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.

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) is asking an important question about Japan's nuclear crisis that seems to have been ignored by the media and in announcements from the Japanese government and Japan's nuclear power industry: What is happening with the spent fuel pools located at the top of the buildings housing the Unit 1 and Unit 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant facility? Both reactor buildings have lost their upper structures due to explosions possibly caused by a hydrogen gas build-up (Unit 1 on March 12, Unit 3 on March 14).

Until the last six months of World War Two, the home islands of Japan were virtually untouched by the ravages of war. That changed definitively on the night of March 9 1945, as the full fury of U.S. firebombing was unleashed on Tokyo. The raid turned a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo into an inferno. Police Cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets as “rivers of fire. Everywhere one could see flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like match sticks… . Immense vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire.” 100,000 civilians died. More than one million homes were destroyed. Yet this was but a prelude of the hell that was to come.

The worst-case scenario of Japan's nuclear crisis, reportedly floated by Prime Minister Naoto Kan on the dark night of March 16, that much of the east of the country including Tokyo could be “wrecked” has been averted. The reality though is shocking enough.

A 20km zone around the ruined Daiichi nuclear power complex has been irradiated, emptying towns and villages in Fukushima Prefecture of about 80,000 people who do not know when they can return. Unknown quantities of radiation continue to seep into the sea from the plant, which is swimming in 70,000 tons of toxic water.

On September 7 Japanese patrol boats intercepted a Chinese fishing trawler near Kubashima, one of the Senkaku [Chinese: Diaoyu] Islands in the East China Sea. After it repeatedly rammed the patrol boats in attempting to escape, the fishing boat was detained and its captain arrested and charged with interference in the execution of official duties. The incident would come to have enormous repercussions, shaking up Sino-Japanese relations.

In December 2004, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced preliminary results of the second Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey that had been conducted in 2003 on 15 year olds from the 30 OECD members and eleven “partner countries” in mathematics, science, reading, and problem solving. This survey confirms two trends in Japanese education that have been widely recognized in recent years: the general decline in academic standards of Japanese students and growing bifurcation in student performance. This essay assesses these trends and their implications for Japanese society including issues pertaining to Japanese competitiveness and social equity.

Japan's expat rebel with many causes blends music and a wider world view

Former Japanese pop heart-throb and musical pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto talks to David McNeill about music, the state of the planet –and why he still reluctantly lives in New York City.

The Mongolian declaration of independence on 29 December 1911 was a monumental event in the modern history not only of Inner Asia, but also of East Asia; it not only contributed to the fall of the Qing Empire, but more importantly it led to the formation of two separate national states on the debris of the Empire: China and Mongolia. In 2011 both China and Mongolia commemorated the centennial, but the moods were more contemplative than celebratory, for neither thought that their nation has been consummated: China lost Outer Mongolia and (Outer) Mongolia lost Inner Mongolia.

Tokyo - In defiance of mounting pressure to fully liberalize imports of foreign leather products, including footwear, Japan is digging in its heels to safeguard its internationally uncompetitive industry.

At first glance, the import restrictions may look like typical protectionist trade measures that can be seen elsewhere in the world. But lying beneath the surface of the current issue is the bitter legacy of a feudal hierarchy and an historical pattern of discrimination. Under the WTO, international pressure has grown for Japan to take drastic measures to further liberalize its imports of foreign leather products, as well as agricultural ones.

From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”

Dated January 29, 2010, the Foreign Trade Bank of the DPRK (North Korea) issued document No. DC033 10-004 to diplomatic missions and international organizations present in North Korea. They were informed that the use of foreign currency was to be stopped, payments were to be made in the form of non-cash cheques, and that the official exchange rate of the Euro to the North Korean Won was changed from 188.2 KPW to 140 KPW, effective January 2, 2010.

As Randolph Bourne discerned as far back as 1917, a state waging war is readily able to obtain support for its undertaking from sizable numbers of intellectuals. Such factors as jingoism, combative egos, power worship, or considerations of profit and prestige ensure that numerous academics, journalists, writers, and critics will pronounce eloquently in favor of the warring state and exhort their compatriots to back it without question. Although a uniformly pro-war consensus is seldom attained, hawkish intellectuals play an important role in engineering consent and discrediting opposition to official policies. Appreciative of the services rendered by its intellectual myrmidons, the state rewards them, directly or indirectly.

A single sentence buried among 7000 pages of documents recently released by the Pentagon might well be the needle in the haystack that conclusively proves the U.S. military stored toxic herbicides, including Agent Orange, on Okinawa during the Vietnam War. American veterans have long claimed that large volumes of these chemicals were present on the island and hundreds of them are suffering from serious illnesses they believe were triggered by their exposure. But the U.S. government has repeatedly denied their allegations, insisting it has no records related to the issue.

