In a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal on October 25, 2013, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo outlined his plan to enhance Japanese leadership in Asia. He meant leadership on multiple fronts, including the economy, military affairs, and regional engagement. Abe insisted that his interactions with regional representatives showed that “Japan is expected to exert leadership not just on the economic front, but in the field of security in the Asia-Pacific.” He lamented Japan's economic malaise of the past two decades, arguing that it has led to an “inward-looking” country, in which students are reluctant to study overseas and the public is unenthusiastic about providing aid to other countries. He linked his still quite vague economic reforms with a vision of productive resurgence: “By regaining a strong economy, Japan will regain confidence as well, and we'd like to contribute more to making the world a better place.”

Languages of politicians have always been treasure troves of lies and deception. But watching a number of new Japanese phrases the Abe Administration spews out one after another, I started to think that perhaps we even need a special new dictionary for this administration alone.

The Okinawa Chapter of the LDP has revoked its pledge that Futenma Air Station should be transferred out of Okinawa and, following in the footsteps of the LDP National Diet members, has switched to approving the construction of the new [substitute] base at Henoko. In the history of Okinawan political thinking, what does this strange political drama in which they have been reduced by force to submit to proposals of the government and party HQ signify? We [Ryukyu shimpo] asked historian Hiyane Teruo to comment.

December 27 will be remembered as a bitter day in Okinawan history. On that day, Okinawa Governor Nakaima Hirokazu cast aside his campaign promises, his statements made repeatedly during the last three years, and his duty as Governor to represent the Okinawan people's will, and approved the Japanese governments' application for permission to begin reclaiming land offshore from Henoko in northern Okinawa, on which to build a new US Marine Corps base. This amounts to approval of the base, which he had promised to oppose.

Under ultraconservative Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the process of Japan's remilitarization has recently gained momentum. Japan's rightward shift is embodied in a military buildup, Abe's pilgrimage to Yasukuni Shrine, and historical revisionism. The buildup includes a new warship and more funding for the Self Defense Forces, greater surveillance over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, ignoring local opposition to a new military base in Okinawa, the State Secrets Law, establishment of an American-style national security council, and plans to reinterpret Article 9 of the Constitution to allow for collective self-defense.

On April 9, 2014 the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the “Japanese people who conserve Article 9” had succeeded in registering themselves as contenders for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. As of this typing, the group remains a loosely organized, broad-based cross section of Japanese society committed to saving the Japanese constitution's famous clause outlawing war.

This might be one for the Guiness Book. On April 19, 2014, a ceremony was held at the fishing village of Henoko, in Nago City, Okinawa, marking the tenth anniversary of the continuous sit-in by residents and supporters opposing the construction of a new U.S. Marine Corps Airbase there. Actually it's seventeen years since the U.S. and Japanese governments announced that the USMC Airbase at Futenma, in crowded Ginowan City, would be closed, or rather packed up and moved to this new base at Henoko, as soon as it is built. Seventeen years and, far from being built, construction has not begun and isn't likely to in the foreseeable future.

July 9 was the final day of Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's historic and surreal 3-day visit to Australia. He and Australia's climate-denialist Prime Minister Tony Abbott jetted together to Rio Tinto's West Angelas iron ore mine in the western Pilbara region, five hours away from the Australian capital of Canberra and home to earth's oldest rocks and evidence of life. Rio Tinto had arranged a “money shot,” putting the two leaders atop an enormous, and automated, Komatsu 930E dump truck.

In a recent article in the Diplomat, Michael Green and Jeffrey Hornung claimed that critics of the Abe government's “reinterpretation” of Japan's constitution, to end the ban on the use of force for the purposes of collective self-defense, were “basing their opposition on myths about the change.” This allegation that resistance to the “reinterpretation” of Article 9 is based on nothing but “myths” is increasingly heard, and so it is worth examining their arguments, and the so-called myths that they purport to dismiss.

In early August, the Asahi Shimbun retracted some stories that it published in the 1990s about the wartime “comfort women”. According to the newspaper, the most egregious mistakes involved articles based on claims by Yoshida Seiji concerning his personal involvement in the forced mobilization of young Korean women from Jeju Island to be used as sex slaves in brothels run by the Japanese army.

The Historical Science Society of Japan's (HSSJ) on December 7, 2014 issued a public statement on the wartime comfort women controversy that has gone viral in recent months in Japan and internationally. The text, made available at its website one week prior to Japan's snap election, is an English translation of the group's statement made in the fall of 2014. For more than half a century, the JSSJ has been a progressive voice for historians on social, cultural, and political issues of contemporary Japan. Now it is speaking out at a time when the media and government are mobilizing to silence independent and critical voices.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the broadcast of the NHK documentary on Comfort Women, Senso wo do sabaku ka: Towareru senji seiboryoku (How to Put War on Trial: Wartime Sexual Violence Considered) broadcast on January 30, 2001, the recently presented a feature on the program and the controversy over its showing that ensued in Japan.

Tokyo is crawling unsteadily back on its feet. Its buildings are intact, its vast transport network is creaking back to life, cellphones work again, patchily. Planes land in the main international airports but traffic crawls through the streets.

The extent of the destruction caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan has shocked the world. An official report on the 20th listed over 8277 dead and 12722 missing – a great majority in the hardest hit areas of northern Japan. The “dead” are the number of the bodies found by police and rescue workers. The “missing” are those reported missing by friends and family. With whole communities swallowed by the tsunami, there is a strong chance that many victims simply have no one left to report them missing. The situation for survivors in the quake-hit areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi atomic energy plant has been particularly dire as many have been unable to leave their homes.

The exceptions can be brutal, such as the Twitter comments by Alec Sulkin and Gilbert Godfried, but overall, online and print media have conveyed an incredible outpouring of sympathy for Japan in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake. This trend seems particularly pronounced among Japan's neighbors, many of whom have often been at odds with it over historical and territorial issues.

Assessing the Economic Aftershocks of Japan's March 11 Earthquake Stephen S. Roach warns us not to be complacent about the effects of the March 11 earthquake in Japan on the global economy. After outlining a “narrow view” based on a declining global profile for the Japanese economy – a shrinking percentage of both global exports and GDP, a rising China, and an irreplaceable position in only a handful of critical upstream industrial components – Roach urges us not to accept the “superficial” conclusions that might flow from this view: that Japan “doesn't really matter any more” and that disruptions to global economic activity from the March 11 earthquake and its aftermath will be “transitory” and “small.”

Tetsuo Sakuma has loaded his small pickup with all it can carry. There's not much of value: a television, some books, boxes of clothes, snatched in haste from a home he may never sleep in again. “We hope to come back, but it's difficult to tell when,” he says.

The Fukushima plant workers have been widely lionized but who they are, why they work under such desperate conditions, and how they are being treated is less discussed. On the 29th, however, the Tokyo Shimbun published an article that sheds light on some unpleasant realities behind the heroic “Fukushima Fifty” (workers at the plant really number in the hundreds) story.

Amid myriad scenes of tragedy, scenes of horror are also being reported from around the Fukushima Daiichi site. Because of elevated radiation, workers have been unable to collect and bury bodies. There are reports of corpses, at least one of which was found to be heavily contaminated with radiation on March 27, simply left where they lie. This news must be horrifying for families and could be the harbinger of a different public health crisis given the thousands missing in the region.