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.

On 29 June, Japan witnessed its largest public protest since the 1960s. This was the latest in a series of Friday night gatherings outside Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's official residence. Well over one hundred thousand people came together to vent their anger at his 16 June decision to order a restart of Units 3 and 4 at the Oi nuclear plant . This article discusses the events of the last several weeks which sparked this massive turnout as well as the nature of the protest. It begins by outlining the Japanese government's recent policies affirming nuclear power, from Noda's nationwide address of 8 June justifying the Oi restarts on the grounds of ‘protecting livelihoods’, and continuing with the move on 20 June to revise the Atomic Energy Basic Law and establish a law to set up a new, yet potentially toothless, nuclear regulatory agency.

On June 10, 2014, the Article 9 Association marks its tenth anniversary, more than ever embattled and determined. As illustrated by Alexis Dudden’s recent article on this site, “The Nomination of Article 9 of Japan's Constitution for a Nobel Peace Prize,” business people figure in the broad swath of “Japanese people who conserve Article 9” recognized as worthy of consideration for the Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Shinagawa Masaji, the subject of this memorial tribute by prominent modern literature scholar and executive secretary of the Article 9 Association Komori Yoichi, was surely the dean of progressive financial leaders of the postwar era. English-language readers who follow Japan are likely to be aware of the political clout of Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), which not so incidentally supports Constitutional revision. Miho Matsugu's generously annotated translation* of Komori's tribute to Shinagawa following his death in August of 2013 provides a glimpse of an association, Keizai Doyukai, or Japan Association of Corporate Executives, that has often projected a contrasting sense of mission. Given the neo-liberal furor reigning over the ever bellicose US and its client state Japan (to borrow Gavan McCormack’s designation, as in “Japan’s Client State (Zokkoku) Problem”), we are right to be painfully aware of the limited capacity of capitalism to benefit all human beings-not to mention our home the earth. It is all the more refreshing, then, to learn not only about Shinagawa's commitment to the “no-war clause” but also his years of union activism and espousal of “revisionist capitalism.” His example prompts wide-ranging comparison, whether to Nordic models (see the intriguing comparison recently published on this site of Sweden and Japan's policies in the face of financial crisis) or in another era of US capitalism, Henry Ford's brand of investment in anti-union employee well-being and espousal of pacifism, albeit a pacifism fundamentally flawed by anti-Semitism.

“While it is crucial to explicitly define and communicate the acts or damage that we would find unacceptable, we should not be too specific about our responses. Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US might do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool – headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially ”out of control“ can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.” Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger called this the Madman Strategy. For nuclear weapons to serve as a deterrent, it's not enough simply to possess them. The problem is, it's difficult to believe that a person of ordinary human feeling or rationality would actually use them. A first strike would be a moral abomination, and would also mean abandoning the policy of deterrence; a second strike would mean that deterrence had failed, so that its only motive would be vengeance. For nuclear weapons to be an effective deterrent, it's best for a government to persuade adversaries that its leaders are crazy enough to use them – as the document says, “out of control”, “irrational and vindictive”.

Toyota is back on top after one of the worst crises in its history. But has it solved its problems, or just buried them?

In 2008, Toyota faced an embarrassing problem: The Imperial Family's luxury Century Royal, used to carry Crown Prince Naruhito around Japan, was a dud. Memos flew back and forth between managers and senior engineers trying to find the cause of what appeared to be a speed-control fault. “This is a very difficult situation,” fretted one engineer. “The Imperial Household Agency feels there is risk if it should recur.” The unspoken concern was clear: What if a crash hurt or even killed Japan's heir to the Imperial throne?

‘Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.’ Ernest Renan

In 2002, the Japanese government built the “Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims” within the Hiroshima Peace Park. It is located less than two hundred meters from the A-Bomb Peace Museum operated by the Hiroshima City Council. This new Memorial Hall, funded and run by the Japanese government, includes the following message on one of the wall panels:

As discussed in Greene's essay, the belief in the safety of nuclear power has historically been quite strong. Jeff Kingston picks up this idea in his piece, characterizing the faith in absolute safety a “myth” that blinded the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese government to the potential dangers of nuclear power. The story that Kingston tells is about how environmental events in the form of an earthquake and tsunami together with human error caused a disaster with grave environmental and human consequences. He argues that the power of an idea, the inadequate knowledge of politicians, and the vested interests of bureaucrats and businessmen resulted in a lack of attention to environmental risks and shortcomings in emergency procedures. Or to put it more pointedly, TEPCO and government regulators failed for a variety of reasons to take seriously the risks of a tsunami or earthquake and to respond adequately to the dangers of radiation. Kingston's essay also prompts us to remember the privileged position from which historians think and write about the past, with the benefit of hindsight, when convincing ideas have been revealed as myth and human failings have been exposed by catastrophe.

The five-day Russo-Georgian War in the Caucasus brought into sharp focus many conflicts rooted in the region's history and in aggressive US-NATO policies since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notable among these were the military encirclement of Russia and attempts to control energy resources in areas long dominated by the Soviet Union. The net effect was to hasten a dangerous new era of rivalry between the world's two most powerful nuclear weapons states, one which will be shaped hereafter by the current global recession and the changes it is bringing about in the economic practices of all states.

This article strives to give a voice to survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake who suffered from the tsunami but not the nuclear disaster; their invisibility makes the case that these survivors are a separate group of Japan's “abandoned people.” They have been poorly represented in discussions on Japan's future energy policy; Thompson uses individual accounts to explain the residents’ “short and long-term needs, the full social, cultural, and economic impact of the tsunami disaster, and the future prospects of the region.”

