Precis: Using Kawaguchi Kaiji's graphic novel Jipangu (2001-2009) as an example, this essay explores a horizon of historical consciousness revealed by alternative histories of the Asia-Pacific War. Alternative histories of the war attempt to remove the stigma of defeat but also betray the extent to which contemporary Japan is unimaginable without the experience of defeat. Jipangu suggests a limit to the alternative pasts imaginable in early-twenty- first-century Japan.

Does it make sense to refer to a Chinese “tributary system?” A number of influential Western scholars, including John Wills Jr., James Hevia and Laura Hostetler, have argued that it does not—largely on the grounds that previous China scholars, John K. Fairbank “and his followers” in particular, have overgeneralized its historical significance. The result, however, has been that much of Fairbank's painstaking and valuable research on the structure and functions of the tributary system has been ignored. Although Fairbank may well have overestimated the degree to which Chinese assumptions about tribute shaped Qing policy toward foreigners, it seems unhelpful and misleading to suggest that they were of no consequence whatsoever.

There could hardly be a better time for publishing Kinglun Ngok's article on Chinese labor policy and legislation. Three major national labor-related laws were passed in 2007 and went into effect in 2008. These are: the Labor Contract Law, the Employment Promotion Law, and the Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law. What does this flurry of labor legislations mean? Why now? And perhaps most important: does it matter for China's workers?

“Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones:machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Japan's war for empire in Asia had many endings: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the imperial broadcast announcing acceptance of surrender terms, “suffering the insufferable”; signing of the surrender instrument on the deck of the USS Missouri; promulgation of a new constitution; the last execution of a convicted Japanese war criminal, Nishimura Takuma; American implementation of the Treaty of Peace with Japan; the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; establishment of the Asia Women's Fund to compensate the former comfort women (1995). But no one of those endings was more protracted and potentially more recuperative of Japan's view of itself than the reversion of the Ryūkyū Islands to Japanese rule on May 15, 1972 after 27 years of direct American military control. Reversion did not go uncontested among Ryūkyūans. Memories of the entrepôt Kingdom of the Ryūkyūs and its final annexation by Meiji Japan in 1879 persisted: independence was the impossible possibility. But the hand of the Pentagon had been so stern, so deforming on the Ryūkyūs, and the realistic alternatives so few, that reversion to Japanese sovereignty seemed better to many Ryūkyūans than continuing as America's China Sea military outpost complete with nuclear weapons. Yet, at the point of reversion and in the 38 years since reversion, Japanese sovereignty was a mask: the US occupation of the Ryūkyū Islands continued undiminished, but now Tokyo and not Washington paid most of the bill; Japanese sovereignty in post-reversion Okinawa continued “to be subject to the over-riding principle of priority to the military, that is, the US military.”

The sentencing of Matsumoto Chizuo (Asahara Shoko) to death on February 27, 2004 marked nearly nine years since members of Aum Shinrikyo carried out an attack with sarin gas on subway lines in Tokyo on March 20, 1995. Asked to write an opinion piece for the Japanese edition of Newsweek that appeared two days before the sentencing, I chose to focus on how the notions of victims and victimizers have structured efforts to understand and come to terms with the Aum Affair.

[Written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and later re-worked in Memories of the Battlefield published on the fiftieth anniversary of Japan's surrender, this essay presents wartime violence not as something distant and exceptional, but rather as a pervasive condition of our lives. Tomiyama attempts here ‘to bring out the battlefield in the everyday’, and then from the battlefield, ‘to reconstitute the everyday’. In a time when war and violence can be seen everywhere and yet felt at a remove, his ideas are as pertinent as ever. N.M.]

Southeast Asia, long known as an intermediate zone between the ancient civilisations of China and India, is also an area that scholars have long portrayed as historically subject to influences coming from its west, beginning with Indianisation, then islamisation and finally westernisation. However, this article argues that it would be far more insightful, and historically more accurate for the last several centuries at least, to treat Southeast Asia and southern China as part of one region, in the same way that Fernand Braudel approached the history of the Mediterranean.

This article by Softbank CEO Son Masayoshi outlines the thinking of one of Japan's most innovative capitalists and public-spirited citizens. Having helped create a competitive market in telecommunications, Son is now aimed at liberating and greening Japan's YEN 16 trillion electricity industry. In addition to the efforts he outlines in the article, Son inaugurated his Japan Renewable Energy Foundation on September 12. This Foundation is to be led by Tomas Kaberger, the former Director General of the Swedish Energy Agency. It includes a stellar cast of international experts on renewable energy, associated support policies (especially the feed in tariff), and other aspects of the ongoing energy revolution. Through these initiatives and the plan for a “solar belt,” described in this article, Son has been instrumental in defining a new direction for Japan in the wake of Fukushima. Without Son putting renewable energy so squarely and credibly on the public agenda, Japan might have succumbed to the enormous pressure from Keidanren, METI, TEPCO and other elements of the nuclear village to maintain the unsustainable status quo.

“3/11” is emerging as new shorthand for The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 and its aftereffects: the tsunami that destroyed much of Japan's northeast coast, and the crippling of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant . The sobriquet has the virtue of brevity; it also, of course, calls directly to mind the atrocities visited on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 – one of the reasons it seems to be coming into use. For while the two events had radically different causes and the scale of the devastation wrought in Tohoku – measured both in human suffering and in economic damage – was orders of magnitude greater than that inflicted on Manhattan, the parallels are sufficiently striking that the echo of “9/11” evoked by “3/l1” may well be justified.

Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko (b. 1921) has devoted her life to creating works of art that explore contested histories of war and colonialism in East Asia. For several decades she has collaborated with musician and composer Takahashi Yuji to produce powerful audio-visual slide and dvd works that illuminate little-told stories of the past; the two artists see themselves as modern day “tabigeinin” (wandering minstrels) who like poets and painters of medieval times, speak through their art to the times.

On June 8, the Wall Street Journal reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which promotes itself as “the world's center of cooperation in the nuclear field”, has come under fire for its handling of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi crisis. NGOs accuse them of whitewashing, while officials from G8 countries have expressed concerns that the IAEA has been slow in providing clear information about the Fukushima radiation release and the situation at the Daiichi plant. The organization is also accused of not being sufficiently critical of the Japanese government.

For its sheer brutality, the scene that has emerged before us has hurled the world into what I might call a “new Dark Ages.” Wielding high-tech weapons, a barbarian “empire” is set to dominate the world with absolute violence. This empire's intentions are “medieval.”

The only thing that is new is the use of state-of-the-art weapons systems. People are being killed with certainty – and in utter absurdity.

Two valuable new documentaries on atomic weapons and their human legacy offer new light on the inner world of atomic testing and weapons manufacture and the impact of the bomb on atomic test areas in the United States, on Bikini, and Hiroshima.

The present NATO campaign against Gaddafi in Libya has given rise to great confusion, both among those waging this ineffective campaign, and among those observing it. Many whose opinions I normally respect see this as a necessary war against a villain – though some choose to see Gaddafi as the villain, and others point to Obama.

Long applying a carrot and stick approach to winning diplomatic allies in a sometimes ludicrous contest with Taiwan over diplomatic recognition, today China strives to establish itself as a “status quo” player in the international arena. “Softpower” replaces ideological approaches to the world, as in the sponsorship of scores of Confucius Institutes throughout the world, in hosting the Olympic Games, and even through the advent of mass Chinese tourism. “Resource diplomacy,” that is the quest to secure natural resources, is emblematic of the scale of China's economic reach. At the same time, China is increasing participation in international peacekeeping missions, notably the dispatch of civilian police to such locations as East Timor, Haiti, and Lebanon. In 2000, China established a peacekeeping training center in Hebei province. China can also be proactive on international issues, as with its leading role in the 6-Party Talks on North Korea nuclear weapons, and its 3 May 2009 call for the establishment of a peacekeeping role in Somalia. While China's “string of pearls” approach to the construction of ports and naval bases across the Bay of Bengal to the Indian Ocean may alarm, the projection of its naval assets to the coast of Africa should not surprise given the international character of the “war” against piracy. In short, with China's accession to WTO and other international fora, alongside its sustained economic growth and its position as the largest owner of foreign reserves in the world, including U.S. debt in the form of treasuries, the nation of over a billion people is carving out a central position in world affairs.

Which country should the islands called Diaoyu by the Chinese and Senkaku by the Japanese belong to, China or Japan? Currently, these islands are under Japanese control, but China also claims sovereignty over them. When signing the 1978 Sino-Japanese Treaty of Peace and Friendship, then Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping said: “Our generation is not wise enough to find common language on this [Diaoyu/Senkaku] question. The next generation will certainly be wiser. They will surely find a solution acceptable to all.”

When Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) was torn apart by several explosions, whether due to technical failings in correspondence with the earthquakes, tsunami or a combination of both, it not only dispersed radioactive contaminant but also exposed the bonds connecting people's lives with nuclear power. Over the two and a half years since then, the corruption, inadequacies and mendacities at the centre of the sovereign power structure that has prevailed in Japan since 1945 have become ever more visible. This essay first introduces the foundations of this structure, exploring how the long-standing relationship between Government and major private electric utilities in Japan informs the present crisis, noting in particular the ramifications of decisions being made within this structure at the individual level in present and projected effects to human health. Following consideration of the effects of radiation on human health, the discussion then turns to visual and local testimonies of the effects of other radiological events - Hanford, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Iraq - so as to offer a comparative assessment of the Fukushima disaster. While mindful of the difficulty in arriving at an absolutely conclusive position on these conditions, enough evidence has now accumulated to make a realistic assessment of the human health impact, and to discern how public understanding has been, and continues to be, confused. Finally, given that the Fukushima disaster is distinguishable from other radiological events in scale and type of contamination, this essay argues that far-reaching change is called-for in the current legal standards and institutional responses which have been governed thus far by mid twentieth century power relations.

In the summer of 2007 I went to Hagi, northern Yamaguchi prefecture, to take part in a revolution. Well, not a revolution per se—but a revolutionary summer school.

[With Japan's snap election campaign in full swing and scheduled for 9/11, this timely critical article by UFJ Institute senior analyst Morinaga Takuro looks deep into the social and economic implications of the competing ‘reform’ agendas that presently define Japanese politics to reflect on Japan's emerging underclass. Coverage of Koizumi's “postal privatization” election in the overseas press as well as much of the Japanese media has, by contrast, largely held to script. A chorus of business voices, particularly overseas investors and their advisors, apparently see Koizumi as the embodiment of fiscal austerity, open markets and vigorous growth.