Dedication: This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Arasaki Moriteru, Professor of Politics at Okinawa University who passed away on March 31, 2018.

For many years in Okinawa, Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma in the heart of Ginowan City has been synonymous with danger. In 2003, when surveying the controversial installation from the air, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld remarked that this, “base is the most dangerous in the world.” On this occasion, Rumsfeld's vantage point was that of someone in flight, such as a U.S. pilot or other flight personnel operating from the base rather than that of nearby residents in Ginowan City, then over 90,000. On the ground, the local people experience danger daily in intensely visceral ways.

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 significance of Japanese civil society-based medical support implemented by an anti-nuclear and relief organization, Kakkin Kaigi, and a Hiroshima-based doctor, Dr. Kawamura Toratarō. It also analyzes Japanese – South Korean citizen cooperation and the Japanese governmental relief program for hibakusha. In particular, it explains how Japanese grassroots movements succeeded in providing long-term medical support and eventually assuring that the Japanese government extend relief to long-neglected Korean victims.

This paper explores a previously unexamined context to the firebombing of Japan. Analysis of the decisions leading up to construction and military testing conducted in 1943 at the Japanese Village at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah allows important insights into the evolution of US bombing strategy. The shift in US strategy from precision to carpet bombing, the testing and development of incendiary weaponry, and the institutionalization and rationalization of pursuing civilian targets throughout Japan are considered alongside this untold history. Additionally, a broader appreciation of World War II timelines is suggested.

Taiwan was surrendered to Imperial Japan by China's Qing dynasty in 1895, fifteen years prior to Japan's annexation of Korea. Like Korea, Taiwan's women and girls were subsequently conscripted into Japan's military “comfort women” (ianfu) system. The author notes significant differences between the treatment of the women in the two colonies and in the remembrance of the comfort woman systems. In Korea, dozens of comfort women statues and memorials commemorate the system's victims while not one such statue exists in Taiwan. In December 2016, eighteen years after Korea opened its first of two comfort women museums, the Ama (Grandmother) Museum was opened in Taipei. While the museum in Taipei chronicles the Taiwanese comfort women's plight, its message represents more than an indictment of Japan or a pursuit of redress for the system's victims. The museum and its sponsors find ways to apply the lessons of this tragedy to the ongoing challenges of human trafficking and domestic violence.

A critically important part of assembling the Korean peninsula-wide denuclearization jigsaw puzzle is the institutional and legal form of North Korean commitments on the one hand, and the nuclear negative security assurances by the NPT-Nuclear Weapons States (NWSs), especially the United States, on the other. Given the risk of mutual annihilation between the two Koreas as well as to third parties such as the United States, Japan, and China, finding a way to square this circle is urgent.

The Nautilus Institute has published a special report 'A Korean nuclear weapons-free zone treaty and nuclear extended deterrence: options for denuclearising the Korean Peninsula, A Korean Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone Treaty and Nuclear Extended Deterence: Options for Denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula