On April 9, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report on the military comfort women, which Japan Focus presents here in full. Much of the report's content will not be new to Focus readers. The research and reporting of scholars and journalists such as Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Yuki Tanaka, Sarah Soh, George Hicks, and Norimitsu Onishi contribute much to author Larry Nikch's findings. But the report also draws extensively on responses to the issues by the Yomiuri Shimbun, Sankei Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun and other Japanese newspapers as well as successive Japanese government press conferences illustrative of the official disarray in the face of US Congressional pressures on the eve of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's first visit to the US since taking office. It also provides an extensive record of the Japanese government's official handling of the comfort women issues, including apologies and unofficial reparations over a fifteen year period.

Japan's population is aging and shrinking. If other demographic factors, such as retirement age or fertility rate remain unchanged, Japan will need large-scale labor migration in order to keep its workforce at a level that ensures the functionality of the state. The nation's political elites, however, are hesitant about opening Japan's doors to such migrants.

There is a vast amount of data available on Japan's demographic change, of which the most relevant is the decline of Japan's workforce. Data provided by Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) shows the projected development of the Japanese population divided into age brackets. It forecasts a decline of those 14 years old and under; there is an even sharper decline predicted for those aged 15 to 64. Only those 65 years and older will increase in number. A nation's workforce is usually defined by the 15 to 64 age bracket; those who are 14 and younger, as well as those 65 and older, count as the non-working population. IPSS (2006: 12) predicts for Japan that the working and nonworking populations will almost equal each other at some 40 to 50 million each by 2050. This development would lead to the breakdown of the nation's social services, its economic power, and global competitiveness in general.

Blinded by imperial hubris, the author vividly shows how Australian and American forces received a bitter lesson in guerrilla warfare and the uses of technology from the NLF.

In 1967 the commander of First Australian Task Force (1ATF), Brigadier Stuart Graham ordered the construction of an 11 kilometre ‘barrier fence and minefield’ in Phuoc Tuy Province, southern Vietnam. This ‘barrier’, which ran for some 11 kilometres through the southern Phuoc Tuy, would constitute the biggest blunder in Australian military history since the Second World War. It would also constitute a story of strategic self-destruction that epitomised both Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and the wider Australian imperial tradition of sending expeditions to farflung wars.

This article examines how issues “closest to home”—family, friends and furusato (home town/area)—affect Japanese war memories. It draws upon testimony illustrating the importance of “home” and analyzes how family and local identities impinge on the evolution of cultural memory and war commemoration. Examples are drawn from Hokkaido.

In 1938, Ito Yoshimitsu enlisted in the Sapporo Tsukisamu 25th regiment, part of the Seventh (Hokkaido) Division of the Imperial Army. He saw action in China before transferring to the military police (kempei) in 1943. At the end of the war he was stationed in Celebes in present-day Indonesia. There he was arrested by the Dutch after the war and executed as a BC class war criminal on 4 October 1948. Ito had been convicted of serious torture, including beating, burning with cigarettes and force-feeding water to Indonesian prisoners.

For 60 years the world has faced no greater threat than nuclear weapons. Japan, as a nuclear victim country, with “three non-nuclear principles” (non-production, non-possession, and non-introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan) and its “Peace Constitution,” had unique credentials to play a positive role in helping the world find a solution, yet its record has been consistently pro-nuclear, that is to say, pro-nuclear energy, pro-the nuclear cycle, and, pro-nuclear weapons. This paper elaborates on Japan's aspiration to become a nuclear state, arguing that attention should be paid to Rokkasho, Tsuruga, and Hamaoka, the places at the heart of Japan's present and future nuclear plans, no less than to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose names represent the horror of its nuclear past.

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied, warned radical war reporter Claud Cockburn. That famous dictum resonates strongly throughout the murky story of Okinawa's reversion to Japanese rule in 1972.

Tokyo and Washington have always denied the secret pact that obliged Japanese taxpayers to shoulder the burden of compensating Okinawa landowners during the transition. Both governments have clung to that denial despite recent damning testimony from a key Foreign Ministry official and the release of papers in 2000 and 2002 from US government archives proving the existence of the deal beyond all reasonable doubt. Throughout the twists and turns of the scandal, officials on both sides have corrupted the judicial process, lied to the people who pay their salaries and destroyed the lives of the few whistleblowers brave enough to take them on.

Japan Focus presents two complementary perspectives on the challenges facing China and the world economy in the context of global over-accumulation. In 1997, China emerged unscathed from the economic collapse that set back Japan and then Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and other high-flying Asian economies. The present analyses pose the question of whether China, too, is now vulnerable, with consequences that will be felt throughout the world economy. Posted at Japan Focus on February 9, 2007.

This is the first article by John McGlynn in a series that meticulously dissects US charges of North Korean criminality, notably the forgery of US currency and money laundering, the significance of the legal instruments it has imposed on North Korea through Banco Delta Asia, and the significance of US actions for the resolution of the interrelated issues of North Korean nuclear weapons and the normalization of US-North Korean relations.

The history of Inner Mongolia during the last century has been in important respects a story of Sinicization. On the one hand, massive immigration by Han Chinese has transformed the Mongol community into a minority of around 20% in their homeland. On the other hand, as is the case of other minority peoples in China and elsewhere, there has been a steady erosion of the distinctive identity of the Mongols, especially in urban regions. Many now speak and read no Mongolian and have adopted Chinese names, dress and other markers of Chinese culture. Visitors to the capital of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot, as recently as ten years ago would have found it very similar in appearance to a dozen or more Chinese cities of about the same size. It comes as a surprise therefore that, in the last decade, the cityscape of Hohhot has come to display a public Mongol identity that differentiates it sharply from other cities in China. This new public face of Mongol identity is not a reflection of resurgent Mongol nationalism. Rather it represents a taming of ethnicity by the forces of tourism and the market through processes of nationalization and globalization.

