[Since the publication of Tanaka Sakai's February report on the US road to war with Iran, vigorous international debate has been touched off by allegations of a critically important Israel lobby in US politics and the making of US policy in the Middle East. Tanaka offers an independent critical Japanese perspective on the forces driving US policy toward Iran, one that goes beyond discussion of the Israel lobby to consider the interaction between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam that has been driving the region and world toward Armageddon. But Sakai looks beyond the US-Islamic clash to examine the doctrinal roots of the Shia-Sunni divisions within Islam and their implications for the future of Iran and the region. In particular, he considers whether divisions internal to Islam will trump the deepening divide between Islamic and Christian fundamentalists. In either event, the prospects for Iran and the Middle East remain dark. MS]

Westernism is giving way to Orientalism in Moscow's outlook, if the past week's happenings are any guide. As Russia's ties with the West deteriorate, an upswing in its strategic partnership with China becomes almost inevitable.

The resumption of Russia-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) dialogue has gone awry. And the nascent hopes regarding a “reset of the button” of the Russian-American relationship are belied. With Moscow under multiple pressures from the West, two top Chinese officials have arrived in the Russian capital to offer support - Defense Minister Liang Guanglie and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.

Speaking on May 4, 1902, at the newly opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial violence at the heart of American nation building. In a speech before an estimated thirty thousand people, brimming with “indignation in every word and every gesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the cemetery as a landscape of national sacrifice by justifying an ongoing colonial war in the Philippines, where brutalities by U.S. troops had led to widespread debate in the United States. He did so by casting the conflict as a race war. Upon this “small but peculiarly trying and difficult war” turned “not only the honor of the flag” but “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” Roosevelt acknowledged and expressed regret for U.S. abuses but claimed that for every American atrocity, “a very cruel and very treacherous enemy” had committed “a hundred acts of far greater atrocity.” Furthermore, while such means had been the Filipinos’ “only method of carrying on the war,” they had been “wholly exceptional on our part.” The noble, universal ends of a war for civilization justified its often unsavory means. “The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity,” he asserted, but “from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.”

The United States Department of Defense is planning a massive military build-up on Guahan (Guam) that threatens to change the entire make-up of the island. Guahan, nestled at the southern-most tip of the Marianas Archipelago in the Micronesian region of Oceania, is a mere 212 square miles in area, barely bigger than a dot in most world maps. The island is similarly small in the consciousness of most American and Japanese taxpayers, who will be funding the military expansion. Guahan, however, has a large and rich history. While the island and her people remained in relative isolation from the Western world for over 3,500 years from the earliest indications of settlement, its strategic location as a crossroad between East and West has resulted in colonization by successive maritime powers over the last six centuries.

To introduce this symposium on World War II in the Pacific, I reflect on the differences between this, the 60th anniversary, and the memorable 50th anniversary in 1995.

First, we are well aware of the passing of many members of generations who, as adults, experienced the protracted wars of the 1930s and 1940s. 60th anniversary commemorative practices are marked by this awareness. At the site of the German surrender in Holland, for example, the march of veterans and former resistance fighters in May will “be the final one there” “because of the aging of the participants.” (NYT 3/27/05, p. 6). In Japan, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Museums have stepped up efforts to gather narratives and artifacts of the atomic bombings in anticipation of the sixtieth anniversary. One critic noted, “it is almost certain that events to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary will be the last chance for surviving hibakusha to appeal to the world to oppose … genocide by weapons of mass destruction” (Yuki Tanaka, The Hibakusha Voice and the Future of the Anti-Nuclear Movement). In local newspapers, we see prominent calls for readers to send their memories of VE Day and also of VJ Day.

The idea that China and Japan are slipping towards war over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands territorial conflict is deeply shocking. How could the world's second and third largest economies even consider the possibility of war over half a dozen uninhabitable islets? For Australians, the question is more serious still: could Australia be drawn into the dangerous conflict between its two largest trading partners on the side of Japan because of its defence agreements with Japan and because of the pull of the ANZUS alliance?

Introduction. All is not as it appears in Dili, that “pestilential place,” as described early last century by Joseph Conrad in his classic novel, Victory. The question posed by Bob Broughton is certainly valid, namely, how did one man – Alfredo Reinado – hold hostage the fortunes of this young nation? The answer is certainly murkier than the standard democratic elections narrative which, remarkably, saw in 2007 a constitutional crisis leading to the reversal of roles of the President and Prime Minister in East Timor. As Boughton highlights, it is important to pay attention to personalities and politics.

Ang Lee's 2007 movie, Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) based on a short story by Zhang Ailing, is a deeply unsettling exploration of enmity and collaboration filtered through the medium of the erotic. The Chinese head of the Japanese Secret Service in 1942 Shanghai, Mr Yee, develops a sexual relationship with the winsome Mrs Mak who is a secret agent for the resistance and seeks to lure him to his assassination. The film maker skillfully utilizes the torrid sexual encounters between the two to register their ever-changing and volatile feelings of lust, hatred, violence and love.

Japan's ruined and radioactive reactor plant at Fukushima Daiichi has been an abiding source of concern among knowledgeable observers. There are a host of good reasons for this reemergence. As this Mainichi survey observes, it is now clear that several hundred tons of radiation-contaminated water is entering the ocean per day. Over the past week, it suddenly returned as an intense focus of concern in the Japanese and quality overseas press. There are a host of good reasons for this reemergence. As this useful summary of articles and expert statements reveals, it is now clear that several hundred tons of radiation-contaminated water is entering the ocean.

