http://www.japanfocus.org Communities Struggle to Rebuild Shattered Lives on Japan’s Coast David McNeill in Rikuzen-Takata, Iwate Prefecture Kanno Mitsuhide (36) is standing on a pile of muddy firewood where his home used to be. He has come to salvage what he can and found a single object: a hibachi, a traditional Japanese charcoal heater. “We could only locate the house because of this,” he says, pointing at an old green water pump still clinging stubbornly to solid ground. The small family car is 200 meters away, upside down, across the ruined landscape of Rikuzen-Takata. Kanno Mitsuhide (left) stands where his home used to be. (All photographs by David McNeill) A few days ago, Mr. Kanno gave up the search for his father, Ken (68), who was washed out to sea. “We think he was in his car, trying to reach relatives when the tsunami came,” he explains. “Everybody ran up there,” he says, nodding up toward a temple. Hi... http://www.japanfocus.org/-David-McNeill/3510 What Caused the High Cl-38 Radioactivity in the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor #1?[1] Japanese text is available F. Dalnoki-Veress with an introduction by Arjun Makhijani This is a first for The Asia-Pacific Journal: publication of a technical scientific paper addressing critical issues pertaining to the leakage of radioactive water at the Fukushima reactors. Our goal is to make this information available to the Japanese and international scientific communities, to Japanese government authorities, and TEPCO as they address the formidable issues of cleanup and safety. But we also believe that the information is of importance to informed citizens and the press in the face of further dangers that have gone unmentioned not only in government statements, but also in the press. Arjun Makhijani’s introduction provides a lucid explanation of the problem and the issues, followed by F. Dalnoki-Veress’s paper. Asia-Pacific Journal Introduction by Arjun Makhijani The presence of highly rad... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Arjun-Makhijani/3509 The Plan to Rebuild Japan: When You Can’t Go Back, You Move Forward. Outline of an Environmental Sound Energy Policy Kaneko Masaru Unthinkable Not to Rethink Policy in This Catastrophe Japan seems on the verge of a second defeat. The March 11 magnitude 9.0 East Japan earthquake shoved the entire country 2 metres and brought even more mayhem in a tsunami that wrecked whole communities and snatched away the lives of thousands. Now we see 100,000 troops from the Self-Defense forces dispatched to rescue operations amidst the pall rising from massively damaged nuclear reactors. Radioactivity is drifting out to sea and over the surrounding prefectures, poisoning farm produce and forcing restrictions on their shipment and sale. The crisis has extended even to drinking water in the capital of Tokyo. The scale of disasters evokes embedded memories of the cusp of postwar reconstruction, the moment when rebuilding economy and society was about to harness prodigious resources and time. So it... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Kaneko-Masaru/3508 Japan, Europe and The Dangerous Fantasy of American Leadership Karel van Wolferen The peculiar and unique U.S.-Japan relationship has entered a new phase, in which its future is shrouded in mist. While few Americans can be bothered ever to think about it, in the back of many Japanese minds it is something as generally accepted as a fact of nature, but at the same time a permanent complication that is recently showing sharp and irritating edges. Quite a few have begun to think that they should shake themselves out of the habit of taking it so much for granted. When thinking about the relationship between two powerful countries such as that between the United States and Japan it is useful to take a step back to view it in the context of our planet's geopolitical reality. This also enables a quick overview of what has been happening to it recently. Both Japan and the United States were until the collapse of the Soviet Union considered countries that belonged to the ‘First World'. T... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Karel_van-Wolferen/3507 Japan Quake Shakes TV: The Media Response to Catastrophe Philip J Cunningham "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. We have just experienced an earthquake. Please move away from the buildings to an open area...We will provide more detailed information as soon as possible..." The polite but authoritative "we" was the voice of the Tokyo DisneySea theme park in this instance, but similar, oddly reassuring warnings of peril were being echoed across Japan, mostly following the lead of television broadcaster NHK. Japan has a thriving terrestrial broadcast television market, which in most cities comes down to half a dozen key players. To watch Tokyo's six main TV stations side by side, as media scholars sometimes do, is to be subjected to an overload of dazzling color, brightly-lit sets, short, snappy jingles, silly commercials and plodding documentaries. When the biggest earthquake in memory hit Japan at 2:46 PM on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, it took less than ten minutes for the... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Philip_J_-Cunningham/3506 Whole Earth or No Earth: The Origin of the Whole Earth Icon in the Ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Robert Jacobs "Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available - once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known - a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose."--Fred Hoyle, 19501 The Whole Earth, taken by Apollo 17, Dec. 7, 19722 Introduction The image of the Whole Earth is one of the most ubiquitous visual icons of the late twentieth century. It is everywhere, on books, posters, advertisements, packaging, and all over the world-wide-web. It is the descendent of such essential early tools of human imagining as the map and the globe, but the Whole Earth is a radical reformulation of those older tools. It is a tool that opens humans to a new perspective about the relationship of the individual to the planet, and to the other creatures living on the planet, especially the other people. The history of the modern visual image of the Whole Earth derives from... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Robert-Jacobs/3505 Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons? Peter Dale Scott's Libyan NotebookUpdated April 3, 2011 Preface The world is facing a very unpredictable and potentially dangerous situation in North Africa and the Middle East. What began as a memorable, promising, relatively nonviolent achievement of New Politics - the Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt - has morphed very swiftly into a recrudescence of old habits: America, already mired in two decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sporadic air attacks in Yemen and Somalia, now bombing yet another Third World Country, in this case Libya. USS Barry launches a Tomahawk missile in support of Operation Odyssey Dawn in the Mediterranean Sea, March 19, 2011. US government handout The initially stated aim of this bombing was to diminish Libyan civilian casualties. But many senior figures in Washington, including President Obama, have indicated that the US is gearing up for a quite different war for regime change, one that ma... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3504 China-Korea Culture Wars and National Myths: TV Dramas as Battleground Robert Y. Eng China and Korea have been engaged in a culture war in recent years, contesting issues of national identity, historical territorial claims, and cultural heritage. The single most inflammatory topic in this culture war is conflicting interpretations of the history of Goguryeo (Koguryo é«�å�¥éº�) (37 BCE-668 CE), which ruled large areas in present-day Northeast China and Northern Korea, and constituted one of the Three Kingdoms in Korean history, along with Baekje (Paekche ç�¾æ¿�) (18 BCE - 660 CE) and Silla (æ�°ç¾�) (57 BCE - 935 CE) (Figs. 1 and 2).1 North and South Koreans consider Goguryeo to be a key foundation state of their history. They are therefore angered by Chinese claims that the "various tribes that inhabited Koguryo [were] ... among the many minorities that were eventually absorbed into "Greater China," and therefore "its history is considered a part of Chinese national history."2 Fig. ... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Robert_Y_-Eng/3503 The Atomic Bomb and "Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy" Yuki Tanaka The devastating 9.0 earthquake that hit Japan on March 11, together with the following massive tsunami, completely destroyed the picturesque northeast coast of Japan's main island, taking potentially tens of thousands of lives and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees. Along this stretch of utter destruction sit four nuclear power stations, comprising a total of 15 reactors, within a distance of about 200 kilometers. Of these, the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power station, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), is the largest, comprising six nuclear reactors. Until now, TEPCO, Japan's largest power company, proudly boasted of the robustness of the containment vessels of these reactors, claiming that they were made utilizing the same technology originally developed to produce the main battery of the world-largest naval artillery ever produced, mounted on the gigantic battleship, Yamato, the pride of the Japa... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3502 The Earthquake in Japanese Energy Policy Andrew DeWit More than a week after March 11, when northeastern Japan was hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 7-metre tsunami, the death toll remains unknown. It seems certain to exceed 20,000, as whole sections of some communities were washed out to sea. Search and rescue groups are grimly at work finding bodies alongshore and beneath the rubble and debris. The human losses are already enormous, and now the slow erosions of humanity threaten: there are sad reports of hundreds of elderly left to die in hospitals and care homes in the stricken areas. And the economic losses are climbing into the stratosphere as stocks fall, foreigners flee, and millions of workers and consumers simply stay at home. All the numbers are huge: half a million people barely getting by in poorly supplied shelters; the iconic bullet-train damaged at 1100 locations that will take "considerable time" to repair; a projection of reconstruction costing upwards of US... http://www.japanfocus.org/-Andrew-DeWit/3501