Japan's outgoing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he resigned to break a deadlock in parliament over Japan's support for US-led operations in Afghanistan. Former foreign minister Taro Aso, who shares Abe's pro-remilitarization agenda, is considered the frontrunner to take over as party leader and, consequently, prime minister. Under the proposed plan, the Air Self-Defense Forces would provide airlift support for NATO's ISAF mission in Afghanistan, a provision of a new law planned to replace the current counter-terrorism law that expires Nov. 1. The new legislation would also continue and expand the Maritime Self-Defense Force's NATO-linked refueling mission in the Indian Ocean. (Euronews, Sept. 12; Japan Times, Sept. 9)

The Japanese anti-war group Zenko, whose 37th annual conference just closed in Tokyo, is a critical voice of dissent to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, where "Class A" war criminals like Hideki Tojo, as well as many hundreds of common soldiers, are honored. Not all of the survivors of those soldiers are happy that their loved ones are enshrined at Yasukuni, and Zenko has organized support for Koreans and Okinawans who have brought suit in the Japanese courts to have the names of their fathers or grandfathers removed from the shrine. Kinjo Minoru, an Okinawan sculptor and leading voice against the US military presence on the island, is one of the litigants. He said his father did not fight for Imperial Japan willingly, and that official Japanese history is trying to erase the memory of the "Okinawa massacre"—in which military authorities ordered the island's inhabitants to commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the US in July 1945, leading to hundreds of deaths.

Hiroshima marked the 62nd anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack Aug. 6, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe scrambled to mend fences with survivors still outraged by comments from a cabinet member apologizing for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's historic first post-war Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma, an Abe appointee, said in a June speech, "I understand that the bombings ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped." Kyuma was forced to step down in the outcry following the comments, but still retains his seat in the Diet, where he represents—perversely—Nagasaki.

On Aug. 4, the National Assembly for Peace and Democracy opened at a conference hall in Kamata, a city within the Tokyo metropolitan area. Attended by some 500 activists from throughout Japan, as well as participants from South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States, this was the 37th annual National Assembly, better known by its Japanese acronym Zenko. The group first emerged from the struggle against Japanese involvement in the Vietnam war, and history has now brought it full circle, as Washington again calls upon Tokyo to back up a US military adventure—this time in Iraq, where Japan still maintains troops in an officially "noncombatant" role. The most honored guests at the Zenko conference were Samir Adil and Nadia Mahmood, leaders of the Iraq Freedom Congress (IFC), a civil resistance coalition which came together in 2005 to oppose the occupation and demand a secular state. Another luminary was Tokushin Yamauchi, a leading opponent of the US military presence in Okinawa, who was elected to the upper house of the Diet in last month's dramatic turn-around elections that dealt a humiliating defeat to the Liberal Democratic Party of pro-military Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Well well, look who's running for the Diet. An almost perfect analogy to the vile Alessandra Mussolini in Italy. She was (officially) "shunned" by the "post-Fascist" National Alliance—even as doing so only helped legitimize and mainstream the party whose roots go straight back Il Duce. Japan's ruling LDP does not have roots in the fascist era, but it is leading a propaganda drive to rehabilitate Japan's World War II role—and a political drive to remilitarize the country. This revealing July 26 USA Today report is rather understatedly entitled "Nationalism gains strength in Japan":

International inspectors July 15 confirmed that North Korea had shut down the nuclear reactor at its Yongbyon research facility, the fruit of a painstaking diplomatic effort in which the DPRK will immediately start receiving oil aid from South Korea. (WP, Reuters, July 12) The following day, a 6.8 earthquake in Niigata prefecture, Japan, caused a fire and leak of radioactive water into the sea at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), is the world's largest commercial nuclear plant. Japan has a fast-growing nuclear industry, with 55 plants operating and another 11 planned. Nuclear power currently provides a third of the country's energy, but Tokyo plans to boost this to 40%. The plans are opposed by environmentalists and local residents who say the government is inviting disaster by building so many reactors in a seismically unstable country. (The Independent, Reuters, July 17)

Police in southern China's Guangxi region arrested 28 as thousands staged angry protests against draconian local enforcement of the government's family-planning policy. In Bobai county, more than 3,000 people smashed through the gates of a town government compound, setting fire to vehicles and damaging files and office equipment. Disturbances were reported in sveen Bobai towns following a drive by local officials to enforce fines for families who failed to comply with China's national one-child policy.

As a campaign of nonviolent protests mount in Okinawa over construction of a new off-shore US military heliport at Henoko, an e-mail alert from the local anti-militarism group "Project Disagree" informs us that the the Japanese government has dispatched the Maritime Self Defense Force ship Bungo to the Henoko base. The Bungo is a gunboat and mine-sweeper equipped with divers, and its mission is apparently to assist private contractors in the environmental "pre-survey" for the off-shore expansion. The environmental assessment is being overseen by the Defense Facility Administration Bureau, and local media have noted that Maritime Self Defense Force involvement in this type of environmental review is unprecedented. Writes Project Disagree: "Although Yasuhisa Shiozaki, Chief Cabinet Secretary, said the Maritime Self Defense Force in Henoko is not tasked with suppression of local base opposition, Okinawans suffering from the US presence and the Japanese government's discriminatory policies reacted with anger."