Most impartial observers of the China-Japan imbroglio over tiny islands claimed by both in the East China Sea—known in Japan as Senkaku and in China as Diaoyu—believe it has reached a dangerous point. The importance of the dispute is essentially two-fold. First, historical memory counts heavily in China-Japan relations. Despite their wide and deep economic ties in terms of trade, investment, and (at one time) Japanese development assistance, the dislike between peoples and governments is palpable. The Chinese are unrelenting in demanding Japanese apologies for aggression in World War II and insisting that Japanese political leaders stop behavior (notably, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine for war dead and endorsing school textbooks that elide such fraught issues as the Nanjing Massacre and the military “comfort women” system of sexual slavery) that suggests a lack of contrition. The Japanese say they have apologized enough and have every right to honor those who have served the country and display patriotic symbols.

People still clearly remember that on April 5, 2009 the U.S. President Barack Obama excited an audience in Prague by declaring that his government “will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.” As the only nuclear power to have ever used a nuclear weapon, he said, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. Indeed, the U.S. has not only moral responsibility but also legal responsibility for the victims as the nation that committed a crime against humanity by indiscriminately killing tens of thousands of people and causing lifelong radiation sickness to many survivors. In his speech, Obama also added ‘this goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime.’ Clearly, this goal will never be reached if the U.S. continues to spend ever larger sums on nuclear weapons, overshadowing all other nuclear powers, as the Obama Administration has been doing since the speech in Prague.

On June 29, 2014 a man set himself on fire in Tokyo to protest PM Abe Shinzo's bid to lift constitutional constraints on Japan's military forces and in subsequent days tens of thousands of citizens gathered outside the prime minister's residence to loudly protest this initiative. Opinion polls, even those conducted by reliably rightwing news organizations, indicate widespread opposition to his renunciation of pacifism and very little support for collective self-defense (CSD).

Here is our update on the situation concerning US military base construction in Henoko and Oura Bay. We have divided it into three parts: The Japanese government (and US government), Opposition movements, and issues that are unclear and need to be clarified. Many things are very clear now. Both the Japanese government and people in Okinawa are so determined to prevail that we expect the tensions between the two to escalate with the possibility that confrontation will become ugly and dangerous. Meanwhile, there are things that are still not clear or many people may not be aware of. But we think some of them, once clarified, could change the dynamics of this 18-year-long Okinawan saga.

This interview with a former top official of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs was conducted immediately after the July 1, 2014 adoption of a Cabinet resolution that changed the government's long-standing position that Article 9 of Japan's Constitution prohibited the country from engaging in collective self-defense (military action in support of an ally that has come under enemy attack). The decision came just six weeks after a carefully selected advisory panel delivered a report on May 15 with a preordained conclusion—that the grounds long used to justify Japan's individual self-defense under the Constitution also apply, within limits, to the exercise of collective self-defense.

The reverberations of the act of self-immolation next to Shinjuku Station on June 29, 2014 seem akin to the sound of one hand clapping. Japan's mass media reliably jumps all over any sensational story, but not this one. While not ignored, it was certainly not pursued, as the story of a man reciting an anti-war poem by Yosano Akiko, a national legend, before igniting himself in front of throngs on a Sunday afternoon at Tokyo's most crowded commuter station somehow failed to gain traction. It was a remarkable political statement without precedent in the Japan I have lived in since 1987 making the negligible coverage all the more newsworthy.

Much can be learned from revisiting the life and times of imperial leaders of the twentieth-century, particularly those who were one thing in name and another in practice, or who combined power and authority but were neither dictators nor warmongers. The Showa Emperor Hirohito, who reigned from December 25, 1926, to his death on January 7, 1989, was such a person.

The first paragraph in the first volume of A History of Japan, by the scholarly British diplomat Sir George Sansom, is a detailed description of the islands' geology.

In recent years in Okinawa, local citizens have been divided over the issue of Henoko as an appropriate location for a particular kind of development. The United States military has, since the mid-1960s, been mapping out designs for a comprehensive facility for the U.S. Marine Corps at Henoko in Northern Okinawa. According to archived documents uncovered by Makishi Yoshikazu (真喜志好一), the proposed military development of this region of the main island has been debated for decades and, like a vampire, time and again keeps returning from a long sleep to make its presence felt in public discourse.

Many Japanese and long-time Japan observers have expressed dismay about the recrudescence of self-righteous nationalism under PM Abe Shinzo who has emboldened rightwing extremists now threatening democratic institutions, civil liberties and Japan's relations with its neighbors.

On the evening of November 11, 2014, a man set himself on fire at Hibiya Park in Tokyo, an area where government buildings are concentrated. The act was a protest against both the “July 1 Cabinet Decision,” which paved the way to lifting the constitutional ban on Japan's exercise of its right to collective self-defense, and the new US military facility construction at Henoko and Takae in Okinawa.

To top it off last week, the Japanese Defense Minister threatened to fire live (albeit tracer) rounds on Chinese aircraft which continue to buzz the disputed Senkaku islands - 400 km west of Naha, the Okinawan capital.

It was against this drumbeat of resurgent Japanese militarism that more than 140 Okinawan civic representatives made a historic trip to Tokyo on Sunday. This was the first time since Okinawa reverted to Japanese control in 1972 that leaders from each of Okinawa's 41 municipalities have visited the nation's capital - and despite the bitter cold, they were met with a warm reception by 4000 Tokyoites at a rally in Hibiya Park.

During the Battle of Okinawa, thousands of civilians were caught in the crossfire as U.S. and Japanese troops waged one of the final - and bloodiest - fights of World War Two. The combat lasted for more than three months, devastated the south and centre of the island and forced starving refugees to flee to the relative safety of the north. There, they turned to the place which had always sustained them during difficult times - the sea.

On Okinawa, U.S. military service members and their families are demanding answers from the Pentagon about a chemical dumpsite located adjacent to two Department of Defense schools.

Last summer, dangerous levels of dioxin were discovered near Kadena Air Base, but only recently did many Americans stationed on the island learn of the contamination.1 Parents whose children attend the potentially-poisoned facilities claim base officials failed to inform them of the risks and, for almost six months, they did not investigate whether the pollution extended onto their schools’ land.

More than six months after dozens of rusty chemical barrels were unearthed from former U.S. military land in Okinawa City, their contents have been identified - and they appear to offer conclusive proof that the toxic Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange was buried on the island.

Announced in early July, the results of two separate studies - one conducted by Okinawa City and one by the Okinawa Defense Bureau - both detected the three signature components of Agent Orange: the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D as well as highly-toxic TCDD dioxin.

In September 1995, the Okinawan problem in its present acute form originated from the rape of a 12-year old school girl by three US servicemen. The prefecture galvanised in fury and elicited a pledge the following year from the two national governments that Futenma Marine Air Station would indeed be returned “within five to seven years.” Sixteen years on, there is no sign whatever of that happening; instead Futenma's runways are reinforced, the base's military functions upgraded, and plans for a new (“substitute”) base in the north, at Henoko, are pressed forward in the face of islandwide opposition.

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.

In the upcoming Tokyo gubernatorial elections, Hosokawa Morihiro could make an astonishing comeback more than a quarter of a century after retiring as Prime Minister. Mainstream and independent media have generally stressed his opposition to nuclear power and his support for green energy alternatives, in contrast to the national government of Abe Shinzō. However, Abe and Hosokawa also represent different poles in another controversial field of politics - the politics of memory including the fraught question of apologies for war and the regional and global implications of their respective stances.

In the midst of the Fukushima crisis, Japanese Prime Minister Kan has tied his political future, and likely that of his party, to an anti-nuclear direction.

At the G8 in May, he pledged to forge an energy policy that would see the percentage of Japan's energy needs met through renewables such as solar energy double to 20% in the 2020s. This is a decisive turn away from the previous government mandate to increase the amount of Japan's energy generated by nuclear power from 30% to 50% in the same timeframe. He has followed this up by appointing an energy review board that includes proponents of solar and other green energy technologies.

Like most Japanese men, Katsunobu Sakurai read apocalyptic comic book stories about the future when he was a boy. He never expected to live through one of those stories himself.

A common plot sees a modern city reduced overnight to a ghostly husk as fears of nuclear contamination empties it of people. Businesses shut and food, water and petrol run out. Old people left behind begin dying. The city mayor makes a desperate televised appeal for help. Such is real life in Sakurai's city of Minami-Soma.