In February and in June 2005 the national football teams of Japan and North Korea met in World Cup qualifiers. These highly emotionally and politically charged matches have highlighted the familiar global issue of the nexus between sport and politics, and have provided a rich arena with which to explore political aspects of postcolonial Korean football and Korea-Japan conflict, as well as to reflect on the uses of the past in present South and North Korea.

The following paper, which draws on and updates a 2007 Japan Focus article, was written for Le Monde Diplomatique, where it was posted online in French early in April 2011.

This article offers a general overview of the nuclear era that began in Japan less than a decade after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and may well have been brought to its close by the events at Fukushima six and a half decades later. The Hirohito imperial broadcast of 15 August 1945 announcing the Japanese surrender and calling on the Japanese people to unite to “endure the unendurable” is now matched by the Akihito imperial television address of 16 March, calling on people to unite in the face of catastrophe and help each other through the crisis. Two days after the Akihito address, the government announced that the “Great East Japan Earthquake” disaster was to be elevated from level 4 to level 5, on a par with Three Mile Island, and three weeks later, on 12 April, it raised it again, to level 7, the maximum on the international scale for nuclear incidents, alongside Chernobyl.

In his final televised speech to the Iraqi people in 2003, Saddam Hussein denounced the invading Americans as “the Mongols of this age,” a reference to the last time infidels had conquered his country, in 1258. But the comparison isn't very apt — unlike the Mongols, the Americans don't have the organizational genius of Genghis Khan.

Many older Japanese conservatives are deeply committed to pacifism as a result of their personal experiences in World War II, despite recent Japanese government efforts to assert the right to belligerence in the present and the legitimacy of Japan's wars in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonaka Hiromu, the former Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party, retired from politics last year. But he still openly criticizes Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, his foreign policy, and the LDP's planned revision of Japan's Constitution. He lost his cousin and uncle in the Asia-Pacific War. Gotoda Masaharu, who served as Chief Cabinet Secretary for the Nakasone Cabinet in the 1980s and was also highly critical of both Koizumi's foreign and domestic policies, died last year. He was also as a staunch supporter of Article 9, the “no-war clause,” of Japan's Constitution. Watanabe Tsuneo, the Editorial Chief of the Yomiuri Newspaper, belongs to this same circle of conservatives whose wartime experiences prompted strong anti-war sentiments, although he is less supportive of Article 9.

This paper investigates the behaviour of turbulence production in adverse pressure gradient (APG) turbulent boundary layers (TBLs), including the range of pressure gradients from zero-pressure-gradient (ZPG) to separation, moderate and high Reynolds numbers, and equilibrium and non-equilibrium flows. The main focus is on predicting the values and positions of turbulence production peaks. Based on the unique ability of turbulence production to describe energy exchange, the idea that the ratios of the mean flow length scales to the turbulence length scales are locally smallest near peaks is proposed. Thereby, the ratios of length scales are defined for the inner and outer regions, respectively, as well as the ratios of time scales for further consideration of local information. The ratios in the inner region are found to reach the same constant value in different APG TBLs. Like turbulence production in the ZPG TBL, turbulence production in APG TBLs is shown to have a certain invariance of the inner peak. The value and position of the inner peak can also be predicted quantitatively. In contrast, the ratios in the outer region cannot be determined with unique coefficients, which accounts for the different self-similarity properties of the inner and outer regions. The outer time scale ratios establish a link between mean flow and turbulence, thus participating in the discussion on half-power laws. The present results support the existence of a half-power-law region that is not immediately adjacent to the overlapping region.

It is widely believed that the major source of kamikaze suicide pilots was the Air Force Cadet Officer System in the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army Forces, which recruited university and college students on a voluntary basis. In fact, however, the majority of kamikaze pilots were young noncommissioned or petty officers, that is graduates of Navy and Army junior flight training schools. A total of 708 noncommissioned Army officers died as kamikaze pilots, while the total death toll of Army Air Force officer class kamikaze pilots was 621. In the Navy, 1732 petty officers died as kamikaze pilots compared with 782 officers. Many assume that the majority of kamikaze pilots were former college students, because the letters-home, diaries and wills of these young men, who became kamikaze pilots through the Air Force Cadet Officer System, were compiled and published as books and pamphlets after the war. The best known of these publications is Kike Wadatsumi no Koe (Listen to the Voices from the Sea). Unfortunately similar personal records left behind by non-commissioned and petty officers are not publicly available. It is therefore necessary to rely on private records to gain a fuller understanding of the thoughts and ideas of these kamikaze pilots.