Geography Archives: Japan

A new documentary that began airing on PBS this month (The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today) highlights one of the most surreal stories from World War II.

The U.S. military is preparing for war on China. It has missile systems in the Philippines aimed at major Chinese cities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the USA is turning “Japan into a war-fighting headquarters”. Silicon Valley Big Tech oligarchs are making hugely profitable investments.

Toshiyuki Mimaki, co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese organization honored with the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its anti-nuclear activism, drew comparisons between the plight of children in Gaza and those impacted by the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The U.S. and UK ambassadors to Japan will not attend the Nagasaki atomic bomb victim memorial on August 9 due to the Nagasaki administration’s decision not to invite the Israeli envoy.

In Asian media this week: Dangerous turn adds new anti-Beijing flashpoint. Plus: Bangkok banks used to supply Myanmar military; Why Hindu nationalists back Israel; Thais opt for neutrality in great-power war; How to stop China slipping into Japan trap; Online gambling an Indonesian epidemic.

The Russian economy has overtaken Japan to become the fourth largest in the world in PPP terms (purchase power parity), according to revised data from the World Bank released at the start of June. As bne IntelliNews reported in August, Russia had already overtook Germany to become the fifth biggest economy in adjusted terms. Hit by multiple shocks […]

In early April 2024, the navies of four countries—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States—held a maritime exercise in the South China Sea. Australia’s Warramunga, Japan’s Akebono, the Philippines’ Antonio Luna, and the United States’ Mobile worked together in these waters to strengthen their joint abilities and—as they said in a joint statement—to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight and respect for maritime rights under international law.”

The vastly different treatment of Cuba and Israel illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the Western order, an order that is being taken less and less seriously in the global South. North-South relations are tilting, not only economically, but also ideologically. A new era is beginning.

I. To summarise the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task.1 In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific, and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although it remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism […]

While the sanctions regime has hit Chinese companies, especially Huawei, hard and exposed weak links in China’s chip supply chain, the last year has seen significant progress by Chinese companies.

“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported on Monday.

Let’s start with the total amount of radiation that the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant STILL contains today. The spent fuel at the site contains 85 times more cesium-137 than Chornobyl and 50,000 to 100,000 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. 

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 heralded the atomic age and ushered in the military-industrial complex that took over the United States.

U.S. government documents admit the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union.

Mythology about these mass civilian slaughters warps thinking about U.S. militarism.

July 1939, Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist and a refugee in U.S., had sought the help of Einstein to persuade the U.S. administration headed by President Roosevelt, to construct an atomic bomb as a counter to an identical programme that, it was then suspected, Nazi Germany had embarked upon.

“It has never been true that nuclear war is ‘unthinkable.’ It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.” —E.P. Thompson

“Piping water into the sea is an outrage. The sea is not a garbage dump,” said one local fisherman earlier this year.

U.S. politicians from both parties agree: the deficit doesn’t matter. In their bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, Biden and Republicans are boosting military spending to $886 billion while making it harder for poor people to receive food stamps and welfare.

During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where the meeting was held.