Tokyo - The imbroglio over the huge Sakhalin-2 oil-and-gas project in Russia's Far East involving two Japanese firms has cast a cloud over resource-poor Japan's new national energy strategy. It has also served as a fresh reminder that Japan's economic power seems to have lost much of its luster, at least in the eyes of the Russians.

Traveling through East Asia, one can view historic imperial palaces in Beijing and Tokyo, and royal palaces reconstructed from the ruins left by fire and war in Seoul and Naha. Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago. The Shuri palace in its capital, Naha, was constructed more than six hundred years ago by the rulers of the Ryukyu kingdom, which played a crucial role in maritime East Asia from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Today, it takes barely an hour to fly from Taipei to Naha, and the Shuri castle, reconstructed three times in the last century, has been designated a World Heritage Site in an attempt to evoke its former grandeur.

What are the causes and consequences of North Korea's extended famine of recent years? Though it is not blessed with plentiful arable land or a consistently temperate climate, North Korea has long tried to feed itself and avoid dependence on the outside world. Food security represents, for the government in Pyongyang, a very concrete expression of juche, or self-reliance. Though such a policy has meant that one-third of the population remains rural—a very high percentage for a modern, industrialized country—North Korea continues to push hard to guarantee sufficiency in basic grains.