's largest installation in the Pacific region - but was returned to civilian usage in 1987. Tests revealed that the barrels contained two ingredients of military defoliants used in the Vietnam War - the herbicide 2,4,5-T and 2,3,7,8-TCDD dioxin. Levels of the highly toxic TCDD in nearby water measured 280 times safe limits.

March 4, 1994, marked a rare moment in the annals of Japanese postwar responsibility when the Japanese state engaged reparations activists in direct dialogue. Parliamentary supporters of Korean forced labor redress efforts, mainly from the then-Japanese Socialist Party, arranged for a room at the Diet and officials from five government agencies took turns negotiating and responding to questions for several hours.

Since the 1980s, a widespread view has arisen in the literature that the post-1950 economic successes of Taiwan and the Republic of Korea have been due, in part at least, to the legacy of Japanese colonialism. This paper challenges that view by comparing Japanese economic achievements in both Taiwan and Korea with those of the British, French, Dutch and Americans in their Southeast Asian colonies. The paper examines the record of economic growth and structural change across the various colonies, and also discusses policies relating to government revenue and expenditure and to trade, exchange rates and the balance of payments. The paper also looks at some non-monetary indicators relating to living standards, including mortality rates and educational enrolments. The main conclusion is that the facts do not wholly support the case for Japanese exceptionalism.

[Introduction: Six decades into the nuclear age, it is worth reflecting on the fact that the United States remains the only nation to have detonated a nuclear weapon in combat, that Japan alone among nations has experienced nuclear attack, and that for all the terror unleashed in subsequent wars, no nation has launched nuclear weapons on an enemy since 1945. What forces have prevented nuclear war, and what lessons can be drawn from this experience for the future? Lawrence Wittner finds important answers to these questions in the world anti- nuclear movement.

Anthony Giddens was right to emphasize that ‘[a] large part of the chequered history of the concept of class has to be understood in terms of the changing concerns of those who have made use of the notion, concerns which reflect changing directions of emphasis within sociology itself’ (1977: 99). It must be added, though, that those concerns also reflect value-ridden perceptions about the structure of societies and social models, and indeed the changing structures and prevailing political and social values in society. Even the shifting emphasis in social analysis that Giddens refers to may reflect emerging ideologies within the profession and within the broader context of social relations, notably paradigm shifts. This is certainly the case with the use of the class concept and methodologies of class analysis in the People's Republic of China (PRC) over the last two to three decades.

My salary will be reduced 10% on April 1. Are students bitching about my lousy teaching? Have I been less productive on the research front? Less willing to shoulder my share of administrative burdens? All this could be true - or not - but has nothing to do with my pay cut. From slacker to Nobel Prize winner, every one of my colleagues at the University of Tsukuba is seeing his or her salary fall. As are all professors at all of Japan's national universities. And, indeed, everyone in Japan who is paid, directly or indirectly, by the Japanese tax payer - or, more precisely, paid by all the borrowing the Japanese government has been doing since taxes now cover less than half the Japanese government's expenses.

Niigata. The Niigata District Court ordered the state and a Japanese company Friday to pay 88 million yen ($760,000) in compensation to Chinese who served as slave-laborers in Japan during World War II.

It is the first time for a Japanese court to order both the state and a firm to pay compensation for wartime slave labor. A Fukuoka District Court ruling in 2002 did uphold a compensation claim, though it only ordered the defendant firm to provide redress.

KONO MICHIKAZU This year I was in Nanjing on August 15, the anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II. I was with you, in fact, attending the opening of an exhibit that was the product of three years of effort on your part: “My August 15,” an exhibition by Japanese manga artists at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. One should probably note here that a contentious debate continues to rage between Japan and China, and among Japanese scholars as well, over the facts of the so-called Nanjing Massacre, including the number of victims and the authenticity of certain documents. And the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, which has “300,000 Victims” engraved in large letters near the main entrance, is regarded by many in Japan as a kind of rallying point for anti-Japanese sentiment in China. What a bold, pathbreaking idea, to choose this memorial hall, and the symbolic date of August 15, to exhibit cartoons describing the wartime suffering of the Japanese, whom the Chinese have tended to view solely as aggressors!

History is a cumbersome science. Scholars work diligently in amassing data, reading original sources, and creating plausible narratives regarding the past. That is, however, of scant use for mitigating and resolving international conflicts, such as those presently involving Japan and its neighbours. As Ernest Renan observed in his famous 1882 essay Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?: “L'oubli, et je dirai même l'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation.” The importance of forgetting the past or getting the facts wrong lies in the fact that at the bottom of political formations great injustices and even massacres can often be found, and directing public attention to them is not conducive to integrating a nation as a peaceful unity. Renan had legal precedents for his idea of forgetting as the basis of a nation. One French massacre that Renan refers to was Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris in 1572, when several thousand Huguenots were killed. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 granting amnesty for Protestants included also a decree that all parties extinguish from their minds the memory of all that had happened during the decades of religious fighting. Renan's problem was how to create stable nations, but the phenomenon can be observed also in international politics. If Renan had wished, he also could have taken up the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the 30-years War, and which contained not only a decree for all parties to place into “perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon” all hostile acts that had been committed during the war, but also prohibited litigation processes related to lost property and most debts, so that “perpetual Silence” would fall on public memory of the war. The emphasis was on forgetting the past and moving on towards reconstruction of a functioning regional state and trading system, rather than keeping war memories alive by trying to sort out injustices, perpetrated to some extent by all parties.

Japan has not only suffered from dismal macroeconomic performance over the past two decades, but it has lost its edge in areas of its greatest competitive strength, such as electronics, especially information and communications technology (ICT) hardware Japanese electronics firms have declined by many standard measures of industrial performance, such as market share, exports, and profits.