Over the past three years, much of the Japanese public and many students of its political economy have grown used to being disappointed by the Koizumi style of reform. Koizumi came to office through internal party selection on April 26, 2001, his candidacy largely driven by the desperation of local Liberal Democratic Party chapters facing defeat in Upper House elections. Koizumi was supposed to be the Japanese equivalent of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and in his first year became akin to a rock star for his willingness to talk about as well as take on taboos and sacred cows. His talk of painful fiscal and economic reform would have scared off electors in any other society not gripped by a sense of foreboding and the need for drastic change.

China's rapid economic expansion has impressed the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century China has become the third largest importing as well as exporting country, the fourth largest economy in the world (after the United States, Japan and Germany), and one of the top three destinations of foreign direct investment. The figures of its increasing world export market share in the period of 1985 to 2000 show that China has profited more from globalization than any other country. China achieved an average annual export growth of 4.5 percent, while the second and third country on this list achieved no more than 1.8 percent (the United States) and 1.1 percent (Korea). Its annual growth of real GDP from 1980 to 2000 was even more spectacular with an average of 10 percent. Over this period developing countries on average only grew 3 percent, and the average growth of the rest of Asia was 4.5 percent (UNCTAD, 2005b, 2004, 2003, 2002b).

On the morning of August 26, 2008, aid worker Ito Kazuya arrived at work as usual. Four armed men suddenly appeared and abducted him. Local people witnessed the abduction, and a force of policemen and villagers gave chase into the mountains above north of the village of Bodyalai near Dara-e-Noor, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. The result was a tragedy: Ito was shot three times in the leg and once in the left thigh. On the morning following the abduction, his body was found by the local people: Ito had bled to death.

Will the current crisis in Kyrgyzstan lead to greater instability, and perhaps an expansion of the current conflict in Central Asia? There are good reasons to be concerned. Deep forces, not adequately understood, are at work there; and these forces have repeatedly led to major warfare in the past.

The pattern of events unfolding in Kyrgyzstan is ominously reminiscent of how America became involved in Laos in the 1960s, and later in Afghanistan in the 1980s. American covert involvement in those countries soon led to civil wars producing numerous casualties and refugees. It will take strenuous leadership from both Obama in Washington and Medvedev in Moscow to prevent a third major conflict from breaking out in Kyrgyzstan.

The following are edited excerpts of a panel discussion, coordinated by Wakamiya Yoshibumi, chairman of The Asahi Shimbun's editorial board with Amano Yukiya (former Director-General of Arms Control and Scientific Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Asai Motofumi (former diplomat and President, Hiroshima Peace Institute); Choi Sang Yong (South Korean Ambassador to Japan); Kato Koichi, former Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General); Okada Katsuya (leader of the Democratic Party of Japan).

Two reports follow on the vast, and vastly expensive, Tokyo International Conference on African Development designed to showcase Japan's aid to Africa. The conference, held in Yokohama with the presence of 51 of 53 African nations, was attended by 40 Presidents of African nations. The first report by Ramesh Jaura concentrates on the proposed Japanese aid package, as Japan proposes to double both trade and investment in Africa within five years. The second report by the Yomiuri Shimbun's Kawakami Osamu highlights the real stakes for Japan: the effort to outbid China whose burgeoning trade, investment and presence in Africa is a cause of Japanese, and the continued pursuit of the chimera of a Japanese UN security council seat. Neither report mentions either oil and energy or military strategic issues. MS

