The watchdog role of journalists in Japan is on trial in several cases with enormous implications for freedom of the press here

In a summer laden with portentous anniversaries, several important skirmishes between journalists and the people they keep tabs on passed by almost unnoticed.

In July, Matsuoka Toshiyasu, president of the Rokusaisha publishing company, was arrested on a deformation charge that has editors across the country nervously consulting their rolodexes for libel lawyers.

On 30 October 1940, six days after meeting with Adolf Hitler in the railway station at Montoire, Philippe Pétain announced on French radio that “a collaboration has been envisioned between our two countries.” Since then, “collaboration” has been the word by which we denigrate political cooperation with an occupying force. Pétain's choice of language to characterize the arrangement he made with Hitler—he claimed he would shield France from the greater threat of military occupation—was not of his own devising. The French army had signed an armistice with Germany four months earlier that committed French officials “to conform to the decisions of the German authorities and collaborate faithfully with them.” This first iteration was vague and innocent; Pétain's was not, and less and less could be. As war and occupation subordinated France's economy and polity to German control, collaboration unravelled into a tangle of compromises that few could anticipate at the outset of the war.

What is the future of the competition to control the market in commercial aircraft between Boeing and the European Airbus? Does Japan have a role to play in the new generation of aircraft? While Boeing dominated commercial aircraft sales through the 1980s, in the 1990s it has fallen behind Airbus. As Tanaka Sakai shows, the stakes for the U.S., Europe and Japan are high, and the outcomes may deeply affect the ability of Japan and Asia to emerge as a major industrial powerhouse in the decades ahead. Tanaka Sakai, an investigative reporter, publishes the Japanese language weblog http://www.tanakanews.com. His report on Boeing and Japan appeared in the December 31, 2003 issue of Tanakanews. Developments since the publication of this article suggest that Boeing, and the Boeing-Japanese connection are central to a new lease on life for the beleagured company and industry. As the April 18 Asahi Shimbun reported,, Boeing announced the sale of 50 7E7s to Japan's ANA, valuing the sale at $6 billion and giving the airline confidence in moving the plane into production. Of particular interest is the fine print: Three Japanese enterprises, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and Fuji Heavy Industries will provide 35% of the production of the new plane, centered on the construction of the wings, as well as providing a heavy share of the financing. Is this the way forward for Japan's lagging aircraft industry, or does it seal anew Japanese dependence on American aircraft production, with the U.S. maintaining monopoly control over the engine production? Tanaka suggests another possible scenario: Japanese-Chinese-Korean cooperation at the center of a future Asian regional design. But such a possibility will require major developments within Asian regionalism.

LOS ANGELES (Kyodo) After the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki passed last August, filmmaker Steven Okazaki began worrying that the attacks and their cautionary lessons are being forgotten.

Why did Japan, the victim of the atomic bomb, early and whole- heartedly opt for nuclear power? From 1945 to 1955, indeed, from the immediate aftermath of Japan's surrender, the Asahi, Mainichi and Yomiuri, the big three newspapers, unanimously and without controversy, endorsed the peaceful uses of nuclear power, distinguishing it from nuclear weapons. This article reconsiders a literature that has focused on the decisive role of the Yomiuri newspaper, and Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace program, which led the Japanese to accept nuclear power in the mid-1950s. Instead, it shows a broad media consensus in support of nuclear power from the 1940s, envisaged as the heart of the next industrial revolution.

Major trends that are gradually changing the fortunes of nations and reshaping world history are not easy to identify. There are three key reasons for this. First, many important trends unfold so insidiously that they are recognized only ex post once the developments reach a breaking point and a long-term trend ends in a stunning discontinuity. Second, we cannot foresee which trends will become so embedded as to be seemingly immune to external forces and which ones will suddenly veer away from predictable lines. Third, what follows afterward is often equally unpredictable: the beginning of a new long-lasting trend or a prolonged oscillation, a further intensification or an irreversible weakening.

Four months after the landslide re-election of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, Fukushima Mizuho, leader of Japan's Social Democrats (SDP), paints a through-the-looking-glass picture of the country Koizumi has helmed since 2001.

Even as much of the world's press hails the return of economic prosperity following the publication of Japan's best economic figures for more than a decade, Fukushima highlights the fallout from the Koizumi reforms: growing income and wealth disparities, social breakdown, declining birthrates and one of the most casualized economies in the developed world, providing a dystopic image of the once vaunted lifetime employment system.

The 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurs today, August 6, 2007, bringing with it thousands of commemoration ceremonies in cities and towns around the world. Such events have become part and parcel of the nuclear era, and include the lighting and floating of lanterns in memory of the dead, silent vigils, religious observances, the chalking of human “shadows” on the ground, readings of John Hersey's Hiroshima, and leafletting.

On the 23rd and 24th of April the first round of negotiations for the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) was held in Canberra, the Australian capital. This is the first negotiation since the telephone conversation four months ago between Prime Ministers Abe Shinzo and John Howard, in which a decision was made to begin negotiations. To avoid negative political repercussions the negotiations were scheduled to follow the Japanese General Election and were held in Australia.

