This May, the United Nations will be holding a review conference on the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), a key nuclear arms control and disarmament agreement to which 188 countries are now parties.

Originally proposed by the U.S. and Soviet governments, the NPT was signed at the United Nations in 1968 and went into force in 1970. Under its provisions, non-nuclear nations agreed to renounce the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed nations agreed to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons through good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament. In this fashion, nations on both sides of the Cold War divide signaled their intention to halt the nuclear arms race and move toward a nuclear-free world.

Okunoshima, Hiroshima Pref. – With its turquoise waters, quiet forest paths, palm trees and spectacular views of the mainland and other islands of the Inland Sea, Okunoshima Island has the feel of a resort somewhere in the Aegean Sea or the South Pacific.

[This article by Eamonn Fingleton exemplifies the “Japan as Number One” genre, a type that has become such a rara avis in recent years that it seemed virtually extinct. The conventional wisdom among international economists as well as Japanese neoliberals, is that Japan is washed up and has to learn from America. Using Japan's trade with China as an example, Fingleton raises compelling questions about the failures of American industrial and trade policy.

Over the past three years, much of the Japanese public and many students of its political economy have grown used to being disappointed by the Koizumi style of reform. Koizumi came to office through internal party selection on April 26, 2001, his candidacy largely driven by the desperation of local Liberal Democratic Party chapters facing defeat in Upper House elections. Koizumi was supposed to be the Japanese equivalent of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and in his first year became akin to a rock star for his willingness to talk about as well as take on taboos and sacred cows. His talk of painful fiscal and economic reform would have scared off electors in any other society not gripped by a sense of foreboding and the need for drastic change.

Ever since taking office, the Bush Administration has struggled to define its stance on the most critical long-term strategic issue facing the United States: whether to view China as a future military adversary, and plan accordingly, or to see it as a rival player in the global capitalist system. Representatives of both perspectives are nestled in top Administration circles, and there have been periodic swings of the pendulum toward one side or the other. But after a four-year period in which neither outlook appeared dominant, the pendulum has now swung conspicuously toward the anti-Chinese, prepare-for-war position. Three events signal this altered stance.

In recent months, officials at the Bank of Japan have been scratching their heads at a puzzling phenomenon. In spite of nearly three years of robust economic growth, a run of dazzling corporate profits and recent signs of a tightening labour market, wages have been falling.

Even in the second quarter of 2004, when the economy was growing at an exhilarating 6 per cent a year, total remuneration was still falling by 1.1 per cent. This has been the seventh straight year of decline. If the US has experienced a largely jobless recovery, Japan is going through a wageless one.

[In the following article, published in the May/June 2005 issue of FOREIGN POLICY, Robert McNamara makes a powerful case for ending the U.S. government's reliance upon nuclear weapons as an instrument of U.S. policy. Pointing to their enormous destructiveness, the likelihood that they will be employed deliberately or accidentally, the immoral and illegal nature of their maintenance and use, and their incitement to proliferation, the former U.S. secretary of defense argues for prompt action “toward the elimination – or near elimination – of all nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, he argues, the Bush administration is moving in precisely the opposite direction, by turning its back on treaty commitments to nuclear arms control and disarmament and, instead, promoting a U.S. nuclear buildup.

Japan is now embarking on a historic and potentially dangerous journey into space, urged on by the U.S., which seeks a more heavily armed and militarily active partner in the Asia- Pacific.

Space technology is being developed for two primary reasons. One is to give nations the ability to better coordinate warfare on Earth. The second is that many nations and corporations view space as the “new world.” Gold on asteroids, water and helium-3 on the moon, magnesium, cobalt, and uranium are believed to be on Mars. Corporations intend to venture to these planetary bodies and secure massive profits in the years ahead. But first new space technologies have to be created that make it possible, and cost effective, to “mine the skies.” [1]

Nagase Takashi tortured British POWs during the building of the Thai-Burma railway. He has spent his life since trying to make amends and wants the railway declared a UN World Heritage Site before he dies.

