Japanese prosecutors find themselves in the dock for abuses of power involving a number of high profile cases that have drawn considerable media attention in recent years. More than ever, the Japanese public is aware of the extent of prosecutors' power and how this jeopardizes justice. Until recently, prosecutors' post-WWII public reputation was relatively positive, and they were widely viewed as paragons of trust and propriety who had largely overcome the negative images stemming from their wartime role as tools of state oppression against critics and dissidents. This does not mean that Japan's procuracy has lacked critics both at home and abroad, but only recently has the positive public image come under sustained fire. The media is drawing unprecedented public attention to the ways and means of prosecutors and detailing their resort to unscrupulous methods in order to maintain their chilling 99% conviction rate.

Lee Keun-mok, a Korean former labor conscript who was forcibly taken to Hiroshima and became an atomic bomb victim at the end of the Asia-Pacific War, died last July at the age of 87. Lee was a plaintiff in a lawsuit claiming it was illegal for hibakusha living outside Japan to be excluded from benefits under the national Atomic Bomb Survivors’ Support Law. The Japan Supreme Court agreed with Lee's position in November 2007. One month before his death in South Korea, Lee filed a new lawsuit with the Osaka District Court seeking the same payments for medical expenses that hibakusha living in Japan receive. We retrace the path of Lee's struggles.

After checking them against a list of prize-winning numbers, a family member of tender age handed me my New Year cards, informing me that I had won three sheets of post-office stamps. One of the cards was from Rui. I read it again: “I am leaving the hospital as I reach retirement age; I plan to enjoy the afternoon tea time of life.” “Now I finally know your age. Bravo,” I said. I had said the same thing on first reading the card that New Year's morning.

The governments of both mainland China and of Taiwan have turned their civilisation’ into a national heritage, in different but often converging ways. But civilisation was transmitted before without its being a tradition’ (chuantong) or a material and non-material heritage in the UNESCO-speak that prevails. Sinocentric views of civilisation speak a language of national pride and exaggeration of longevity and continuity, just as do Eurocentric and other nationalist views of their civilisations. All these claims need to be taken with at least pinches of salt. This article will be a handful of salt. Taking a more dispassionate and distanced concept of civilisation, which most importantly does not judge from the standpoint of any one civilisation and certainly not just from a civilisational elite in pronouncing what is and is not civilised but includes all ranks in a civilisational hierarchy as subjects of that civilisation and of aspirations within it, I shall seek answers to what has happened to civilisation in China under its present government. I will focus on the People's Republic of China.

Tehran - Speaking of business as unusual. A mere two months ago, the news of a China- Kazakhstan pipeline agreement, worth US$3.5 billion, raised some eyebrows in the world press, some hinting that China's economic foreign policy may be on the verge of a new leap forward. A clue to the fact that such anticipation may have totally understated the case was last week's signing of a mega-gas deal between Beijing and Tehran worth $100 billion. Billed as the “deal of the century” by various commentators, this agreement is likely to increase by another $50 to $100 billion, bringing the total close to $200 billion, when a similar oil agreement, currently being negotiated, is inked not too far from now.

With Japan and its neighbors still at odds over history, German freelance journalist Gebhard Hielscher says Tokyo should take bold measures to clarify that it has atoned for its wartime aggression.

The former Far East correspondent for the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung proposes that Japan follow Germany's lead and come up with legislation that offers compensation to individuals that suffered under its wartime policies, even if only a token sum. Hielscher says Japan must also conduct joint historical research with its neighbors, as Germany did, so that all sides can at least learn to accept one another's different perceptions.

As the United States gears up for an attack on Iran, one thing is certain: the Bush administration will never mention oil as a reason for going to war. As in the case of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be cited as the principal justification for an American assault. “We will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon [by Iran],” is the way President Bush put it in a much-quoted 2003 statement. But just as the failure to discover illicit weapons in Iraq undermined the administration's use of WMD as the paramount reason for its invasion, so its claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism. More important, any serious assessment of Iran's strategic importance to the United States should focus on its role in the global energy equation.

This paper explores conflicting representations of Japanese fishing practices in a joint venture company in the Pacific. Western and Islander representations frequently included suspicions that Japanese management was cheating their local partner and engaging in illegal and ecologically destructive fishing practices. In contrast, Japanese self-identified as as socially and ecologically responsible in contrast to the callous disregard for employment security and destructive industrial fishing methods used by Americans. Analysis of these different perspectives shows underlying conflict about whose development assistance is best, with Islander perspectives demonstrating postcolonial reactions to their continued subordination in the world system.

The past is haunting Northeast Asia. The China-Japan-Korea triad has been on a repeated collision course over how each perceives the shared past. Bound by dense memory webs, cultural affinity and geographical proximity, each of the three nations has made conflicting historical claims against the other, giving rise to conflict throughout the region and beyond.

China, Japan, and Korea constitute the core of the Northeast Asian “community.” According to Robert Nisbet, “community” encompasses “religion, work, family, and culture; it refers to social bonds characterized by emotional cohesion, depth, continuity, and fullness.” No community, however, can be totally unified; indeed, national communities can contain antagonistic elements, and the members of a community are not necessarily content with one another. The community of China, Japan, and Korea, like many a marriage, is charged with intense but coexisting feelings of interdependence and conflict, of love and hate.

