This report consists of two related articles. Jeff Kingston reports on Japan's Kashiwazaki nuclear disaster and Japanese plans to sell nuclear power technology to Indonesia. This is followed by Tom Hyland's report on Indonesian plans to build nuclear power plants.

In Japan, Kashiwazaki has come to mean “close call”. On July 16 a 6.8 magnitude trembler jolted beneath the world's largest nuclear power complex in a place that was not supposed to have a fault. This earthquake serves as a vivid reminder of the risks generated by nuclear power, especially in zones of seismic risk like Indonesia.

In early 2007, the Indonesian government decided to withhold its bird flu virus samples from the World Health Organisation's collaborating centres pending a new global mechanism for virus sharing that offered better terms for developing countries. In breaking with the existing practice of freely sending flu virus samples to these laboratories, Indonesia expressed dissatisfaction with a system which obliged WHO member states to share virus samples with WHO's collaborating centres, but which lacked mechanisms for equitable sharing of benefits, most importantly, affordable vaccines developed from these viral source materials.

When, in mid-2005, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia's “history wars” – the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for Japan's 20th century military expansion in Asia.

Amid intensifying rivalry between Tokyo and Beijing over influence in Asia, Japan is revving up its drive to strengthen relations with countries in Indochina, an economically backward but geopolitically important part of the region.

The target countries are Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which are collectively referred to as the “CLV” countries. To be sure, these countries are all relatively small in terms of economic size and represent a tiny fraction of East Asia's economy.

In 1993 Professor Yamamuro Shin'ichi of Kyoto University published Kimera: Manshukoku no shozo (Chimera: A Portrait of Manzhouguo). He sent me a copy at that time—we have been friends since the mid-1980s—and I glanced it over and thought how nice it would be to read, as soon as I had some of that most precious of commodities: spare time. Unlike the countless other books collecting dust, which I continue to promise myself I will someday get to, I actually had an opportunity to read this one during 1996-97 while I was a visiting professor at the Research Institute in the Humanities at Kyoto University.

Curiously, it had to be on the fateful day when Russia had begun brooding over former president Boris Yeltsin's final, ambivalent legacy that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived on his first official visit to Moscow.

The United States needs to keep the focus on al-Qaida while targeting Iran. It isn't easy.

There's no escaping Iraq. Two incidents in recent days bear heavily on the unending conflict in that country. More broadly, they reveal how the United States administration's definition of its "war on terror" (or “long war”) reflects entrapment in a way of thinking that requires it constantly to press the real world into the service of a partisan, dangerous, and self-defeating ideology.

Since the early 1980s, China has been hailed as the poster child of post-socialist transition, shifting its revolutionary course via a reform that has generated the world's most dynamic growth in GNP and trade over a quarter of a century and elevated it to the forefront of nations attracting foreign investment. Often eclipsed in this glowing picture of reform are enduring, indeed exacerbated, structures of inequality and the vibrant forms of popular resistance these have spawned. So too are the inequalities of the revolutionary era, including both persisting historical legacies and new forms of inequality. This article seeks to provide a framework both for assessing structures of Chinese inequality in successive epochs of revolution and reform and for gauging the changing relationship between social movements and structures of inequality. Three key questions drive the analysis: What are the legacies of the Chinese Revolution for the pursuit of social equality? How has reform restructured patterns of inequality? What is the relationship between the social upheavals that took place during both periods and changing patterns of inequality?

Contemplating the appalling mismanagement of the global political response to the emergence and early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the greatest enemy of rational public policy making is not, as might have been expected in the case of AIDS, nihilism and paralyzing despair.

Rather, the staggering inability of the global community to prevent the long, relentless march of AIDS from its African origins to the shores of the Asia Pacific owes a great deal to the limitless capacity of human beings for invincible optimism. Time and again, evidence that the HIV virus was a dangerous threat requiring decisive pre-emptive containment action was ignored or discounted.

With more than 2,500,000 U.S. personnel serving across the planet and military bases spread across each continent, it's time to face up to the fact that our American democracy has spawned a global empire.

The following is excerpted from Chalmers Johnson's new book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” (Metropolitan Books).

This article examines the impact of acts of blood-sacrifice on the establishment and politics of a nation-state by focusing on the different experiences of the Japanese diaspora on the United States mainland and in the Hawaiian Islands during and after the Second World War.

