As the English translation of Shiori Ito's book, Black Box, is published, she says her fight for justice goes on.

It has been over four years since Ito Shiori accused one of Japan's better-known journalists of raping her in an upscale Tokyo hotel. Ito had begun nervously reaching out to the Japanese and foreign media, not to avenge herself for what happened, she said, but to challenge public attitudes regarding sexual assault. Her proposal for a press conference was initially rejected by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (full disclosure: I was on the events committee at the time), which was nervous about airing unproven claims.

This article assesses the US debacle in Afghanistan in light of the Vietnam War and US forever wars.

Many commentators are likening the recent Taliban seizure of Kabul to a “repeat” of the 1975 “fall of Saigon”.

But the Taliban less closely resemble Vietnamese communists than they do Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. More than two decades ago, when the Taliban, a Sunni Islamist group, held power in Afghanistan, they massacred members of their country's Shia Muslim minority and others. In the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouge had committed genocide against Cambodia's Cham Muslim minority and others. In March 2001, the Taliban deployed dynamite to blow up their country's monumental 6th-7th century stone sculptures, the Bamyan Buddhas, part of Afghanistan's historic heritage. That act of vandalism resembled the Khmer Rouge's demolition of Phnom Penh's Catholic Cathedral, stone by stone, and their repression of Cambodia's Buddhist religion.

Five and a half months ago (15 March), I wrote of the “Troubled Games of the XXXll Olympiad” in the context of the dual crises facing Japan: continuing, unresolved radiation emanating from the 2011 Fukushima quake/tsunami/meltdown and the COVID-19 public health crisis. The Games were supposed to resolve these crises, leading the world into a new era of recovery, hope and peace, but as they went ahead in July and August neither was even mitigated.