The challenges of nuclear proliferation, conflict and terrorism, poverty and inequality, climate change and the deteriorating environment, are inextricably linked in our current world, and can only be tackled by a broad and unified effort to achieve peace in its fullest sense. Yet the perception of peace is much less vivid in popular imagination than that of war, and the growing body of serious peace studies is less accessible than it should be. Peace is often written off - especially by war historians - as a difficult concept to define, as a dull subject compared to war, or simply as ‘the absence of war’, a mere interval between wars which are claimed to be the driving motor of history. In my new book, The Glorious Art of Peace: From the Iliad to Iraq, I argue to the contrary that from ancient times onwards there has been a rich discourse about the meaning of peace and how to secure it, that there is a wealth of ideas and debate which continues to be relevant, and that The Art of Peace is as complex as the Art of War. Human civilisation could not have developed without long periods of productive peace, which have allowed for the emergence of stable agriculture, the growth of urban society, and the expansion of peaceful trade and intercourse between societies. Peace, as the great humanist thinker Erasmus (1466-1536) put it, is ‘the mother and nurse of all that is good for man’.

The seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko (presently Emeritus Professor at Kobe University) predicted that a nuclear power plant accident like the present one was possible, and issued warnings from the late ‘90s. People had been warning of the danger of earthquake-caused nuclear accidents since the 1970s, but Ishibashi, from the specialized standpoint of seismology, proposed a new concept, which he called genpatsu shinsai [Translator's note: this expression literally means Nuclear-Power-Plant-Earthquake Disaster. As there is no English expression for this (the phenomenon itself is new) in this work we will render it as genpatsu shinsai syndrome.]. By this he meant a situation in which, as the damage from the earthquake widens, the situation is made doubly worse by nuclear radiation damage. It was in the hope of preventing this that he was issuing warnings. Ishibashi wrote many books on this, including Daichidouran no Jidai (The Age of Shifting Earth) (Iwanami Shinsho) and he is a very well-known scholar, so it is impossible that his warnings were unknown to the officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

In recent years, the G8 Summit has gone beyond being simply a gathering of world political leaders. The Summit is an occasion for a wide variety of NGOs, activists and civic groups from across the globe to congregate and discuss a multitude of issues. When the location of the 2008 G8 Summit was announced, it was clear that the environment would be a key theme under discussion. As the Hokkaido Toyako Summit (7-9 July 2008) drew closer, rising fuel and food prices and their devastating effects, particularly on the world's poorest people, became an important part of the agenda, too.

So wide-ranging are 71-year-old Inoue Hisashi ‘s talents and activities - including playwright, director, novelist, public intellectual and activist, that it is difficult to know which to focus on at the expense of others.

Inoue not only writes plays regularly for numerous theaters in Japan, but his own Komatsu-za company that he founded in 1983, and which only stages his plays, is constantly touring the country. He is also a prolific best selling novelist and has been president of the prestigious Nihon Pen Club since 2003 – as well as being director of Nihon Gekisakka Kyokai (Japan Playwrights Association), director of Sendai Literature Museum and the director of a library of his own collection of books in his small hometown of Higashi Okitama-gun in rural Yamagata Prefecture.

It may seem improbable that a regional cooperation organization commences its annual summit against the backdrop of military exercises. The European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the Organization of Latin American States - none of them has ever done that.

This paper examines how South Korean understanding of what it means to be—or to have been—a citizen of the DPRK has evolved during the last decade. How does South Korean popular culture reflect that evolution and, in turn, shape ongoing transformations in that understanding? These questions have significant policy implications and take on a heightened salience given the recent deterioration in relations that has taken place under the Lee Myung Bak administration: is the South Korean imagination being enlarged to make room for an inclusive but heterogeneous identity that accepts both parts of the divided nation? Or, conversely, is a hardening of mental boundaries inscribing cultural/social difference in tandem with the previous decade's (anything but linear) progress in political/economic rapprochement? In examining these questions, I sample key discursive sites where the South Korean imaginary expresses itself, including music, advertising, television comedy programs, film and literature.

In the past few years, an increasing number of Private Security Companies (PSCs—sometimes also referred to as Private Military Companies, PMCs [1]) have emerged and are offering and conducting maritime security services in Southeast Asia. These companies offer services in addition to security provided by Southeast Asian states and their government agencies. This paper explores the role of private companies in securing vessels, ports, offshore energy installations and fishing grounds across Southeast Asia, and discusses whether PSCs are an alternative or viable supplement to government efforts to protect national waters, shipping lanes and other maritime assets.

US forces withdrew completely from Ecuador in September 2009. How does the Democratic Party of Japan's coalition administration see the “victory for sovereignty and peace” as it sways between the imperatives of the Okinawan people's will and the US-Japan Alliance with respect to the transfer of the Futenma Base on Okinawa? This is the second in a two part series on US military bases. The first part is Kageyama Asako and Philip Seaton, Marines Go Home: Anti-Base Activism in Okinawa, Japan and Korea

TOKYO - The past week has seen an unprecedented flurry of top-level Japanese diplomacy aimed at ensuring the resource-poor nation's energy security through stable supplies of oil and other resources.

After traveling to the United States for talks with President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo flew on to the oil-rich Middle East, where he visited Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Egypt to strengthen bilateral relations. The trips to the US and the Middle East were both his first since assuming office last September. Abe returned to Tokyo on Thursday.

For several weeks of the extraordinarily hot summer of 2010, Japan was embroiled in a stand-off between Prime Minister Kan Naoto, representing fiscal austerity, and Ozawa Ichiro, representing more spendthrift Keynesianism. Both sought the presidency of the DPJ in the September 14th party elections, with the winner becoming PM. Faced with dismal poll results in advance of the July Upper House elections, Kan was forced to backtrack on his commitment to raise the consumption tax and cut spending in order to balance the budget. But that remained the core of his policy over the long haul, with an immediate 10% cut to all government ministries now back on the table. By contrast, Ozawa preferred to throw money around in order to stimulate Japan's lagging economy and garner votes.