India can’t indefinitely “balance” between Russia and the US as it’s impossible for it to fulfill all of its stated commitments to both of them, meaning that the country will have to eventually choose which of the two it wants …

To be both handicapped and poor is the situation of several million Vietnamese. Through social programmes and income-generating schemes, the Red Cross assists this vulnerable group and their families. Among the beneficiaries are victims of Agent Orange, a powerful defoliant …

Journalism is getting something of a battering in Australia.  At the parliamentary level, laws have passed that would be inimical to any tradition versed in the bill of rights.  (Australia, not having such a restraining instrument on political zeal, can …

Introduction 

This is an excerpt from “Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925-2015”. The book, which was published in May 2018, is based on a series of interviews with a Japanese man who was …

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5)¹ on human security identifies “Critical infrastructure and state capacity” as a major concern. The report points out that “Climate change and extreme events are projected to damage a …

Australia’s plans to return to the Lombrum Naval Base on Manus that it previously occupied in Papua New Guinea prior to the island state’s independence is a power play for leadership in the South Pacific on behalf of the Quad’s …

The never ending disputes over a semi-enclosed sea, the South-China Sea (SCS) was culminated in the consensus between the Philippines and China in bringing the case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). While the PCA under the United Nations …

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Be wary of the self-satisfied and morally soothed.  The complacent have a habit of giving the game away, glorifying themselves in satisfied satiation. Australia’s parliament seemed to be very self-congratulatory in …

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Among the two million and more young men who went to Vietnam as soldiers, those dozens who came home to write about the Vietnam War evolved a poetry which deserves to …

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The hyper-nationalist Hindu fundamentalist government of India is deathly afraid of a social revolution breaking out in response to its polarizing socio-economic policies, though arresting prominent leftist activists might do more …

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Featured image: Cover of the novel Yogamaya

When I was well into my career as an anthropologist specializing in Himalayan peoples, I came across an historical episode concerning two no-longer living …

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Ten days of incessant downpour has turned the peninsular Indian state of Kerala into a theatre of destruction. Three hundred and sixty deaths, thousands of homes inundated, over a million people …

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Heaps of plastic waste cover the shores of Manila Bay in the Philippines. Myrna Dominguez remembers when an abundance of fish inhabited its waters—locals would catch enough to feed their families …

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Despite five high-level reports (listed here) in India advising against the adoption of genetically modified (GM) crops, the drive to get GM mustard commercialised (which would be India’s first officially-approved …

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It is a continuation of Malcolm Turnbull by other means.  The new Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison and his freshly appointed Deputy, Josh Frydenberg have ensured that the “insurgents”, as …

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The process that’s required to train baby elephants to give rides to tourists is devastatingly cruel. Now, animals rights groups and travel agencies are taking a stand against this practice.

Baby …

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The opinion poll prime ministership is a modern Australian disease.  Not only does it suggest an ailing in the Westminster system, but a profound contempt for the democratic sensibility on the …

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When 12 boys and their coach were trapped in a Thailand cave, the international community rose up as one. Thai Navy Seal took up the lead in rescuing the kids. Several …

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Born in Toyama Prefecture, Kamanaka Hitomi entered Waseda University and joined her friends in a filmmaking club. Kamanaka won a scholarship from the Japanese government and spent time in Canada and …

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Base Islands

For more than two decades, the Asia-Pacific Journal has paid close attention to the “Okinawa problem.” However, today that “problem” becomes increasingly complex and difficult to grasp, even as …

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Swami Gyanswaroop Sanand is an important figure in the field of environmental engineers in India. Formerly known as Professor G.D. Agarwal, he has been a faculty member in the Indian …

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This time it was really supposed to work! The turbo-capitalist, anti-Communist and obedient Indonesia got so used to hearing bizarrely inflated compliments from its Western handlers, that it began to believe …

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It may well go down as one of the most appalling conferences in the history of the International Political Science Association. The World Congress is one of those hot air events …

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Humans are a funny species.  They create settlements along fault lines that, on moving, can create catastrophe, killing thousands.  They construct homes facing rivers that will, at some point, break their …

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India celebrates its independence from Britain on 15 August. However, the system of British colonial dominance has been replaced by a new hegemony based on the systemic rule of transnational capital, …

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In June 2018, the BBC broadcast a documentary called Japan’s Secret Shame, a distressing tale of sexual violence toward women pegged to the experience of Ito Shiori. The documentary, by …

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Like many countries, India’s food system was essentially clean just a generation or two ago but is now being comprehensively contaminated with sugar, bad fats, synthetic additives, GMOs and pesticides under …

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They appear a hapless collection of desperate village lads lured by false promises, making their way to a hostile place fraught with peril. A small but significant number perish while working …

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A busy air route between Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan Airport and overseas is via the communications hub of The Arab Emirates. Several direct flights between Abu Dhabi or Doha and Nepal depart and …

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There was a sudden outbreak of violence last week in the Indonesian Province of Papua.

