[This is an updated report on the attempt to secure redress for Chinese wartime forced labor following the March 29 verdict issued by the Fukuoka District Court.]

Chinese forced laborers have been waiting for a verdict for sixty years. They received it on March 29. The Fukuoka District Court judge announced the ruling-all claims rejected—and left the packed courtroom in less than one minute. Forty-five Chinese survivors of forced labor in wartime Japan, ranging in age from 74 to 91, had been seeking individual compensation of around $200,000 and a published apology from the Japanese government, Mitsubishi Materials Corp. and Mitsui Mining Corp.

KOODANKULAM, Tamil Nadu—Even as the Indian government gropes in the dark for a coherent policy on energy and the environment, it is pressing hard for a highly unpopular nuclear power project here, close to the peninsula's southern tip.

The project, which involves building six Russian-designed reactors of 1,000 Megawatt (Mw) capacity each, will be India's biggest nuclear power station.

On 12 April, 1996, Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro and US ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale announced agreement upon the return of the US Futenma Marine Corps Air Station facilities, situated in the city of Ginowan in Okinawa prefecture, to Japan within five to seven years. This surprise declaration was the jewel in the crown of the two governments attempts to quell the surge of anti-US base sentiment that had swept the island prefecture since the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three US soldiers the previous year. It came just days prior to the arrival of then US President Clinton to Japan and the reaffirmation of the US-Japan Security Treaty.

Amid intensifying rivalry between Tokyo and Beijing over influence in Asia, Japan is revving up its drive to strengthen relations with countries in Indochina, an economically backward but geopolitically important part of the region.

The target countries are Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which are collectively referred to as the “CLV” countries. To be sure, these countries are all relatively small in terms of economic size and represent a tiny fraction of East Asia's economy.

In 2008 and 2009, a series of historical issues once again defined the public space of Japanese-South Korean and Japanese-Chinese relations: the revisionist essay of General Tamogami Toshio; Prime Minister Aso Taro's acknowledgement of the use of slave labor in his family's wartime mine; new flare-ups in the longstanding territorial disputes over the Senkaku/Diaoyu and Takeshima/Dokdo islets; ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine; and Japanese government approval of another amnesiac history textbook whitewashing Japan's World War II aggression.

Giovanni Arrighi, an authority on the political economy and geopolitics of world social change, here reflects comparatively on states and markets East and West at the dawn of capitalism. Ranging widely across Smith, Marx, Weber and Braudel, he assesses the logic and interplay of China's tribute trade system and Europe's emerging capitalism. This article draws on and extends a chapter from his new book, Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, which looks across the last five hundred years to consider the emerging position of East Asia in an epoch that marks the end of US hegemony. MS

United States presidents rarely visit the U.S. territory of Guam (or Guåhan in the Chamorro language), but President Obama may visit in June 2010. This will be a significant stop for residents of this small island, 30 miles long and eight miles wide, dubbed, “Where America's day begins.” Guam is the southern-most island in the Northern Mariana chain that also includes Rota, Tinian, and Saipan. It is the homeland of indigenous Chamorro people whose ancestors first came to the islands nearly 4,000 years ago. Formed from two volcanoes, Guam's rocky core now constitutes an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the United States military in the words of Brig. Gen. Douglas H. Owens, a former commanding officer of Guam's Andersen Air Force Base.

Japan has had a love-hate relationship with its outlaws. Medieval seafaring bands freelanced as mercenaries for the warlords or provided security for trading vessels; when not needed they were hunted as pirates. Horse-thieves and mounted raiders sold their skills to military households in return for a degree of tolerance toward their banditry. In the 1600s urban street gangs policed their own neighborhoods while fighting with samurai in the service of the Shogun. Feudal lords paid gang bosses to supply day laborers for construction projects.

While Weathers highlights structural issues facing working women more generally in Japan, Chisa Fujiwara focuses specifically on the plight of single mothers. Fujiwara analyzes the intersections between gender and class in Japan, especially with regard to factors inhibiting single mothers from achieving self-sufficiency. The author aptly notes that in most studies of Japanese society, poverty and social class receive little to no attention. This oversight may result from assumptions that Japan is an affluent, homogeneous nation with a large comfortable middle class and no poverty. Fujiwara explains that 90% of the Japanese population self-identifies with this “middle class myth.” However, she demonstrates that the everyday realities of many individuals, including single mothers, present a challenge to this constructed notion. Along with ethnic and racial diversity, Japan features a far greater spectrum of socio-economic class differences than is often recognized.

Three years have passed since the birth of the Koizumi Cabinet. While the Cabinet has been preoccupied with such Koizumi reforms as the privatization of postal services, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has changed character. In discussions over constitutional revision and security policy, it has set a course of prioritizing the state over the individual and abandoning the emphasis on “light armament and prioritizing the economy” that was initiated shortly after the end of the war by Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and was long the heart of LDP politics.