Much recent discussion on anti-base opposition in the Asia-Pacific has focused on island-wide protests against the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma. By uniting in mass demonstrations against the construction of a new U.S. base, and by staging a multi-year round the clock demonstration at the proposed site of the new base, Okinawans put pressure squarely on Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to keep his campaign pledge to move Futenma air base off the island. However, shortly after the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which South Korea and the U.S. charge was the work of a torpedo launched by a North Korean submarine, Hatoyama reversed his pledge. The Japanese government bowed to U.S. pressure, agreeing to move forward with earlier plans to relocate Futenma within Okinawa to smooth over U.S.-Japan relations.

In July 1969, a leak of chemical weapons on Okinawa sickened more than 20 U.S. soldiers and laid bare one of the Pentagon's biggest Cold War secrets: the storage of toxic munitions outside of the continental United States.

Public outrage following the Okinawa accident forced the White House to launch Operation Red Hat — codename for a mission to remove the chemicals from the island.

The US global “empire of bases” has been well analyzed by Chalmers Johnson, especially in his Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, 2006. The complex of bases in Okinawa, ever since the islands fell into US hands in 1945, were central to the 20th century wars in Asia from Korea and Vietnam to the Gulf and Iraq. Okinawa was (and is) in the poignant position of being passionately antiwar, a lesson driven home by the catastrophe it suffered in 1945, yet forced by the Japanese and US governments to accept war and war preparation as its basic collective raison d’être. In that sense, Okinawa may be compared to North Korea, both states whose essence is defined in terms of “Sengun” - priority to the military.

Among the myriad controversies surrounding the American use of nuclear weapons against Japanese cities in August 1945 is the seemingly simple question of exactly when President Harry S. Truman decided to use the bomb. The closest thing to a presidential directive regarding use was an order dispatched on July 25, 1945 from Acting Army Chief of Staff Thomas T. Handy to General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the United States Army Strategy Air Forces. The directive, personally approved by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, authorized the delivery of the “first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945…” The bomb was to be used on one of four target cities (a list that included Niigata and Kokura as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and no further orders were required for the use of additional bombs, which were to be “delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff.” But while this directive was almost certainly discussed with the president before its approval, Truman never signed this or any other order with respect to the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. More significantly, the order was itself the product of an extended series of discussions and decisions that in some cases went back months or even years prior to the summer of 1945. While significant as a link in the chain of operations that culminated in the atomic bombings of August 6 and 9, historians must look beyond the July 25 directive to understand exactly when and how Truman committed to the use the bomb.

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.

Japan is routinely depicted as a leader in addressing the global community's ominous energy and environmental challenges. A recent issue of Newsweek, for example, incorrectly assumed that Japan had the “feed-in tariff” mechanism that Germany in particular has used to vault itself into global leadership in renewables. Japan's reputation as a leader is neither inexplicable nor, to be frank, entirely undeserved. Japan certainly responded adroitly to the oil shocks of the 1970s, instituting tight energy conservation goals and investing heavily in the promotion of renewable technology. And note that Japan's public transport systems rank among the world's best for widespread diffusion, low cost and reliability. This is true not only of Tokyo, Osaka and other major cities, but also of its national high speed rail network.

In the late 1990s, press coverage of police scandals in Japan provoked policy reactions so that more ‘trivial’ offences were reported, and overall crime figures rocketed. The resulting ‘myth of the collapse of secure society’ appears, in turn, to have contributed to increasingly punitive public views about offenders and sentencing in Japan.

The United States suffered a serious financial deficit as a result of the Korean War in the 1950s. To solve this problem, it moved to reduce the sizes of US forces in Korea and the South Korean military which depended on U.S. financial aid. As President Rhee Syng-man opposed this plan, the U.S. introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea in January 1958. For this purpose, the UN Command removed NNSC personnel from South Korea in June 1956, and nullified part of the Armistice Agreement in June 1957.

As nuclear weapons were deployed in South Korea, North Korea began a massive program of underground construction in the 1960s and deployed its conventional forces in forward positions. North Korea asked the Soviet Union in 1963 and China in 1964 for help in developing nuclear weapons of its own, but was rebuffed. South Korea prepared to develop its own nuclear weapons in 1974 and North Korea began to develop its own program in the late 1970s.

North Korea seeks, through development of nuclear weapons, to secure international recognition as well as economic aid and national security. Thus for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, provision must be made for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons without a sense of insecurity. In addition, it is unrealistic to urge North Korea to unilaterally dismantle its nuclear weapons without a breakthrough in U.S.-North Korea relations, preparing the withdrawal of US forces in South Korea, eliminating the U.S. nuclear umbrella for South Korea, and abolishing the U.S.-South Korea Alliance.

Japan to date has provided an inspiring role model for Asian workers trying to ban the importation and mining of asbestos in Asia. Japanese money has enabled international gatherings of workers and officials trying to end the importation and use of this deadly dust.