It is a well-known fact that warfare and obligatory military service system long played decisive role in the formation of modern nation-states, first in Europe and later elsewhere in the world. While externally the military prowess of a given state was (and still is) decisive for defining its place in a competitive international system explicitly based upon an equilibrium of military force and hegemonic interstate relations,1 internally conscription-based national armies formerly served as main pillars of the state, linking conscript-age able-bodied males with the nationalist ethos1 and acculturating them to views and practices often referred to as “militarized masculinity culture”. “Militarized masculinity”, both in the conscription states and in states possessing large-scale military but relying upon a volunteer force in peacetime, usually involves both a gendered view of the world in which the able-bodied man, the “defender of the fatherland”, was unconditionally privileged over women, defined either as sexualized objects or as child-rearing “mother of the nation”, and a shared feeling of superiority towards men unfit for or unwilling to engage in combat (handicapped, conscientious objectors, etc.).2 Examples of modern states which chose to define their whole able-bodied male citizenry as potential soldiers and use conscription as the primary instrument of “creating nationals”, include revolutionary and post-revolutionary France (which began the history of modern conscription by declaring the levée en masse on August 23, 1793), and the Prussian state, which began introducing French-style conscription practices after suffering a defeat at the hands of Napoleon's conscript army in 1806-1807.3 In more recent times, the state of Israel successfully used a comprehensive conscription system applicable to both men and women. The conscription system inculcated Zionist ideals and the newly-forged Israeli national identity, as well as a siege mentality based upon the imperative of the “national defense” against the demonized Arabic/Muslim world, into the minds of a very heterogeneous body of citizens,4 In South Korea too, as we will see below, conscription provides an ideological fiction of equality, the exclusion of women from the conscription system and, consequently, much more manifestly the “hegemonic masculine” character of the army being an important difference.

This is the first of a three part comprehensive survey of the US-Japan relationship defined by the Ampo Treaty of 1960, and refined subsequently in ways that have deepened Japanese and Okinawan subordination to American global power and ambitions. The article focuses on questions pertaining to the legacy of Article Nine of the Constitution, and to Okinawa and base relations as a template for exploring the troubled Ampo relationship, including the powerful and sustained Okinawan resistance to US base expansion.

On the east coast of the Malay Peninsula between Mersing and Endau, a few kilometers in from the silvery beaches along the South China Sea, one comes to Kampong Hubong. It is still and hot here. Isolated. Rice fields lie fallow. Coconut palms, bougainvillea, hibiscus, and tall grasses tumble together in the fields. Small buildings of stucco and timber, gone grey with age and monsoon rains, line one side of a short paved street. A couple of Chinese men sit in the shade of the shophouses. They yak in the Hokkien dialect. A red dog yawns.

This article provides an unusual corporate perspective on nuclear power from SON Masayoshi, the CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese telecommunications company. The Fukushima disaster led him to oppose nuclear power and take up the cause of renewable energy. Son's stance is especially significant because he has broken with the rest of big business in Japan, leaving the “nuclear village” behind.

Son discusses some of the inadequacies of government and corporations revealed by the Fukushima disaster, such as the inadequacy of cellphone networks, a technological failure that made it difficult to provide immediate relief. Even more troubling, he says, TEPCO and the Japanese government deliberately spread misinformation, a moral failure that certainly endangered many citizens. After criticizing his own firm, TEPCO, and the government, Son explains that he launched a website to help coordinate recovery efforts following the 3/11 earthquake, and he established the Renewable Energy Foundation, which pushes the government to adopt policies favorable to renewable energy. He argues that nuclear power is not a sustainable option on financial grounds either; the Fukushima disaster, costing both lives and money, proved that nuclear power is too expensive and should be phased out. Even without the added costs of recovery from disasters, nuclear power is actually three times more expensive than commonly believed. Son had heard repeatedly that the unit cost of nuclear power is 5-6 yen for each kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy produced, but he recently examined the official figures and was surprised to see a pre-accident unit cost of 15-20 yen/kWh. Son therefore urges the Japanese government to adopt a pro-renewable energy policy, particularly focusing on solar power.

Popular culture has long been an important tool used by the Japanese government and energy companies to promote nuclear power. In the two months since the 3.11 quake and the beginning of the Fukushima crisis, Japanese netizens have circulated key examples as a reminder of past propaganda. This 1993 video “Our Reliable Friend Pluto” was produced by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, a group associated with the Japanese government. In it, a cute cartoon stand-in for radioactive element plutonium tells children that not a single case of cancer can be traced to him and that he is even safe to drink!

One year after media reports that Aso Mining used 300 Allied prisoners of war for forced labor in 1945, Foreign Minister Aso Taro is refusing to confirm that POWs dug coal for his family's company—and even challenging reporters to produce evidence.

That is not hard to do. Records produced by both Aso Mining and the Japanese government clearly show that POWs toiled at the Aso Yoshikuma mine in Fukuoka Prefecture.

