By drawing attention to Iraq and the obvious role oil plays in US policy today, the George W Bush-Dick Cheney administration has done just that: it has drawn the world's energy-deficit powers’ attention firmly to the strategic battle over energy, and especially oil.

This is already having consequences for the global economy in terms of US$75-a-barrel crude-oil price levels. Now it is taking on the dimension of what one former US defense secretary rightly calls a “geopolitical nightmare” for the United States.

A Korean Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (WFZ) may be a necessary condition to achieving the full denuclearization of Korea. As well as providing benefits to the United States in preventing a major direct and wider proliferation threat from North Korea, and to China, Japan and South Korea in maintaining stability in the Northeast Asian Region, it would also serve to address North Korean security concerns about potential US nuclear strikes. The two Koreas have already negotiated a legal basis for a Korean Nuclear Weapon Free Zone in the form of the 1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula. This could form the basis of a NWFZ covering the peninsula. Alternatively, the ROK and Japan could create a Japan Korea NWFZ via a bilateral treaty. This article assesses the prospects for the creation of a NWFZ in the present international climate.

Japan Focus introduction: For more than five decades after the end of the World War II, Japan articulated an official identity as a pacifist, anti-nuclear nation both domestically and in the international arena (its formidable Self Defense Force notwithstanding). Since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, however, the debate over revising Japan's “Peace Constitution” intensified. In particular, Article 9 of the Constitution, by which Japan renounces offensive war, has been under attack by politicians proclaiming the goal of becoming “a normal nation”, and the present Abe administration has prioritized Constitutional revision. Along with politicians and the citizenry, many intellectuals and artists have spoken against the possibility of Japan identifying itself as a “nation that wages war”–thus rejecting its assumed role as advocate of peace and foe of nuclear arms. In June 2004, Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo, along with artists and intellectuals Inoue Hisashi, Komori Yoichi, and Kato Shuichi and others, formed the Article 9 Association, which advocates “protection” or preservation of the present Constitution.

How is it that today in the diverse, multi-ethnic polity of Malaysia (where government figures give a population breakdown of 65% Bumiputra, 26% Chinese and 8% Indian), a single ethnic group completely controls - and occupies virtually all positions in - the judiciary, public administrative organs, the police, the armed forces and increasingly the universities? While Malays constitute a majority of the population of this nation, their presence in all these spheres of power far exceeds their ratio within the general population. How did this situation emerge and how has it evolved?

The images and references to Pearl Harbor seem to be all around us as the anniversary of the attack looms. They are instantly recognizable. But what do they mean?

The analogies came easily after September 11, 2001, when newspaper headlines picked up the cry of “Infamy!” and President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary that “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” As historians who focus on popular memory have insisted, we experience the present through the lens of the past – and we shape our understanding of the past through the lens of the present.

Dolphin and humpback whale are just two of the items on the menu in the fishing village of Taiji where the locals battle Hollywood environmentalists and ‘racist’ foreigners. David McNeill mingles with the suspicious locals and witnesses a clash of cultures. Below, too, see his interview with dolphin trainer turned activist Ric O'Barry.

“Testimony and War Memories in Japan”, comprising two essays and an introduction, brings together a most unlikely pair of Japanese authors: Kurahashi Ayako and Kobayashi Yoshinori. The first essay, “War and Responsibility in a Japanese Family”, is a selection of extracts from Kurahashi Ayako's autobiographical book My Father's Dying Wish (Paulownia Press, 2009). It describes the effects on her and her family of her father's deathbed request: for an apology to be placed on his gravestone for his actions as a military policeman (kempei) in China during World War II. The second essay, “Historiography and War Nationalism in Japan”, is a study of the uses of testimony within Kobayashi Yoshinori's bestselling manga Sensōron, On War (Gentōsha, 1998).

Article summary: In this interview, Asato Ikeda speaks with artists Ken and Julia Yonetani, the creators of uranium art. The Yonetanis share with us emotions that have motivated them to create the uranium art and their interests in Aboriginal stories and worldviews, and in postwar Japanese cultural images of nuclear power and catastrophe.

Is Makoto Aida a misogynist? It seems a fair question. Among his cheerfully scattershot collection at the Mori Art Museum is a series of manga-style paintings called ‘Dog,’ showing naked young women with severed and bandaged limbs being led around on a leash. A 62-minute video depicts the artist tediously masturbating in front of the kanji characters “beautiful young girl.” In “Blender,” he uses more naked girls to make a bloody milkshake. What was the thinking there?

Out in the academic cemetery to which avatars of market fundamentalism thought they had consigned their intellectual and political opponents, one can hear today the unmistakable scrape of coffin lids opening. And climbing out of their graves are the bodies of those who contend that the reductionist assumptions of neo-classical/rational choice orthodoxy are not simply inadequate but flawed in the most fundamental sense.

