[Debates over the best film of all time tend to go no further than Hollywood classics such as Citizen Kane. But the influential Halliwell's Film Guide now says the title belongs to Tokyo Story, a little-known Japanese film in which nothing much happens. Peter Bradshaw pays tribute.]

For more than three decades, historical memory controversies have been fought over Japanese school textbook content in both the domestic and international arenas. In these controversies, Japanese textbook contents, which are subject to Ministry of Education examination and revision of content and language prior to approval for use in the public schools, repeatedly sparked denunciations by Chinese and Korean authorities and citizens with respect to such issues as the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, and coerced labor. In 2007, the most intense controversy has pitted the Ministry of Education against the residents and government of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. The issue exploded in March 2007 with the announcement that all references to military coercion in the compulsory mass suicides (shudan jiketsu) of Okinawan residents during the Battle of Okinawa were to be eliminated. The announcement triggered a wave of anger across Okinawan society leading to the mass demonstration in Ginowan City of 110,000 Okinawans addressed by the top leadership of the Prefecture. It was the largest demonstration since the 1972 reversion of Okinawa, exceeding even the response to the 1995 rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl by three US GIs.

Ines de Jesus was a young girl during World War II when she was forced to become a sex slave, or “comfort woman,” for Japanese troops in the then Portuguese colony of East Timor.

By day, de Jesus carried out various kinds of menial labor, and each night was raped by between four to eight Japanese soldiers at a so-called comfort station in Oat village in the western province of Bobonaro.

Greene's article explores more deeply the health dangers facing people exposed to long-term low dosages of radiation, as is inevitable for those near the Fukushima plant. An English professor, Greene developed interested in the health effects of low-level radiation when she authored a biography of the late epidemiologist Alice Stewart, who pioneered research in that field. Greene contends that the global media is downplaying these dangers, and she presents alternate studies that show that exposure to radiation following the Chernobyl disaster caused many medical problems. These extend beyond cancer; every human body system is harmed. She argues the pro-nuclear media in Japan is reluctant to connect Fukushima to Chernobyl because doing so would dampen enthusiasm for building new nuclear plants. The misinformation will exacerbate the dangers for Fukushima residents who may follow their government's lead and conclude that it is medically safe to stay there. Most at risk are fetuses and children, on whom the effects of radiation are much more severe.

[Tsuneishi Keiichi of Kanagawa University had already been unearthing secrets about Japan's biological warfare (BW) program for a quarter century when he made a vital discovery about Unit 731 in summer 2005. The two memoranda he discovered from July 1947 were written by Brig. Gen. Charles Willoughby, head of GHQ's intelligence unit during the American Occupation, and found in the U.S. National Archives. The documents shed new light on GHQ's carrot-and-stick method of obtaining BW data at the outset of the Cold War as the arms race against the Soviet Union heated up. The Americans offered the Japanese scientists far more carrots—in the form of cash payments and other rewards as well as immunity from prosecution—than was previously understood.

Domestic mass murder on a large scale is always the work of the state, at the hands of its own soldiery, police and gangsters, and/or ideological mobilization of allied civilian groups. The worst cases in the post-World War 11 era - Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Liberia, China, East Pakistan, East Timor, and Indonesia - show much the same bloody manipulations. It is equally the case that the killer regimes do not announce publicly the huge numbers killed, and rarely boast about themassacres, let alone the tortures that usually accompany them. They like to create a set of public euphemismsendlesslycirculated through state-controlled mass media. In the age of the UN, to which almost all nation-states belong, in the time of Amnesty International and its uncountable NGO children and grandchildren, in the epoch of globalization and the internet, there are naturally worries about ‘face,’ interventions, embargos, ostracism, and UN-ish investigations. No less important are domestic considerations. National militaries are supposed heroically to defend the nation against foreign enemies, not slaughter their fellow-citizens. Police are supposed to uphold the law. Above all, there is need for political ‘stability,’ one element of which is that killing should not get out of control, and that amateur civilian killers should be quietly assured that ‘it's over’ and that no one will be punished.

More than 2 million people were killed during the Korean War. The casualties included not only military personnel but also innocent civilians. Few are aware that the Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The official records of government, military and police, as well as survivor testimonies, reveal that mass killings committed by South Korean and U.N forces occurred before and during the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953). These incidents may be categorized into four types.

There are now three Tohokus … and there have been since the afternoon of March 11, 2011.

One part of that region of northeastern Honshu comprises districts not directly affected by that day's Great East Japan Earthquake or the huge tsunami it triggered. A second is the coastal areas that were inundated or destroyed. The third is the towns and villages in Fukushima Prefecture affected by radioactive contamination from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

I delivered the following remarks at an antiNATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. I was the only North American speaker at an all-day conference, having been invited in connection with the appearance into Russian of my book Drugs, Oil, and War. As a former diplomat worried about peace I was happy to attend: as far as I can tell there may be less serious dialogue today between Russian and American intellectuals than there was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the danger of war involving the two leading nuclear powers has hardly disappeared.