Reorienting the southern half of the Korean Peninsula away from the former Japanese colonial government's anti-democratic, anti-American and militaristic ideology while establishing orderly government was among the goals of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK, 1945-1948). To help achieve this aim on a wide front and as quickly as possible, USAMGIK's Motion Picture Section in the Department of Public Information arranged the exhibition of hundreds of Hollywood films to promote themes of democracy, capitalism, gender equality and popular American culture and values. While U.S. troops in the field enjoyed the increased availability and calibre of American feature films, the Korean government-in-waiting was affronted by their perceived immorality. Standard Korean film histories focus on the hardships endured by Korean filmmakers, and the conflicts among them, and on Hollywood's monopoly of the screen in the era, a situation which USAMGIK film policy - strikingly similar to the ordinances previously set in place by the Japanese - assisted. This study demonstrates how many of these ‘spectacle ’ films, which have hitherto largely gone unlisted, were designed to inculcate Western notions of liberty among Koreans, while distracting them from a tumultuous political scene. However, the films exhibited did not always live up to this lofty purpose. Along with positive portrayals of the ‘American way of life ’, representations of violent, anti-social and misogynistic behavior were foreign to Korean cultural and aesthetic traditions, and often provoked negative responses from local audiences.

For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.

Since 9/11 however, constitutional practices have been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in size, reach and budget, while traditional government has shrunk. As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre - and its entirety…visible only to God.

On December 8, 2005 Prime Minister Koizumi announced that Japan's Self-Defense Forces would remain for another year in Samawa in support of the US war in Iraq. Their mission: to provide “reconstruction and humanitarian assistance”. What has the 500 person SDF mission accomplished and at what cost? How have local people responded to its presence?

Prisoners of conscience, communists, antiwar activists, martyrs for Japan's tottering pacifist constitution: Obora Toshiyuki, Onishi Nobuhiro and Takada Sachimi have been called many things since February 2004.

In the world of right-wing bloggers, they represent the dying strains of a 60-year-old refrain: no matter how the world changes, Japan must stay out of international conflict and remain true to a yellowing document written under US occupation in 1947. For others, including supporters who contributed 3-4 million yen to their legal fees, they are the stubborn keepers of the antiwar flame, the personification of pacifist ideals in the face of huge odds.

Nick Cunningham of Oil Price.com has written a timely article summarizing the World Cup's gargantuan energy consumption and carbon footprint. The World Cup soccer competition underway in Brazil is held quadrennially, and is apparently the most watched sporting event of all. This year's games are to culminate in the July 17 finale in Rio de Janeiro. The games appear likely to set both a viewing record as well as a record for energy consumption and carbon emissions. An estimated 900 million watched the opening ceremonies of London's 2012 Olympics. But the World Cup governing body FIFA's research suggests 909.6 million viewers watched at least a minute of the 2010 World Cup, and Cunningham tells us there may be as many as 3 billion viewers for this event in 2014. Moreover, broadcasting's technical innovations are proceeding apace. Ultra-high definition broadcasts (expected to become standard in 2017) are being used for three of this year's matches, taking advantage of the event's eyeball-dense economics. The official match ball is the Adidas Brazuca, one of which has its own twitter account and micro-cameras studding its surface.

The last major change to Japan's secrecy law was made in 2001 when the Diet revised the Self-Defense Forces Law (jietai-ho) to include a new provision protecting information designated as a “defense secret” (boei himitsu). During the extraordinary Diet session that opens on October 15, the Abe administration plans to submit a “Designated Secrets Protection” bill (tokutei himitsu hogo hoan) to the Diet with the goal of strengthening Japan's secrecy regime.

Building no dams at all would be best. This is clear. How can we open discussion concerning the destruction of dams that have outlived their usefulness? Kumamoto Prefecture becomes the first to take up the challenge of dam removal. Summer has come to the Kumagawa River. Local fishermen who ply the waters for ayu sardines as a livelihood continue to decrease, but tourists from Tokyo and the Kansai area coming for the sport of it are on the up.

The river is broad, the water clear, and the 30cm-long “shaku ayu” with their distinctive aroma when cooked are drawing more and more people. The government's unprecedented plan to expropriate the river's fishing rights is currently deadlocked, thanks to the stubborn resistance of the residents protesting the construction of the Kawabegawa River dam upstream which would be the second largest in Kyushu.

The Japanese House of Councillors election will be held on July 21, 2013. It now seems certain that PM Abe Shinzo's Liberal Democratic Party will follow its landslide win in the December 2012 House of Representatives election with another overwhelming victory. This essay summarizes the results of recent Japanese opinion polls in order to identify major election issues and assess what it is about the new iteration of Abe's LDP that has made them so popular with the public.

It is widely assumed that the Japan-U.S. military alliance plays a key role in securing peace in Northeast Asia. It not only shores up procedural democracy in Japan and South Korea but also assures Japan's neighbors, China in particular, of Japan's commitment to pacifism. Close analysis of the current stage of neonationalism and neoliberal austerity economics in Japan, as exemplified by the government that recently took over in Tokyo, conveys a different impression.

In the standard U.S. image, North Korea is a monolithic, Stalin-style dictatorship controlled by one man, Kim Jong Il. But the key reason for North Korean intransigence in the nuclear crisis with the United States is that Kim does not have unchallenged control over foreign and defense policy. The North Korean power structure is deeply divided between pragmatists who favor a nuclear deal with the United States and increasingly assertive hardliners who argue that a tough posture is needed to stop the Bush administration from pursuing “regime change” in Pyongyang.