| The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Newsletter |
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Newsletter No. 39. 2012
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September 24, 2012 |
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Greetings!
Thanks to the many who responded so generously to our request for financial support for the Journal. We've raised more than $3,000 toward the $10,000 needed to continue our immediate work. This ends our mini-drive. We will resume it in November when we hope to hear from others. As we approach our first decade of publication, we need to place the journal on a sustainable foundation. This will require hiring of a part-time managing editor. As you know, we have no institutional backing and no angel. But we do have 6,000 loyal regular readers and many more who consult our work periodically. In the weeks ahead we will outline more of our plans. Here I will mention only one. Under the editorship of Laura Hein, we will shortly launch the first of ten course readers drawing on the most important APJ articles on themes ranging from war and historical memory to women and Japan's political economy, to environmental history, popular culture, Okinawa, and cross-cultural globalization. With this we hope to extend our reach more fully into the classroom.
We invite you to help increase activity level on our facebook page - by commenting on articles, hitting "like" buttons, or posting relevant articles/news reports on our page. This helps increase the exposure of our page to a broader audience And if you haven't "liked" our facebook page yet, please do so now - www.facebook.com/japanfocus
Our subscribers via this Newsletter, as well as through Facebook and Twitter now number 6,000. We invite you to help us expand these numbers by informing colleagues, associates, students and friends who might find our work useful. The best way to do so is to send along a recent article of interest and invite them to subscribe via our homepage either to receive the Newsletter or to receive notification via Facebook or Twitter. Another good way is to include APJ in your syllabus.
Our home page has two important features. One is a regularly updated guide to the more than 100 articles we have published on the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power meltdown which is transforming Japanese politics and society, and is reshaping issues of nuclear power and energy policy in that nation and globally. Articles are arranged topically. In addition, we have added a guide to some of the most important, and liveliest, online and print sources on 3.11 including blogs and websites. Second, the list of articles now indicates all those available in Japanese translation or original, as well as other languages.
More than 6,000 people now subscribe to APJ, either through our Newsletter or the more than 2,700 who follow us through Twitter or Facebook, whose numbers are growing steadily. Please consider joining them by clicking at the appropriate link on our home page. We invite authors, publishers and directors to bring their books, films and events on East Asia and the Pacific to the attention of our readers. See the home page for information about presenting relevant books and films at our site and for examples of authors, publishers and filmmakers who are presenting their work at the Journal.
Contact Japan Focus by email at info@japanfocus.org
To access our full archive with more than 2,000 articles, and to view the most widely read articles through their titles or via our index, go here. |
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The Asia-Pacific Journal is freely available to all. We invite those who wish to support our work by allowing us to make technical upgrades, defray technical, mailing and maintenance fees, and to enable us to expand our output since the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami. Recommended support level: $25 ($10 for students and residents of developing countries); $40 for institutions including libraries, research centers, government offices. If you experience difficulty in subscribing, write to us with the error message at info@japanfocus.org
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Masuda Yoshinobu, From "Black Rain" to "Fukushima": The Urgency of Internal Exposure Studies
Internal exposure has become a major public concern as a result of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster. Hiroshima's "black rain" was the first event that revealed the significance of internal exposure. I began working on the black rain problem in 1985 after meeting Mr. Murakami Tsuneyuki, then Director General of Hiroshima "Black Rain" A-Bomb Sufferers Organization.
On the basis of more than a quarter century of painstaking investigation, the author documented the fact that exposure to black rain/radiation after Hiroshima was far greater than had been officially acknowledged, a finding with important implications for Fukushima victims today.
Masuda Yoshinobu: Former Director of the Meteorological Research Institute, former member of the Science Council of Japan. Full-time organizer for the Society Demanding Non-Nuclear Government, chairman of the Tokyo Center for Civil Movements on Nuclear Power Plant Issues.
Sakai Yasuyuki is a mechanical/electronics engineer based in Kariya city, Aichi prefecture, working for one of the largest automotive parts suppliers. He studied Ecological Economics, Values & Policy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Steve Leeper is chairperson of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation.
Recommended citation: Masuda Yoshinobu, "From "Black Rain" to "Fukushima": The Urgency of Internal Exposure Studies," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 39, No. 3, September 24, 2012.
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Nadine Ribault and Thierry Ribault, The "Bright Future" of Japan's Nuclear Industry
While the media are rushing to announce the "full stop" of Japan's nuclear power production 2039, little attention has been paid to two much less publicized moves. The first is the restarting of Japan's nuclear export industry, especially its targeting of former colonial areas in South East Asia. The second is even more discreet. It is the revision of the Atomic Energy Basic Law loosening constraints on weapons development and breaking the long-standing pledge that nuclear technology be used exclusively for peaceful ends. The amendment may be related to the apparently contradictory announcement that the Japanese government will stop nuclear production but continue to reprocess spent fuel. We propose to analyse both of these recent developments. This article examines both.
Nadine Ribault is a writer and Thierry Ribault is a researcher at CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research, Maison franco-japonaise in Tokyo). They are authors of: Les sanctuaires de l'abîme - Chronique du désastre de Fukushima published by les Editions de l'Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Paris, 2012.
Recommended citation: Nadine and Thierry Ribault, "The 'Bright' Future of Japan's Nuclear Industry," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10 Issue 39, No. 1, September 24, 2012.
Read More. . . |
Peter Dale Scott, Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension
From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as "events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the ... social structure, have a major impact on ... society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force." This article ranges widely across destabilizing events in American history over the last half century to trace their commonalities and pose critical unanswered questions about their origins and the role of intelligence agencies in their perpetration.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10 Issue 39, No. 2, September 24, 2012.
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