[This is the third in a series of articles on Japanese policy toward the Middle East that debates the appropriate framework for unraveling issues of Japan-oil- and the United States in Middle East perspective. See earlier contributions by Raquel Shaoul and John de Boer.]

Dr. John de Boer in his article, “Gauging Japan's Role in the Middle East” (Japan Focus Sep. 6, 2005) portrays Japanese involvement in the Middle East, as characterized by a “multidimensional presence”. In his article De Boer claims that “at various points in time, Japan has had a relatively high political profile in the region and its people/institutions have demonstrated an active commitment to a variety of important causes in the Middle East”, illustrated by examples dated from 1904-5 to the present. He concludes, “Gauging Japan's overall involvement in the region makes clear that Japan and the Japanese did not simply become active in the Middle East with the Madrid Peace Process of 1991. Japan has contributed to the “peace process” on a variety of levels since the 1950s and its presence continues to be felt throughout the Middle East”. A major difficulty emerges from this thesis: its failure to differentiate between Japan's political involvement and her political commitment in the Middle East over the years.

Do they still require schoolchildren to memorize Miyazawa Kenji's poem Ame ni mo makezu? I ask my young friend Donald Howard who is teaching English in Iwate, where his wife Saori is from. Donald and Saori had also visited the Miyazawa Memorial Museum for me a few years earlier, when they still lived in New York, and brought back a CD of Kenji's musical compositions orchestrated and sung. After checking with a couple of teachers, Donald responds: Yes, they do.

I asked because, though I myself do not remember ever being required to memorize the poem in school during the 1950s, I've learned the requirement was in force in some places, at various times. And if it still is, it must be in Iwate, I thought, where Kenji was born, in 1896, grew up, spent most of his life, and died, in 1933. I learned, years ago, its extracurricular popularity, as it were: it appears on all sorts of souvenirs – towels, mugs, fans, etc. – made and sold in Iwate, especially in Hanamaki, Kenji's birthplace. It is also, I learned, the most revered poem in twentieth-century Japan.

TEZUKA Osamu (1928-1989) was one of the most important manga writers in Japan; his contribution to the popularization of manga and anime cannot be overstated. Tezuka's handling of the confrontation and reconciliation between human and machine, and his vision of humanity with a global perspective, for example, have fascinated many readers both domestically and internationally. Following his creation of a human robot character, Astro Boy (1951), Tezuka frequently wrote about the various impacts of science and technology on humanity. As Tanaka explains, Tezuka witnessed the destructive consequences brought about by the particular use of science and technology during the U.S. bombings of Japan during WWII, which in turn motivated him to explore themes such as war, peace, and humanity in his works. This essay introduces Tezuka's family background and his upbringing, and discusses how his history and personal experience of the war influenced him in the creation of manga heroes and narratives that are closely connected to real-world problems, such as the Vietnam War and nuclear issues. Focusing on Tezuka's early works, the author analyzes some of the most representative manga expressing the artist's observations and ideas about war and peace, as well as his imagination of the future.

In 1928, at the age of one and a half years, Elizabeth van Kampen, daughter of a Dutch plantation manager, arrived with her parents in Sumatra in the former Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia), a land which she evokes from childhood memory as “paradise on earth.” But the attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941, when she was fourteen, was quickly followed by Japanese invasion of the Dutch colony and the nightmare to follow.

Elizabeth and her family experienced extraordinary times between two empires, that of Holland in Asia at the end of a 400-year epoch, and that of a rising militarist Japan. The following images convey a sense of a range of experiences of plantation life through the lens of the Dutch planters.

Three months before he became Prime Minister, in July 2006 Abe Shinzo published his political manifesto, under the title Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a beautiful country). It is well known that Abe's sense of beauty involves a denial of the darkest aspects of wartime history and insistence on compulsory love of country, and that he is committed to revision of the country's basic institutions accordingly. But the fundamental changes in the country's military posture, and especially in its relationship with the United States, have received less attention. Here we consider evidence of a new domestic role for the Self Defense Forces (SDF) as enforcer of unpopular policies, and the implications of a new law to facilitate US military reorganization. Okinawa is at the center of both.