May 4 2005 marked the 76th anniversary of the iconic Chinese patriotic protest movement. It was the day in 1919 when students led popular protests against Japan's imperial ambitions in China. It was also a seminal moment in the historical construction of modern China, prefiguring and also influencing the rise of the Communist Party itself in 1921, and marking a stage in the cultural and social transformation that remains at the heart of modern Chinese identities.

According to accounts published after Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972, nuclear weapons were stored in the northern Okinawan village of Henoko at an Army ordnance depot adjacent to the Marines’ Camp Schwab. The depot was constructed in 1959, becoming the Army's 137th Ordnance Company (Special Weapons) and was turned over to the Marines as Camp Henoko (Ordnance Ammunition Depot) following reversion in 1972. The camp is located only a few hundred yards from the proposed site of the replacement base for the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, which is located in the middle of densely populated Ginowan City. Newly re-instated Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has vowed to push for construction of the base, delayed more than sixteen years by local protests and despite widespread Okinawan opposition. The January 11, 2013 Japan Times reported, “The [Japanese] government may apply next month to bring in earth to fill a coastal area in [Henoko,] Okinawa where a U.S. Marine Corps air base is to be relocated, ahead of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's trip to the United States, government reports said Thursday.”

Can Chinese companies innovate in cutting-edge technology? It is a question many have been asking in the last few years as the size and dynamism of China's economy become apparent. This article focuses on the development of Chinese companies in the information and telecommunication sectors of industry, conventionally known as “Information Communication Technology” (ICT), among the most dynamic, profitable and globalized industries.

The return to power of Abe Shinzō and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) unfolded as tensions on the Korean peninsula mount. As a key advocate of the abduction lobby, Abe's rapid political rise since the early 2000s is closely connected with his role in promoting a hardline policy towards North Korea. Mobilizing a new nationalism in Japan, Abe's return as prime minister in December 2012 signals a rightward shift in Japanese politics. The current international crisis surrounding North Korea offers a critical test for analyzing the trajectory of Abe's foreign and security policy. In addition to joining multilateral United Nations sanctions, the Abe administration has increased the pressure on North Korea through new measures constraining the activities of pro-Pyongyang groups within Japan. Moreover, as Abe has pledged yet again to solve the abduction issue, the kidnapping problem has brought the old anti-DPRK policy network back to the forefront of Japan's North Korea policy.

Nago Mayor Inamine Susumu has visited the United States twice recently to meet with government officials and hold press conferences to convey overwhelming opposition in Okinawa to the construction of a U.S. Marine air base in his city: as shown in local referenda, elections for a new governor and on-site protests. Like former Governor Ota Masahide who visited the U.S. in the 1990s, Inamine presented hand-outs and visuals documenting the disproportionate burden of U.S. military bases borne by Okinawa residents. Now Mayor Inamine's office has prepared a thorough and easily-accessed presentation in English and Japanese on the history and scope of the U.S. military presence in Nago and the devastating impact the proposed air base would have on residents and the environment. It provides the essential facts to inform anyone with an interest in this issue at the center of JapanOkinawa-US relations.

Since the decades of authoritarian anticommunist rule ended in the late 1980s, and the geopolitical order of the cold war collapsed in the wider world shortly thereafter, there have been several important changes in the political life of South Koreans. One notable change is found in the domain of ritual life or, more specifically, in the activity of death commemoration and ancestor worship. In increasing numbers of communities across South Korea, people are now actively reshaping their communal ancestral rites into a more inclusive form, introducing demonstratively into the ritual domain the politically troubled memories of the dead, which were excluded from the public sphere under the state's militant anticommunist policies.

Written on the eve of Japan's dispatch of Self-Defense Forces (army) to Iraq, a major step in the erosion of the peace constitution, this article examines three issues central to understanding the contemporary Japanese military and society. The first of these is the question of the willingness of SDF forces to go to Iraq at a time when strong opposition to its dispatch surfaced in Japanese society. Based on questionnaires and interviews with SDF personnel, the article examines SDF views concerning deployment to Iraq as well as constitutional issues. The second is the nature of the movement seeking to elicit opinions and support resistance to the dispatch to Iraq, from within the ranks of the SDF. This may be viewed as a successor to the Vietnam-era movement that supported GI resistance among US troops stationed in Okinawa and Japan. The third is the existence of serious problems within the SDF, particularly bullying of recruits and suicides that have soared in recent years. This article appeared in the November, 2004 issue of Sekai (World), pp. 47-54. Posted at Japan Focus on February 15, 2005.

An impression is being created that there is a “rift” between the United States and Britain regarding the reconciliation track involving the Taliban. The plain truth is that the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are in this murky game together.

During the recent Congressional testimonies by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others, the air ran thick with military jargon such as “command influence” and “chain of command”, but nowhere was the word “command responsibility” uttered. In 1945, following Japan's surrender to the Allied Powers, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japanese military forces in the Philippines, was tried for war crimes by a U.S. military tribunal, found guilty, and hanged. His crime: failure to uphold “command responsibility” over all the Japanese troops operating in the Philippines.