In his remarks to the Australian parliament on November 17, President Obama declared that the U. S. was making the Asia-Pacific region a top priority. While promising a continued U.S. military presence in the region, Obama also expressed his intention to strengthen U.S.-China cooperation. This declaration, however, was made at the same time as Obama announced a series of anti-China measures: to station U.S. forces permanently in Australia for the first time, to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a multilateral trade agreement that excludes China – and to discuss the South China Sea Islands at the ASEAN summit, to Beijing's displeasure. Therefore, the Japanese media view Obama's emphasis on Asia as strengthening an anti-China containment ring.

“If we do not hear from you within one week, we will take it that you have consented without objection.”

This is the single cover page sent from the company to a labor union formed by employees of an elder care service company in Tokyo last November, together with employment rules totaling about 50 pages. It was a request for opinions as the company was revising its work rules.

This article examines the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship, on March 26 2010. Known as the Cheonan incident, it resulted in the deaths of 46 seamen and gave rise to subsequent political developments that provide a barometer of the current status and future prospects of Korea's democracy and of North-South relations. From a military perspective, the incident involved a serious breach of national security for the ship sank near the northern maritime border with North Korea.

With “history's bloodiest century” growing distant, twenty-first century scholars have become preoccupied with the fraught moral and political dimensions of memory. ‘Memory wars’ have become commonplace in discussions over postwar compensation or in anxious debates over national identity in an era of shifting geopolitical realities. In East Asia, one only needs to look at the sore points of Korean- Japanese relations—contested sovereignty over the Dokdo islands, textbook treatments, questions of official visits to the Yasukuni shrine—to realize the centrality of memory in articulating deeply divergent national narratives.

Despite the description of the March 11, 2011 disaster as “outside safety expectations”, there were multiple warnings from Japanese scientists, writers, activists, and international bodies that a large earthquake and tsunami could cripple Japan's nuclear plants. This article examines how assumptions of nuclear safety remained strong in Japan from the 1950s until the 2000s, even after numerous accidents that demonstrated inadequate oversight, and ties these assumptions to technological nationalism at the heart of Japan's conservative political culture.

Japan is revving up its drive toward free-trade agreements, or FTAs, with trading partners, largely fueled by an intensifying rivalry with China, a rapidly ascendant economic as well as military power.

As the World Trade Organization's trade talks falter, countries all over the world are pursuing their own separate FTAs with trading partners. Bilateral or regional integrations, especially in the form of FTAs, have popped up all over the world since the early 1990s. They include the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the European Union (EU) and Mercosur, a Latin American customs union initially comprised of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguy and Uruguay. In East Asia, too, many countries are now competing for FTAs with trading partners in and outside the region.

There are dozens of brilliant war photographers, but there is only one Yoshito Matsushige.

For many years, Matsushige, 92, worked for a major metro daily called Chugoku Shimbun. He may not have been the greatest war photographer ever but he is unique: he took the only photographs in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was detonated over the city, killing 150,000 people.

During a visit to Fukushima Daiichi in September, Abe Shinzo told workers: “the future of Japan rests on your shoulders. I am counting on you.”

The prime minister's exhortation was directed at almost 6,000 technicians and engineers, truck drivers and builders who, almost three years after the plant suffered a triple meltdown, remain on the frontline of the world's most hazardous industrial cleanup.

This paper analyzes Japan's concerns, as well as its prioritization and leverage points, in multilateral negotiations on North Korea's nuclear programme within the Six-Party Talks. It argues that Japan has deliberately taken an obstructionist stance in multilateral negotiations and that three issues are relevant to understanding Japan's actions: Japan's close relations with the US, its preference for economic rather than political diplomacy, and the dominance of single-issue politics influenced by domestic political considerations. In the Six-Party Talks, Japan has played a largely circumstantial role in the practical sense while being a powerful spoiler in broader, strategic terms. Tokyo wants a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and a stable neighbour, but a Six-Party Talks solution – which would enhance China's standing – is in itself not a priority. Moreover, Pyongyang provides a welcome justification to the Japanese government for the enhancement of its security capabilities. Japanese interests are well served by retaining the status quo, which explains why Tokyo consciously adopted the role of spoiler. After the Bush administration removed North Korea from its list of terrorism sponsoring states, this position appears no longer sustainable.

The year 2005 has particular significance for Koreans concerning Japan: it is the 100th anniversary of the 1905 protectorate treaty (or Ulsa Treaty) which led to Korea's formal colonization by Japan in 1910. It is also the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Korea from colonial rule and it is the 40th anniversary of the normalization treaty of 1965. The year 2005 has also seen a distinct rise in anti-Japanese sentiments in South Korea. In March, angry swells of South Koreans protested at the Japanese Embassy, burning the flag of the Rising Sun, and expressing emotions so deep that some demonstrators cut off parts of their fingers. Riot police blocked a group of anti-Japanese demonstrators from blowing up a propane gas tank at the embassy gates. Citizens groups called for a boycott of Japanese goods, and at several golf courses, Japanese players were no longer welcome.