On April 8, 2009, pirates attacked a US-flagged cargo vessel, the Maersk Alabama, about five hundred kilometers off the Somali coast. The ship, which carried a crew of twenty US nationals, including their now famous captain Richard Phillips, was on its way to Mombassa in Kenya with a cargo of soya, maize and cooking oil destined for the UN World Food Program. In the early hours of the morning, a group of four teenage gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles, the ubiquitous tools of African conflict, boarded the 17,000 tonne ship using grappling hooks. When the unarmed but well-trained crew put up stiff resistance, the pirates were forced to retreat to one of the Maersk Alabama's lifeboats, taking with them Captain Phillips as a hostage. He was subsequently rescued five days later when US navy snipers aboard the USS Bainbridge shot dead three of the pirates and captured the fourth alive.

From Washington to New Delhi, Caracas to Moscow and Beijing, national leaders and corporate executives are stepping up their efforts to gain control over major sources of oil and natural gas as the global struggle for energy intensifies. Never has the competitive pursuit of untapped oil and gas reserves been so acute, and never has so much money as well as diplomatic and military muscle been deployed in the contest to win control over major foreign stockpiles of energy. To an unprecedented degree, a government's success or failure in these endeavors is being treated as headline news, and provoking public outcry when a rival power is seen as benefiting unfairly from a particular transaction. With the officials of numerous governments coming under mounting pressure to satisfy the needs of their individual countries – at whatever cost -the battle for energy can only become more inflamed in the years ahead.

The leaders of South and North Korea have met. The meeting had been formally delayed since the summer because of serious flooding in the North – but in fact both sides had to wait six years for this opportunity.

The two Korean heads of state met for the first time in June 2000 in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il, leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), was supposed to reciprocate by visiting Seoul, but he never did. Now he has succeeded in having a South Korean president visit his capital again.

Sociologist John Lie has written extensively on multiculturalism in Japan and elsewhere. He authored two books on Zainichi Koreans in 2008, and this article is adapted from a chapter in Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity. His other book is Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, which he edited with Sonia Ryang, whose article is also included in this course reader.

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.

Migrant-support activists have comprised a major voice to contest the state-endorsed narrative that presents migrants as a crime threat to Japanese society. This paper investigates the discursive and organizational construction of their challenge against this discourse. It argues that the autonomy and expertise of migrant-support NGOs enable them to challenge the state and create the basis for their modest yet significant political impact.

Tokyo is crawling unsteadily back on its feet. Its buildings are intact, its vast transport network is creaking back to life, cellphones work again, patchily. Planes land in the main international airports but traffic crawls through the streets.

Indonesia since the fall of Suharto in 1998 under reformasi remains subject to powerful tendencies for disintegrasi—both province-based “separatism” and general socio-political decay. These tendencies are greatly aggravated by the failure of democratically elected presidents and parliaments to effectively tackle endemic corruption or reform the armed forces, which continue to enjoy near-total immunity as a major practitioner, guarantor and enforcer of corrupt business practice and extortion. This article notes the activism of civil society and liberal media on the corruption issue and the commendable new array of anti-corruption institutions. But it argues that reform efforts have been virtually nullified by broad collusion of Indonesia's political, bureaucratic, military and business elites in sustaining—while “democratizing” and decentralizing—the system of corruption inherited from Suharto. The reform effort is now subject to political stasis or gridlock induced by money politics. Some reformers believe that politics in Indonesia has been effectively replaced by “transactions”. In arguing that “KKN” “ruins everything”—people's well-being, investment prospects, government budgets and development planning, democratic politics, the justice sector (including its corruption-fighting capacities), military professionalism, the environment and more—the author is serious. The article suggests that real change must await new social and political constellations and struggles initiated outside the parliamentary arena.

Japan's tragic March 11 earthquake, tsunami and its continuing nuclear crisis struck in the midst of the world's unfolding financial, economic, environmental and energy crises. The Fukushima Shock is drastically reshaping Japan's energy policy and politics. This opportunity for change is being seized by a rapidly expanding coalition of large Japanese and foreign firms, small and medium businesses, subnational governments, farmers, NPOs, and others. Their interests are united and focused by the feed-in tariff policy championed by former PM Kan Naoto. They are further channeled and reinforced by the YEN 23 trillion commitment for the 10-year rebuild of Tohoku, a project committed to renewables and smart-city infrastructure. Meanwhile, Japan's central government is adrift, its fiscal and regulatory tools blunted by a continuing rearguard action to undermine renewables and keep nuclear as the main pillar of Japan's power economy. The clash between contending energy regimes is being played out at the international level as well, and remains very fluid and difficult to predict. What is certain is that it involves strikingly different political coalitions and implies equally contrasting infrastructure choices, institutions and ideas. In Japan, the challenge is whether to protect a monopolized, centralized, expensive, and probably cul de sac power economy or opt to innovate a potentially world-beating decentralized smart-power economy. The evidence suggests Japan risks forfeiting an historic opportunity if renewable power generation does not become the main pillar of an emerging, smart power economy.

Japanese migrant policy prioritizes immigration control over migrant rights and welfare, which has clear consequences for migrant healthcare. A literature review and interviews of migrant healthcare advocates revealed that disadvantaged migrant groups have poor health and face barriers in accessing mainstream healthcare, particularly for emergency, HIV/AIDS and maternal and child care. Advocates fashion a provisional safety net from existing policies to connect migrants with essential care, but this approach is of limited effectiveness. Policy solutions and relevant advocate opinion are considered in light of the failure of existing policies to meet uninsured migrants' healthcare needs.