http://www.japanfocus.org Engaging the DPRK: A “Deferred Delivery” Option? Georgy Toloraya Regardless of rhetoric, there is little doubt that North Korea is not prepared to give up its nuclear capability any time soon. Although it might simply be a bargaining position, Pyongyang has even made it clear that there can be no such outcome until the whole world becomes free of nuclear weapons.1 That creates a new strategic reality – even if we do not recognize North Korea as a nuclear power, we will have to live side by side with it as a de-facto nuclear possessing state for a considerable period of time. While the United States is separated from it by an ocean, for Russia, China and South Korea there is just a river or a border. How are all the parties concerned going to deal with this country? Although the risk of conflict has probably not increased with the DPRK becoming a de-facto nuclear power, a further escalation of tensions is a serious threat. Nuclear proliferation and the emergence of ne... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Georgy-Toloraya/3258 A Letter to the Citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki From a Hibakusha residing in Okinawa Tsukishita Miki and Yuki TANAKA     The Asahi Shimbun report is available in Japanese here Introduction Tsukishita Miki, an A-bomb survivor, recently sent copies of the following letter to the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo shortly before U.S. President Barack Obama visited Japan on November 13. Tsukishita was four years and seven months old when the city of Hiroshima was destroyed and many civilians instantly annihilated by the atomic bombing on the morning of August 6, 1945. He was four kilometers away from the hypocenter when the atomic bomb exploded. Miraculously he survived. Tsukushita Miki As Tsukishita compellingly describes in his letter, he has never been free from the  “haunting memory of the unforgettable experience” of the atomic bombing, despite his young age at the time it occurred. Thus this horrific exper... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsukishita-Miki/3257 Assessing the Nishimatsu Corporate Approach to Redressing Chinese Forced Labor in Wartime Japan Kang Jian, Arimitsu Ken and William Underwood   Introduction: Wartime forced labor and the future of Japan-China-Korea Relations WILLIAM UNDERWOOD The Nishimatsu Settlement Controversy Xinhua News Agency reported in October 2009 that Nishimatsu Construction Co. “secured a reconciliation” by voluntarily agreeing to compensate Chinese victims of wartime forced labor in Japan, after resisting the redress claim for more than a decade. But questions have arisen regarding the content of the settlement, and whether it might foreshadow greater Japanese willingness to address past injustices. (The Japanese text of the settlement is available.) In the out-of-court pact finalized on October 23, Nishimatsu Construction Co. agreed to set up a trust fund of 250 million yen, or $2.5 million (based on an exchange rate of 100 yen per dollar). The money will be used to compensate the 360 Chi... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Arimitsu-Ken/3256 Is Japan Headed for a Fiscal Doomsday? R. Taggart Murphy Many people in the financial world – not all of them kooks – have managed to convince themselves that Japan is hurtling towards some kind of fiscal doomsday.  And that no matter what the Hatoyama government does or doesn't do, it's already too late.  That Japan will be defaulting on its pension obligations. Or defaulting on its debt.  Or will find itself unable to halt a string of bank failures that will bring the financial system to its knees.  Or some combination thereof. Robert Samuleson picked up on this scuttlebutt in a November 1 article in the Washington Post.  He warned Americans that they are at risk of following Japan into an abyss of debt that will increasingly “constrict governments' economic maneuvering room.”  He refers to a JP Morgan Chase study of Japan's fiscal situation and seems to have relied on it for much of what he had to say about Japan.  Jim O'Nei... http://www.japanfocus.org/-R_Taggart-Murphy/3255 Okinawan Message to President Obama: Withdraw the Marines Study Group on Okinawan External Affairs (English and Japanese text) On Friday 13 November, US President Obama flew in to Tokyo. The unresolved issue of “replacing” Futenma US Marine Air Station has been removed from the talks agenda, because the two sides cannot agree on how to resolve it. Festering for more than 13 years, the issue has risen gradually to a head since the Hatoyama Government too office at the beginning of September calling for a redefinition of US-Japan relations. The one proposal that nobody in either Tokyo or Washington has considered is the one advanced below, by a representative group of prominent Okinawans: that the US simply close and withdraw from all its Okinawan bases. For 65 years, US forces have dominated Okinawa, beginning with the 1945 and continuing through protracted military occupation to the present. Until Okinawan views are taken into serious consideration, the problem cannot be s... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Study_Group_on_Okinawan_External_Affairs-/3254 Before Sunrise: Will Obama seize a rare opportunity for change in U.S.-Japan relations? R. Taggart Murphy I'm going to provide a few words of introduction for readers of The Asia-Pacific Journal on the subject of a piece I wrote for The New Republic's website, The Plank, as background to President Obama's visit to Japan. The invitation came about through John Judis. I've known John now for close on twenty years; not only is he a good friend, but he has been my most trustworthy guide (personally and in his writings) through the labyrinth of American politics. John is one of those rare American writers who extends his gaze beyond that stretch of land that lies from sea to shining sea when he grapples with the deep currents in American politics. I first got to know him when I was doing the research for my first book, The Weight of the Yen. As a student of the rise of American conservatism and the corruption and decline of the old internationalist American foreign policy elite, John seemed... http://www.japanfocus.org/-R_Taggart-Murphy/3253 The Battle of Okinawa 2009: Obama vs Hatoyama Gavan McCormack The making of an unequal, unconstitutional, illegal, colonial and deceitful US-Japan agreement. Yes We Can – But You Can’t Elections at the end of August gave Japan a new government, headed by Hatoyama Yukio. In electing him and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Japanese people, like the American people less than a year earlier, were opting for change – a new relationship with both Asia and the US, including a much more equal one with the latter. Remarkably, however, what followed on the part of the Obama administration has been a campaign of unrelenting pressure to block any such change. The Obama administration has targeted in particular the Hatoyama desire to re-negotiate the relationship with the United States so as to make it equal instead of dependent. Go back, it seems to be saying, to the golden days of “Sergeant-Major Koizumi” (as George W. Bush reportedly referred to the Japanes... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/3250 Regime Change Short-Circuited: Carbon Emissions and Japan’s Feed-in Tariff System Andrew DeWit One of Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio’s first public acts, in September, was to propose a 25% cut in the country’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, relative to 1990 levels.1 This forthright declaration from Japan, long a laggard in dealing with climate change, captured world attention in the fraught lead-up to the December 7 to 12 Copenhagen meeting. The Obama people may yet fail to deliver, but unlike the Bushies they won’t have a slavish Japan backing them up. Hatoyama’s policy announcement has also earned the wrath of Japan’s emissions-intensive industries, hitherto largely left to design their own voluntary agreements. They and their allies in the media and academe insist there is no hope for achieving such a cut without ruining the economy. Yet these critics either deliberately or unknowingly overlook the fact that Germany has adopted even mor... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Andrew-DeWit/3249 Clean Politics: Race and Class, Imperialism and Nationalism, Etiquette and Consumption in the Chinese and American Revolutions Sarah Schneewind “Why doesn’t this story stick when told?” Clive James1 Every generation of historians rediscovers and then forgets the history of Western views of China: the slow process in which the admiration of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Jesuit missionaries and other European visitors to China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire turned to contempt as nineteenth-century Europe gained the upper hand in world politics and economy.2  Many negative perceptions – that China was weak; the government despotic and venal; the people supine, hypocritical, and dirty; and that nothing in China ever would change without European intervention – were inversions or new readings of material the more admiring Jesuits and others had put forward.  To tie them to sharper observa... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Sarah-Schneewind/3248 Gravity Defying: Whither Korea’s bid to build a world-class city entirely from scratch? David McNeill in Seoul Take a man-made island, roughly the size of London’s Hampstead Heath.  Fill it with state-of-the-art schools, hospitals, apartments, office buildings and high-end cultural amenities. Import architectural features from around the world, including New York’s Central Park and Venice’s canals, make English the lingua franca, and hang a sign at the gates that says: “Open for business.” Attempting a mammoth project like that would be a risky venture in the best of times, let alone in the middle of Asia’s worst business slump since the 1970s.  Putting it mostly in the hands of a single largely untested US firm and financing it with recycled real-estate profits sounds like an act of lunacy.  Yet this is what is what is happening in South Korea, and strangest of all, it appears to be working. Built on 1,500 acres of land reclaime... http://www.japanfocus.org/-David-McNeill/3247