This three part New Year essay was commissioned by the Okinawan daily Ryukyu shimpo and published on January 6, 7, and 8, 2009, under the title “Satsuma shinko 400 nen – “Gekijo” kokka to shite no Okinawa,” (400 Years since the Satsuma Invasion: Okinawa as ‘Theatre’ state“).

For Japanese text, carried here with permission from Ryukyu shimpo, see the headings of each section.

We present two complementary perspectives on North Korea that locate the issues of North Korea isolation and nuclear proliferation within broader regional and global frameworks related to the six-party talks in general, and US-North Korean relations in particular.

The Mekong, one of the world's major rivers, starting in Tibet and flowing through south China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, provides sustenance through irrigation and fishing to those living in its basin. But it also provides hydroelectric power through dams, three of which were built in China, with more planned. And it is precisely these dams that are now threatening the water supply, the livelihood of those living downstream, and the relations between China and its southern neighbors. A fourth Chinese dam, Xiaowan, that should generate 4,200 megawatts of power, could affect the level of fish stocks in Cambodia and water supply for Vietnam's rice fields. But China contends controlling the water flow will prevent the adverse effects of erosion caused by the Mekong's flooding cycle and will supply renewable energy. Winning the debate or coming to a workable compromise is further complicated by China's refusal to join the Mekong River Commission, an inter-government agency whose members include the four of the downstream countries. And though the global financial crisis has put on hold other dams being planned by the downstream countries, China is moving ahead with its plans.

In 1967, Astroboy, the Japanese animation and comic book icon, died protecting a North Vietnamese village from American bombers.

On 13 April (14 April East Asian time), Claude Heller, the Mexican president of the United Nations Security Council, read a “Statement” on behalf of the Council. He condemned North Korea for something described as a “launch” it had conducted on 5 April, demanded it desist from any further such act, reaffirmed the principles of a 2006 Security Council resolution (No 1718, adopted in the wake of North Korea's missile and nuclear tests of 2006, banning any “missile-related activity”), directed the UN Sanctions Monitoring Committee to take further steps to secure compliance and to advise on possibly widening the sanctions list, and called for early resumption of the Beijing Six Party negotiations on the North Korean problem.

Anticipating the August 2009 electoral victory of the Democratic Party of Japan, which has promised to adopt a more assertive stance toward Washington, in July 2009 defense specialist Maeda Tetsuo presented concrete set of proposals for transforming the Japan-U.S. security relationship and paving the way for a more proactive Japanese role in Eastern Asia. These proposals have taken on more immediate relevance since the election, which swept the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party from office in a landslide.

On March 5, 2009, the first hearing in a civil suit against Chinese film director Li Ying was held in the Tokyo District Court. It was, ironically, twenty years to the day since Li first took up residence in Japan, and a year after his documentary, “Yasukuni,” became the center of a political maelstrom when all five theaters scheduled to premiere the film suddenly cancelled their screenings.

The cancellations were prompted by threats from right-wing nationalists to disrupt the screenings, coupled with harsh criticism of the political slant of the film by conservative members of the Japanese Diet (see David McNeill and John Junkerman, Freedom Next Time. Japanese Neonationalists Seek to Silence Yasukuni Film). Dozens of civil liberty and media organizations responded with statements condemning what was seen as political censorship, and theaters across the country stepped up with offers to screen the film.

The year 2010 will mark the centenary of Japanese colonial rule over the Korean peninsula, but, 64 years after that colonial rule was liquidated, North Korea, Japan's neighbour, remains the one country in the world with which it has no relations. That failure to reconcile and to normalize has had, and continues to have, large consequences. The bitterness and anger that feed on the absence of normality fester and threaten to plunge the region back into war. If Asia is to have a future beyond conflict, the “North Korea problem,” meaning that country's unresolved colonial relations with Japan (which is much different from the meaning usually intended by US and Japanese policy makers, as discussed below), and its unresolved war with the US and UN, must be addressed.

A Korean Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (WFZ) may be a necessary condition to achieving the full denuclearization of Korea. As well as providing benefits to the United States in preventing a major direct and wider proliferation threat from North Korea, and to China, Japan and South Korea in maintaining stability in the Northeast Asian Region, it would also serve to address North Korean security concerns about potential US nuclear strikes. The two Koreas have already negotiated a legal basis for a Korean Nuclear Weapon Free Zone in the form of the 1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula. This could form the basis of a NWFZ covering the peninsula. Alternatively, the ROK and Japan could create a Japan Korea NWFZ via a bilateral treaty. This article assesses the prospects for the creation of a NWFZ in the present international climate.

The Battle of Saipan in the Mariana Islands, fought between June 15 and July 9, 1944, was among the most bitterly contested of the Asia-Pacific War. With Japanese forces dug into caves and determined to fight to the death, casualties mounted. According to the US Military History, some 24,000 Japanese soldiers were killed and 5,000 committed suicide while 2,949 Americans died and 10,364 were wounded. According to historian John Toland, 22,000 Japanese civilians, as well as an unspecified number of islanders also died, some by compulsory suicides.