Japan Focus introduction. Below are the first two in a twenty-one part series published by the Asahi Shimbun and International Herald Tribune on May 23, 2007 that seeks to chart Japan's role in shaping the world's future. The Asahi editors target the twin dangers of militarism, particularly nuclear weapons and global warming, at the center of their effort to frame an appropriate role for Japan in the coming decades. These are indeed two of the most intractable issues facing the Asia Pacific and the world. Yet the series nowhere confronts the central obstacles to an expanded Japanese contribution toward peaceful resolution of global problems: that is Japan's subordination within a US-Japan security relationship. Nor, in reaffirming Article 9, does it address the implications of the US-Japan relationship or Japan's contemporary drive for a more powerful, expansive, and constitutionally mandated military role. It remains, in short, at the level of rhetorical commitment to “peace” without engaging the intractable geostrategic issues that challenge peaceful outcomes, above all the nature of US global power and Japan's subordination to it. The point was made clearly by Terashima Jitsuo, President of the Japan Research Institute (Nihon Sogo Kenkyujo). Responding to questions from an Asahi editorial staff member about the value of a China-Japan-US meeting, Terashima commented, “So long as Japan is viewed both by the US and China as a peripheral country attached to the US, then materialization of a China-Japan-US meeting is far off.”

In 2004, then Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi, in response to a request from the United States, sent a contingent of 600 Self-Defense Force troops to Samawa, Iraq, for the purpose of humanitarian relief and reconstruction. Given that Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution eschews the use of military force in the resolution of conflict, this was an enormously controversial step, going further than previous SDF engagements as part of UN peacekeeping operations, which themselves had been criticized by opposition forces as an intensification of the incremental watering-down of the “no-war clause” from as early as the 1950s.

Tokyo ~ Ko Bunyu's comic book Introduction to China is not for the fainthearted. In 300 graphic pages, it claims that the Chinese are incapable of democracy, practice cannibalism, and have the world's leading sex economy. In one sequence, famous political figures say the country is the source of most of Asia's contagious diseases. In another, illustrated with naked, spread-eagled women, China is said to have exported 600,000 “AIDS-infested” prostitutes.

Almost immediately following the end of World War II, Americans began to question the use of the atomic bomb and the circumstances surrounding the end of the Pacific War. More than half a century later, books and articles on the atomic bomb still provoke storms of debate among readers and the use of atomic weapons remains a sharply contested subject. As the 1995 controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum revealed, the issues connected with the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to touch a sensitive nerve in Americans. Among scholars, disagreement remains no less heated. But, on the whole, this debate has been strangely parochial, centering almost exclusively on how the U.S. leadership made the decision to drop the bombs.

Chisato (“Kitty”) Dubreuil, an Ainu-Japanese art history comparativist, has charted connections between the arts of the Ainu and those of diverse indigenous peoples of the north Pacific Rim. Currently finishing her PhD dissertation, Dubreuil co-curated, with William Fitzhugh, the director of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, the groundbreaking 1999 Smithsonian exhibition on Ainu culture. Insisting on the inclusion of the work of contemporary Ainu artists, as well as art and artifacts of past Ainu culture, her input redefined the scope of the exhibition and reflected her ongoing activism to challenge the “vanishing people” myth about the Ainu. Dubreuil explains, “We are still here and our culture is still vibrant.”

The January 1922 issue of Shonen kurabu (Boy's Club) carried the first episode of an exciting new “hot-blooded novel” (nekketsu shosetsu) drawn from the fertile imagination of noted children's writer Miyazaki Ichiu. For fourteen consecutive issues Miyazaki enthralled Japanese children with depictions of Japanese valour and the Yamato spirit (Yamato damashii) locked in a titanic struggle against a duplicitous and rapacious foreign enemy. The fate of the navy and of the nation itself hung in the balance. The Imperial navy fought valiantly against a technologically superior foe but was ultimately destroyed. Then, in Japan's darkest hour, the nation was saved by a group of true patriots, led by a child warrior commanding a powerful new technology. All Japan wept. This was the Future War Between Japan and America, “the greatest naval battle in history.”

Foreign ministers are busy people - especially energetic, creative diplomats like Russia's Sergei Lavrov and Iran's Manouchehr Mottaki, representing capitals that by tradition place great store on international diplomacy.

Therefore, the very fact that Lavrov and Mottaki have met no less than four times in as many months suggests a great deal about the high importance attached by the two capitals to their mutual understanding at the bilateral and regional level.

Fifty years ago, the Canadian diplomat and noted Japan scholar, Herbert Norman, committed suicide, stepping off the roof of a nine-storey building in downtown Cairo. Canadian ambassador to Egypt at the time, Norman was 47 years old and his death on April 4, 1957 provoked a crisis in Canada-U.S. relations.