For divided nations such as the two Koreas, which by their very rationales are involved in a highly-charged competition for legitimacy with their other ‘part-nation’, the Olympics have been a particularly potent arena for political posturing. This article examines the troubled history of the two Koreas' endeavours to out-do each other in the Olympic movement, the prospects of a joint Korean team for the Beijing Olympics being realised, and the potential Chinese role in the run-up to those Olympics, which mean so much to China.

Missile defense (MD) hasn't been much discussed in the Asia-Pacific Journal, but growing US-Japan and US-South Korea cooperation on installing or networking into MD systems, along with US (and NATO) moves to ring much of Eurasia with land and sea-based MD is a subject of growing diplomatic, political and military analytical importance.

Regional leadership matters. It can facilitate cooperation among states and bring about a prosperous common future. Nevertheless, the struggle for leadership may lead to serious rivalry and regional instability. In East Asia, the quest for leadership has been controversial. Northeast Asian powers such as China, Japan and Korea have long been regarded as potential leaders striving to secure national interests by expanding their influence over their southeast neighbors. However, in the Asian financial crisis of 1997 none of these countries was able to play a dominant role, resulting in a “leadership deficit.”[1] To some extent, the Asian financial crisis did witness a new architecture of collective leadership in East Asia. “ASEAN Plus Three” (APT), inclusive of ten ASEAN member states in addition to China, Japan, and Korea, convened in Kuala Lumpur in late 1997, pointed toward a model of co-governance among regional powers. Based on this framework, the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) and Asian Bond Market Initiative (ABMI) resulted in successful responses to the financial catastrophe. Ten years after its inaugural summit, APT cooperation has become the most effective track for regional cooperation.

The issue of Primer Ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine honoring Japan's war dead has reverberated in Japan's domestic and international politics since the first such visit nearly two decades ago. The criticism of Prime Minister Koizumi's several Yasukuni visits by the Kyoto philosopher Umehara Takeshi makes clear not only the breadth of political opposition to such visits, but the ways in which the issues intersect with century-long conflicts over the relationship between the Japanese state and religion, both Buddhist and Shinto. This essay likewise raises important questions about who should be enshrined in war and peace memorials: should they respect only the dead of one's own nation, as in the case of Yasukuni and Washington's Vietnam Memorial, or should all who died in war on all sides of the conflict, as in the Okinawa Memorial?

With the third anniversary of Fukushima's triple meltdown approaching, stories of incompetence and corruption in the nuclear cleanup are rife. A team of Reuters' reporters working in Japan has researched working conditions at Fukushima Daiichi and decontamination jobs outside the plant. Their findings are shocking.

The scientific term Minakatella longifolia G. Lister may be known only to biologists, but behind the story of this slime mold—and of how specimens came to be kept at the Natural History Museum in London—is the life of one of the most fascinating men of Japan's modern era: Minakata Kumagusu.

Owing to its diverse geology, geography and climate, Japan is a country rich in biodiversity. However, as a result of accelerated development over the last century, and particularly the post-war decades, Japan's natural environments and the wildlife which inhabit them have come under increased pressure. Now, much of Japan's natural forest, wetlands, rivers, lakes and coastal environments have been destroyed or seriously degraded as a consequence of development and pollution. Despite increasing awareness of the importance of preserving Japan's remaining natural environments and wildlife, habitat destruction (both direct and indirect), inadequately controlled hunting, and introduced species pose a threat to these. This paper explores these factors, and the underlying forces—political, legislative and economic—which have undermined efforts to preserve Japan's natural heritage during the post-war decades.

2010 will be a year of commemorations in South Korea. The 25th of June will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Korea War. Midway between 2010 and 1950 was 1980. The Kwangju Uprising of May of that year was an event almost as significant as the US-Korean War in framing the contemporary nation.

The imperial institution with its official toleration of hereditary succession and gender discrimination is an enormous contradiction embedded in the Constitution of Japan. Debate over a female successor to the throne ignores this illogicality at its peril. Today we should be thinking not about a female monarch but the monarchy itself, and what the country ideally should be. Yet nobody discusses this issue.