Local elections were marred by two separate incidents of violence when armed individuals attacked state security …

India is under siege from international capital. It is on course not only to be permanently beholden to US state-corporate interests but is heading towards environmental catastrophe much faster than many may think.

According to the World Bank’s lending report, …

Militants in northern Myanmar have once again put China’s One Belt, One Road initiative on hold. It should come as no surprise that Anglo-American history played a direct role in their creation, and currently fund and back networks supporting them. …

National Plaintiffs Association for the HPV Vaccines Lawsuits in Japan

Representative Nanami Sakai

National Attorneys Association for the HPV Vaccines Lawsuits in Japan

Joint Representative Masumi Minaguchi

Joint Representative Yoshiaki Yamanishi

It has been five years since the Japanese Government …

Like all colonial societies, Australia has secrets. The way we treat Indigenous people is still mostly a secret. For a long time, the fact that many Australians came from what was called “bad stock” was a secret.

“Bad stock” meant …

This story is the product of a two-year collaboration between U.S. news website The Intercept and the Japanese broadcaster NHK. The project began in mid-2016, and was initially focused on investigating three U.S. military bases in Misawa, Okinawa, and Yokota. …

In 2012, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Open Source Center published a manual for U.S. officials advising them on how to shape Okinawan public opinion about the large U.S. military presence on their island. Categorized For Official Use Only, the 60-page …

Such moves should trouble any constructive dissenter and civil libertarian: the vesting of powers in a military force to be used against domestic disturbances.  While the United States has a troubled history with it, posse comitatus still remains something of …

Australia is attempting to tighten its vise-grip of control over the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.

The tiny nation has sought to strategically liberate itself in recent years by realigning closer to China as a means of “balancing” out …

The regulatory system for GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in India is in tatters. So said the Coalition for a GMFree India (CGMFI) in 2017 after media reports about the illegal cultivation of GM soybean in the country.

In India, five …

The tradition is represented as noble, the confiding link between confessor and penitent, a bridge never to be broken, even under pain of death.  Taken that way, the confessional is brandished as the Catholic Church’s great weapon against the wiles …

India’s maximalist position towards the Kashmir Conflict and its resultantly unflinching resistance to CPEC haven’t changed despite New Delhi saying that it has no problem with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank funding that project, as this is nothing more than …

It is a credit to the venality of Australia’s refugee policy that much time is spent on letting others do what that particular country ought to be doing.  For a state so obsessed with the idea of a “rule-based order”, …

Communal politics has been viewed from different perspectives. The left primarily regards religion as opium of people, instilling false consciousness, giving them a high, and diverting their attention from their real issues related to material improvement in their lives like …

Scores of people gathered in several cities all across Vietnam in order to draw attention to what they fear is China’s imminent exploitation of a proposed bill on Special Economic Zones (SEZ) that will give investors 99-year leases on land …

The Print is a Delhi-based, online news magazine that began operations in August 2017. On 9 June, it published a short article by Sandya Ramesh under the title ‘EU study trashes anti-GM paper by French expert who Jairam Ramesh cited …

Be wary of the Chinese technological behemoth, goes the current cry from many circles in Australia’s parliament. Cybersecurity issues are at stake, and the eyes of Beijing are getting beadier by the day.

The seedy involvement of Australia in the …

“Further into the Afghanistan mission, after multiple deployments, soldiers began to refer to members going ‘up the Congo’.”
Chris Masters, The Sydney Morning Herald, Jun 9, 2018

They operate with impunity in areas already deemed lawless by their …

By 2050, if current policies continue, India could have numerous mega-cities with up to 30-40 million inhabitants and just two to three hundred million people (perhaps 15-20% of the population) left in an emptied-out countryside. Given current trends in …

In those seemingly interminable refugee debates being held in various countries, cruelty is pure theatre. It is directed, stage managed, the victims treated as mere marionettes in a play of putrid public policy and indifferent public officials.  Barriers have been …

Did the movements of “1968” change societies fundamentally worldwide? This article examines “1968” from the perspective of Japanese history. Japan’s “1968” shared such common elements with “1968” in other countries, as the social background, development of visual media, and progress …

Featured image: Apo Island seen from Negros

When Europeans first visited the east Atlantic seaboard, the hyperabundance of cod would not go unnoticed. In 1602, English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold named the peninsula, where the Nauset and Wampanoag people lived, Cape …

On 21 May 2018, Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad disclosed that Malaysia’s debt has reached more than 1 trillion ringgit. The next day, Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng  elaborated that the debt to GDP ratio stood at 80%.…