Two recent libel cases have led to concerns that the freedom of Japanese journalists to investigate and, if necessary criticize the powerful is under attack. Both involve marginal publications that make a living tackling “taboo” subjects and which have suffered serious legal repercussions as a result. The mainstream media in Japan has so far declined to discuss the issues, still less to offer any expressions of solidarity for their plight. The cases coincide with the publication of a report by Reporters Without Borders, which called the “steady erosion” of press freedom in Japan “alarming” and again criticized the stifling role of press clubs on reporting in the world's second-largest economy.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. provides a privileged site for Americans to “remember” the Vietnam War. W.J.T. Mitchell writes that

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is antiheroic, antimonumental, a V-shaped gash or scar, a trace of violence suffered not of violence wielded in the service of a glorious cause (as in the conventional war memorial). It achieves the universality of the public monument not by rising above its surroundings to transcend the political, but by going beneath the political to the shared sense of a wound that will never heal…. Its legibility is not that of narrative: no heroic episode such as the planting of the flag on Iwo Jima is memorialized, only the mind-numbing and undifferentiated chronology of violence and death catalogued by the fifty-eight thousand names inscribed on the black marble walls.

Fueled by perennial controversies over official Japanese regulation of textbooks, Western media and academics thrive on claims of a peculiar Japanese “forgetfulness” of wartime atrocities. But the postwar record of Japanese discussions of wartime biological warfare experiments reveals an impressive level of public exposure that, in some ways, surpasses American discussions of its own wartime past. To stress Japanese “forgetfulness” tells only half the story and obscures the tale of postwar political polarization that has greatly facilitated exposure of war crimes in Japan.

Japan Focus introduction: For more than five decades after the end of the World War II, Japan articulated an official identity as a pacifist, anti-nuclear nation both domestically and in the international arena (its formidable Self Defense Force notwithstanding). Since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, however, the debate over revising Japan's “Peace Constitution” intensified. In particular, Article 9 of the Constitution, by which Japan renounces offensive war, has been under attack by politicians proclaiming the goal of becoming “a normal nation”, and the present Abe administration has prioritized Constitutional revision. Along with politicians and the citizenry, many intellectuals and artists have spoken against the possibility of Japan identifying itself as a “nation that wages war”–thus rejecting its assumed role as advocate of peace and foe of nuclear arms. In June 2004, Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo, along with artists and intellectuals Inoue Hisashi, Komori Yoichi, and Kato Shuichi and others, formed the Article 9 Association, which advocates “protection” or preservation of the present Constitution.

In his final televised speech to the Iraqi people in 2003, Saddam Hussein denounced the invading Americans as “the Mongols of this age,” a reference to the last time infidels had conquered his country, in 1258. But the comparison isn't very apt — unlike the Mongols, the Americans don't have the organizational genius of Genghis Khan.

It may seem improbable that a regional cooperation organization commences its annual summit against the backdrop of military exercises. The European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the Organization of Latin American States - none of them has ever done that.

For those inclined to keep their hopes well under control when it comes to the Japanese judiciary's capacity to deliver decisions even mildly critical of the political establishment, news of the Tokyo High Court's finding in favor of the Violence-against-Women-in-War Japan Network (VAWW-Net Japan) against the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) was stunning enough to provoke initial eye-rubbing. At least I can say for myself that I had to read twice, and thrice, the first brief listserv message from Nishino Rumiko, one of VAWW-Net's two co-representatives since the premature death (2002) of founder Matsui Yayori.

When the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) released its list of the world's top ten rivers at risk in late March, attention in Australia naturally focused on the fact that the Murray-Darling River system was one of those listed. Very little attention was given in the Australian media to the other nine rivers so identified, which included the two longest rivers in the Southeast Asian region, the Mekong and the Salween. Both these rivers rise in the Himalayas in Chinese territory before flowing into Southeast Asia, and play a vital role for the populations in their basin areas; for the 60-70 million in the Mekong's basin of nearly 800,000 square kilometres, and for the 6-7 million in the Salween's basin of 272,000 square kilometres. The WWF's claims about the risks facing the rivers it lists as ‘in danger’ are bound to generate controversy, with proponents of hydroelectricity sourced from dams bound to express scepticism. Nevertheless, current and future developments associated with both the Mekong and the Salween are certainly worthy of examination. For there is irrefutable evidence of the problems that can be caused by the construction of large-scale dams on previously free-flowing rivers. Moreover, a review of current developments associated with the Salween and the Mekong rivers is desirable at a time when environmental issues are increasingly a concern internationally. Such issues have particular relevance in Southeast Asia, both within individual countries and in terms of relations between individual Southeast Asian countries and their great neighbour, China.

Migrant-support activists have comprised a major voice to contest the state-endorsed narrative that presents migrants as a crime threat to Japanese society. This paper investigates the discursive and organizational construction of their challenge against this discourse. It argues that the autonomy and expertise of migrant-support NGOs enable them to challenge the state and create the basis for their modest yet significant political impact.

This is the third article of a three part series introducing historical museums in Japan and their role in public education on issues of war, peace, war crimes and reconciliation. The first article is Takashi Yoshida's “Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern Japanese History.” The second article is Rumiko Nishino's “The Women's Active Museum on War and Peace.”