Owing to its diverse geology, geography and climate, Japan is a country rich in biodiversity. However, as a result of accelerated development over the last century, and particularly the post-war decades, Japan's natural environments and the wildlife which inhabit them have come under increased pressure. Now, much of Japan's natural forest, wetlands, rivers, lakes and coastal environments have been destroyed or seriously degraded as a consequence of development and pollution. Despite increasing awareness of the importance of preserving Japan's remaining natural environments and wildlife, habitat destruction (both direct and indirect), inadequately controlled hunting, and introduced species pose a threat to these. This paper explores these factors, and the underlying forces—political, legislative and economic—which have undermined efforts to preserve Japan's natural heritage during the post-war decades.

Since the mid 1990s, Japan's neonationalist forces have made important gains: in education, culture and politics, as manifested notably in the activation of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and the popularity of the best-selling comic book Sensōron (On War) by cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori.

In Stockholm last fall, walking past a McDonald's, Tan Dun turned to me and said: “Some 20 years ago, I was still planting rice in China. And now I'm conducting orchestras in all the great concert houses of the world: La Scala, the Met, the Berlin Philharmonic. I still can't believe it.”

In a postbellum environment, far more war crimes are ultimately left untouched than are ever pursued in tribunals. This is particularly true if the victors commit the crimes against the vanquished. If that victor is a superpower, the difficulties involved in the pursuit of justice increase exponentially. As World War II entered its final stages the belligerent powers committed one heinous act after another: the Japanese military massacred civilians in Manila and murdered allied prisoners of war and slave laborers in an attempt to hide the evidence of their barbaric treatment, not to mention the ongoing acts of brutality in China. On the victors’ side, while the United States and Britain bombed German and Japanese cities and their civilian inhabitants into oblivion to “bring the war to a speedy end,” the Soviet Union was unleashing acts of vengeance on the German population. Fresh from victory over the Nazi regime and emboldened by favorable political developments in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union turned its attention to Japan.

Introduction: In this 2009 speech given by a central figure in the decades-long citizen's movement to remember and memorialize the Tokyo air raids, Saotome Katsumoto discusses details of his own experience of the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Japan's capital. He then situates the air raids on Tokyo within the context of twentieth century terror bombing campaigns and Japan's “Fifteen Year War” in Asia.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am a novelist from Japan and I am honored and pleased to have this opportunity to speak at Bradford University today. In Japan, I am the director of a privately founded and operated historical museum dedicated to preserving the memory of the damage wrought by American planes near the end of the Second World War. Accompanying me today are members of our museum staff.

I last visited Barcelona two years ago in the spring. An amazing number of readers gathered when I held a book signing. Long lines formed and I still could not finish signing all the books even after one and a half hours. The reason it took so long is that so many of the female readers wanted to kiss me. That was time consuming.

After decades of preoccupation with traditional security issues, trade, finance and investment have become key areas of concern to policy makers in Asia, broadly defined to include South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. Whereas in the past, governments in Asia applied a traditional understanding of security, today ‘economic security’ is part of a broadened concept of security that most countries in Asia apply (Pempel 2010a: 213). Of course, international trade and the efforts to deepen intra-regional trade integration are part of this process.

“Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21” is a NGO formed in 1998 to resist historical revisionism and fight the removal of material critical of Japan's war record from textbooks.

The Japanese government claims (widely criticized - see here) that the Fukushima reactors have been stabilized and the threat of further hydrogen explosions removed, but now the Japanese public faces a new source of concern.

Meat from more than 500 cattle fed with irradiated straw from the area around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been sold to Japanese consumers. The beef was tainted with radioactive Cesium released from Fukushima Daiichi and contaminating straw by up to 500 times standard levels. With beef prices in the vicinity of Fukushima plummeting, farmers raced to market their cattle in the months following the nuclear meltdown. Previous findings of radioactive contamination were reported for spinach, milk, fish and tea leaves.