Nagase Takashi still breaks down when he remembers the young British man he helped torture. “I couldn't bear his pain,” he says, choking back tears. “He was crying Mother! Mother! And I thought: what she would feel if she could see her son like this. I still dream about it.”

The phrase ‘sixty years of the post-war’ is often used to mean ‘60 years since the end of the war’ or ‘these past sixty years’. However, the term ‘post-war’ itself is premised on a ‘pre-war’ and a ‘wartime’. In other words, prior to the sixty years of post-war, there is the disjuncture between ‘post-war’, on the one hand, and ‘pre-war’ and ‘wartime’ on the other. For me, it is this experience of disjuncture that is the starting point of ‘post-war’.

The Assessment of Park Chung Hee, the brutal dictator who many credit with launching South Korea's accelerated economic development, is central to debates on Korean democracy, development and independence. Paik Nak-chung, distinguished literary critic and a leading Korean public intellectual, delivered this keynote address to the International Korean Studies Conference on ‘The Park Era: A Reassessment After Twenty-five Years’ at University of Wollongong.

China's growing presence in South Asia is riding on its accelerated economic and strategic influence in the region. This article gauges the interplay between economic, particularly resource factors, and strategic factors in China's advance in the region and its relations with South Asian nations. One measure of China's economic outreach is its current trade volume with all South Asian nations, which now approaches $20 billion a year. [1] Its bilateral trade with India alone accounts for $13.6 billion a year, a number that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has projected to grow to $30 billion by 2010. [2] Yet it constitutes just 1% of China's global trade as compared to 9% of India's. [3] These statistics pale in comparison with the trade between China and East Asian nations. China's trade with Japan, which was valued at $213 billion in 2004, [4] is more than 15 times that between Beijing and Delhi. In 2004 China passed the United States as Japan's largest trading partner. What is remarkable about Sino-Indian trade, however, is its dramatic acceleration from $338 million in 1992 to $13.6 billion in 2004. [5] The projected $30 billion trade between China and India by 2010 will likely surpass Indo-U.S. trade that is currently valued at $20 billion a year.

Escalating tension with China, violently illustrated by renewed anti-Japanese protests in Shanghai and other big cities at the weekend, is increasing pressure on Tokyo to expand its military capabilities and back a deepening strategic alliance with the US reaching from East Asia to the Gulf.

In February 2000, Japan began the new century on a sour note when it lost its rights to the Khafji oil field in the Saudi-Kuwaiti neutral zone. Japan's Arabian Oil Company had held exploration rights in that zone since 1957, and the loss of such a long-term investment was keenly felt.

[Debates over the best film of all time tend to go no further than Hollywood classics such as Citizen Kane. But the influential Halliwell's Film Guide now says the title belongs to Tokyo Story, a little-known Japanese film in which nothing much happens. Peter Bradshaw pays tribute.]

[Among the debates critical of Japanese textbook nationalism that have raged in Korea, China and internationally in recent months, this is a rare example of a self-reflexive discussion among Korean historians of the logic and limits of nationalist perspectives on their own history and that of East Asia.]

For weeks, Japan's textbooks have been sparking strong criticism in Korea and China for whitewashing Japanese colonial rule. But, historians say, Korea's textbooks, published by the government for students in the first to 10th grades, also exhibit strong nationalism.

TOKYO – When are a few sea-swept, uninhabited rocky islets more than a bunch of rocks? When they involve lucrative fisheries and emotional issues that hark back to the days of the Japanese Empire.

The two tiny, rocky islets surrounded by 33 smaller rocks also represent sovereignty and national pride for both Japan and South Korea - though Seoul controls them now and the lucrative fishing in the area. The disputes over the islands – called Tokdo by Koreans and Takeshima by Japanese – threaten the recent rapprochement between the two neighbors and represent a significant political and economic setback. The South Korean public is so incensed that hundreds have poured into the streets to protest and the united front against North Korea's nuclear ambitions is cracking.