Syndromes can make for cringe worthy, nervous laughter.  To see the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, struggle with reconciling China the bully of influence with China the resource hungry friend supplied the press with one such spectacle on Tuesday morning.  …

Former long-time Prime Minister and nonagenarian Mahathir bin Mohamad returned to office after incumbent Najib Razak suffered a humiliating loss that many analysts attribute to the multibillion-dollar 1MDB corruption scandal that he’s implicated in. A whistleblower leaked incriminating documents about …

Featured image: Bt cotton. (Sources: Abhishek Srivastava / Flickr / CC BY 2.0)

In an another legal blow to Monsanto, India’s Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the Delhi High Court’s ruling that the seed giant cannot claim …

Featured image: Old growth forest in the vicinity of Kingvale Station, near rivers that flow into the Great Barrier Reef. (Source: Australian Conservation Foundation)

Federal officials plan to back the destruction of almost 2000 hectares of pristine Queensland forest in …

Politicians have been clambering to the top extolling something that has yet to exist.  Scientists are claiming a job boom that has yet to transpire.  Much fantasy and speculation dominate the creation of Australia’s Space Agency, an organisation that remains …

Australian life can seem defiantly absorbed, the defiance induced by insularity and isolation.  The characters that inhabit the continent are mere specks of life before the enormity that is its nature, one bound, at any point in time, to swallow …

Featured image: Prof. Sharma

The evidence is all there. With soil fertility declining; excessive mining of groundwater sucking aquifers dry; and chemical inputs, including pesticides, becoming extremely pervasive in environment, the entire food chain has been contaminated.

As soils become …

John Mathews with Xin Huang

China’s green energy shift is now attracting increasing attention, as its strategic implications become clearer. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Amy Myers Jaffe has argued that China is effecting a “pivot” to green …

Election politics have taken an unusual turn in Malaysia.

Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, now heads an opposition alliance against the corrupt government of Prime Minister Najib Razak, which has done its utmost to destabilize his candidacy.

Mahathir …

Tun Mahathir is leading the opposition in our general elections this coming Wed 9th May. At 92 years old accompanied by Tun Siti, Mahathir is leading a “punishing” campaign trail throughout the country.

Tun M has only one goal – …

A new report on the economy of Papua New Guinea will reopen the case for the Australian government to be held accountable for the negligent decision to lend AU$500 million taxpayer money to the PNG-LNG project.

Jubilee Australia’s new report, …

It has all the elements of a crudely crafted if effective tale: banks and other financial services, founded, proud of their standing in society; financial service providers, with such pride, effectively charging the earth for providing elementary services; then, such …

What limits opinions?  Especially by sportspeople, who are often confused for geniuses of the mind and ambassadors of tact outside their very limited field of endeavour.  (Yes, he can dribble a ball with sigh-inducing majesty, so he must know a …

Featured image: M-69 incendiary tests on Japanese style structures at Dugway Proving Ground. (Source: Standard Oil,Design and Construction of Typical German and Japanese Test Structures at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah, 1943. Via JapanAirRaids.org)

This paper explores a previously unexamined context …

Featured image: George Christensen

It came across on the ABC’s Four Corners as something of a junkie’s confession: I am an addict, and I know.  The conservative MP for the Australian federal seat of Dawson, George Christensen, was not …

In the wake of the recognition of the lack of relief measures and medical support for atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) residing in South Korea, some Japanese dedicated themselves to assuring that Korean victims received subsidized medical treatment. This study assesses …

The authoritarian misfits in the Turnbull government have again rumbled and uttered suspicions long held: Australian residents and citizens are not to be trusted, and the intelligence services should start getting busy in expanding their operations against the next Doomsday …

When nuclear disaster struck at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi power plant, it was clear that the environmental impact of such extreme amounts of radiation would be immeasurable. Reports on just how bad the situation at the plant is have continued to reveal …

The Western media continues to saturate headlines with stories of “Russian meddling,” meanwhile Western governments led by Washington openly celebrate their own meddling in foreign political affairs.

One such example unfolded during the US State Department’s annual “Women of Courage …

Featured image: Nguyen Van Dai, recently sentenced to 15 years in prison, is pictured with US Senator and chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI) John McCain in the US Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam. The IRI provides money to foreign …

Student-driven protests erupted in Bangladesh on Sunday after thousands of young people staged sit-ins and other demonstrations in protest of the government’s “affirmative action” policy to allocate 56% of civil service positions to the children of veterans from the 1971 …

India is experiencing something like a national emergency. This is in the form of persistent, nation-wide attacks on the basic democratic rights of ordinary citizens, by hyper-nationalist and communal forces which are supporting, and which are supported by, Bharatiya Janata …

Washington’s vigilant deputy, doing rounds on the beat in the Pacific, has been irate of late. The central issue here is the continuing poking around of China in an area that would have been colloquially termed in the past “Australia’s …