In September 1951 Japan signed a peace treaty with 48 countries in San Francisco. This postwar peace treaty fell far short of settling outstanding issues at the end of the Pacific War or facilitating a clean start for the “postwar” period. Rather, various aspects of the settlement were left equivocal, and continue to have significant and worrisome implications for regional international relations. The treaty's handling of territorial disposition is a case in point. Close examination of treaty drafts reveals key links between the regional Cold War that was unfolding in 1951 and equivocal language about the designation of territory, which can be related to several contentious frontier problems in the contemporary Asia-Pacific. More than half a century later, the so-called Acheson Line and Containment Line still divide countries of the region, part of a legacy of unresolved problems. The global shift to the postCold War era does not negate the significance of the Cold War origins of these problems. In fact, it is appropriate to pinpoint their common origin and consider solutions in a multilateral context.

I have been thinking about this sort of thing often.

On a Sunday morning, after my night work, before coming home to sleep, I go out to a nearby shopping center and find a father who is about my age, who seems to be enjoying shopping with his wife and child. With men past age thirty, a marriage rush seems to begin like an angry wave. My friends from the past are deciding to marry one by one.

The economic crisis that currently grips the world will have many consequences, not least for the US. A decade ago during the East Asian crisis, the US lectured East Asian elites on the shortcomings of ‘crony capitalism’ and close business relationships. Such claims look bizarrely anachronistic as the US government finds itself having to nationalise or bail-out large chunks of the domestic economy brought low by an inadequately regulated, predatory, but politically-influential financial sector. It is not just that the material significance of the US economy will be diminished as a consequence of this crisis, however, so will its ideational influence and authority. The Washington consensus centered on the dismantling of state regulation and the unfettered working of the market, had few admirers in East Asia even before the current crisis; [1] the current turmoil will further diminish its appeal and make alternatives more attractive. This diminution of the US's overall ideological and economic importance compounded by its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is likely to undermine its influence in East Asia and its standing as both a regional and a global power. One consequence of this process may be to strengthen the attractiveness of exclusively East Asian regional organisations—especially if China's economic development continues to cement its place at the centre of an increasingly integrated regional economy. I suggest that the US's hegemonic influence over East Asia is consequently likely to decline and so is the significance of the ‘Asia-Pacific’ region of which it is notionally a central part.

[Japan's Unit 731 remains central to the fiercely contested China-Japan controversy over war crimes and war memory, and to the international debate on science and ethics. With a staff of more than 10,000, including many of Japan's top medical scientists, 731 and its affiliated units conducted human experiments, including vivisection, on Chinese and other victims in Manchukuo and throughout China between 1933 and 1945. The experiments tested, among other things, the lethality of biological weapons and sought to determine the ability of the human body to survive in the face of various pathogens and in conditions such as extreme cold.

Japan is still struggling to deal with the hugely complex ramifications of the nuclear accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi. While there is often a hope that disasters may act as a major catalyst, following 3/11 it appears that there has been more continuity than change in Japanese politics. Hymans has identified a similar state of affairs, noting that debate about nuclear power has ‘gone around in circles’ with Japan failing to reach ‘a coherent long-term nuclear policy response.’ Yet the very serious political, economic and technical challenges that have emerged following the fateful events of 11 March 2011 are slowly forcing Japan to come to terms with the role nuclear energy might play in its future.

What role, if any, does kinship play in the ability of Indonesia's Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) to rejuvenate itself? I aim to show how conceptions of kinship have important ramifications for the ways these and other jihadists establish political authority among their recruits and capitalise on the perceived grievances suffered by Muslims world wide to galvanise the anger among marginalised young Muslims. Although kinship is the most arcane aspect of anthropological study, we need to understand it, if we are to analyse elements of society, like those of jihadists, who conceive of their organisations in terms of blood relationships and ties of affinity. In this context, it is essential to establish the importance of blood relations and parenthood, rather than simply looking at the more general rituals of kinship, such as ‘spiritual kinship’ in Christian societies (Parkin, 1997: 124).

The Asia-Pacific region has not only emerged as one of the primary engines of the world economy, it has also taken global centre-stage in developments pertaining to nuclear weapons, in efforts to acquire a capability to make them, and in nuclear conflicts among regional powers as well as with the United States. At present, Iran and North Korea, two of the original U.S.-designated “axis of evil” powers are in the scope of U.S. efforts to prevent an adversary to obtain nuclear weapons, or, even to develop nuclear power capability. At the same time, the U.S. offers support for India's nuclear program and is publicly silent on Japanese steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons capacity.