Greetings!

Jeff Kingston examines how the Abe administration continues to crack down on dissent both within Japan and among foreign critics. In recent months this has extended to foreign journalists, as related by Carsten Germis, a German correspondent harassed and marginalized by the government for doing his job including visiting the contested islets of Dokdo/Takeshima. Roger Pulvers presents an excerpt of his recently published collection of translations of tanka by Meiji poet Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912). Takuboku identified in his writing with those people who wanted fervently to liberalize Japanese society, and at the same time wrote about the downtrodden because he saw himself as one of them. Amid the panic over the atrocities committed by ISIL/ISIS, Peter Dale Scott reminds us that the largest planned civilian massacre since the Nazi Holocaust was the overthrow of Indonesia's elected president Sukarno and mass murder of the members and suspected sympathizers of the nation's Communist party by rebellious generals supported by the CIA.