Japanese space activity started in 1955. After fourteen years of rocket and satellite experimentation, space activity was initiated in such practical realms as weather forecasting and broadcasting. Scientific missions extending from the near-Earth region to deep space were organized by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), which was founded at Tokyo University in 1964. Other missions such as weather satellites, communication satellites, broadcasting satellites and environment monitoring satellites were managed mainly by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), which was established in 1969. The two organizations together with the National Aerospace Laboratory were merged to form the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2003. When NASDA was founded, the Diet unanimously adopted a resolution stating that Japan's space programs were exclusively for peaceful purposes, consistent with Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. The word “peaceful purposes” was strictly interpreted to mean that Japan could use and exploit space only for “non-military” purposes. Japan's “non-nuclear” policy was simultaneously proclaimed. The Diet resolution of 1969 established “the principle of peaceful use of space” as the bedrock of Japan's space policy. As discussed below, military space activity would infiltrate the space program despite the principle. Indeed, Japan would become the most active military partner of the U.S. with respect to so-called “missile defense” systems. Even the “non-nuclear” policy has been discarded in practice through official tolerance of entry into Japan of U.S. nuclear submarines and nuclear missiles. After two decades of inconsistency between “the Principle of peaceful use of space” and the reality of militarized space activity, the new Japanese space law enacted in 2008 lifted the ban on the use of space technology for military purposes.

In a recent article in the Financial Times, “Why a little knowledge of inflation can be dangerous” Russell Napier muses on the possible return of the circumstances of the 1970s - most particularly inflation. After a good, smart slap at academics and their infatuation with the efficient markets hypothesis for “making it even more likely that lessons from the pre-disinflationary era are not yet priced in,” Napier notes that “investors unburdened by dreams of efficiency and prepared to learn the lessons of history will have a decided advantage in the search for positive real returns.”

The comparative study of death penalty policy is a relatively new and unpracticed discipline, and few of the existing studies concentrate on regional rather than global comparisons. This article makes the case for a regional approach by summarizing some of the most important findings from our book about capital punishment in Asia. That book is based on five major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China (chapters 3-7), and seven shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India (appendices A-F).

We present two perspectives on coal, alternative energy, and the future of China's industrialization in light of claims that its salvation lies in clean coal. Can advanced techniques for reducing carbon emissions in coal usher in the new wave of industrialization in China or elsewhere? Or is it new green technologies such as wind and solar power that will spearhead the next industrial revolution and transform the prospects for industry and the environment in the coming decades?

A recent article in Nature asked provocatively: Is China ready for GM rice? The title reflects widely shared anxiety over genetic engineering in agriculture. The use of the term “GM” specifically conjures a politically charged object: “GMOs” or “genetically modified organisms.” Is anyone ready for FrankenFoods? Strawberries with fish genes? Human cloning? The question has an ominous overtone, though both reporter and venue are identified with science. The question derives its energy from the decision of the Chinese Government to go full speed ahead with genetically engineered rice to confront what the state constructs as a gathering Malthusian crisis of hunger. What the article does not tell the reader is that the farmers are way ahead of the government: ready and able. Transgenic rice – officially unauthorized within China – has for several years been showing up in exports from China to Europe, to Japan, to New Zealand – and probably many other places that simply are not checking.

The purge of Hatoyama Ichirō and the elevation of Yoshida Shigeru as a substitute prime minister in May 1946 deeply impacted their respective political careers. More important, these actions taken by the Allied occupation authority set the course for postwar Japan's conservative parties. This article examines the thinking of GHQ leaders that led to these actions. The bureaucratic rule of the so-called Yoshida-school was the long-term side effect of a policy that was meant to guide the development of Japan's conservative political parties at the dawn of the occupation. The bloodlines of the two statesmen continue to influence contemporary Japanese politics as Hatoyama's grandson, Yukio, replaces Yoshida Shigeru's grandson, Asō Tarō, as Japan's prime minister.

“The aims of the Olympic Movement are to promote the development of those fine physical and moral qualities which are the basis of amateur sport and to bring together the athletes of the world in a great quadrennial festival of sports thereby creating international respect and goodwill and thus helping to construct a better and more peaceful world.” Baron de Coubertin, 1894

Next year, 2010, marks the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of what is aptly called “The Forgotten War.” While Kim Il-sung's invasion of the Republic of Korea in the early hours of June 25th, 1950, ignited the first hot war of the cold war – and the first and only war in which the two superpowers would clash on the battlefield – it is a war that is almost dead to the public mind and popular culture of the western world.

It was a savage war in a devastated land; a war that was civil, ideological and even racial in nature, a war that sucked in fighting men from as far afield as Columbia and China, Ethiopia and Russia. It was a war in which entire US units were annihilated, an intense war which generated casualties far in excess of those incurred in today's conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet despite its many dramatic elements – and despite the fact that it has never really ended - Korea never achieved the same status in the western mind as did the wars that bookmarked it: World War II and Vietnam.

When the Special Higher Police, the dreaded Tokkō, returned his body to his mother and brother, it was hard to believe their official report that he had died of “a heart attack.”

The skin at his temples had been stripped away, and there were 12 wounds from what a physician friend described as “coming from a drill or the needles used by tatami makers,” some on his cheeks. (The police had actually used the metal pokers from a brazier on him.) There were cuts under his chin. His wrists and ankles bore rope marks from his having been suspended from a ceiling; and his lower torso, pubic area and thighs had turned an awful purple color from “relentless beating.” His penis and testicles were bloated and bore the same purple color. There are extant photos of the corpse, taken by his friends as it lay on the floor. The police had even taken the trouble to break his right index finger so that he would never again write a novella like Kani Kōsen (The Cannery Boat).

Justin McCurry & David McNeill talk to fishermen in the north and south of the country and find widespread alarm at depleted tuna stocks.

On a gloomy day pregnant with rain and the weight of past expectations, Nakamura Minoru is welcomed back to port in Iki-shi like a conquering hero. Three family generations, including Nakamura's father Toshiaki and newborn child Misaki wait ashore, smiles wide as his boat sails into harbor. Good for him, says a beaming Okubo Terutaka, head of the local fishing cooperative. That's wonderful to see.