Recent articles from JAPAN FOCUS in English

Japan Focus is part of ZNet's Asia Watch. Another ZNet Japan site is Japan Watch.

Japan Focus presents writings about Japan, Japan in Asia and the world, as well as Japanese and international perspectives on contemporary Japanese politics, economics and society. It offers translations from Japanese and Japan Focus originals.
Dates listed below are those when the article was posted at Japan Focus.
When viewing an article, if an East Asian author's name is listed with the surname first, the surname is indicated by underline.
Readers are referred to the Japan Focus home page https://japanfocus.org for additional materials on modern and contemporary Japanese politics, economics and society, Japan in the world, and war and peace in the Asia Pacific.

Recent Articles

Featured Articles

Suda: A “Contract Law” that Enslaves Japanese Working People
Aug 13,2007
Translated and introduced by Andrew Gordon  “If we do not hear from you within one week, we will take it that you have consented without objection.”This is the single cover page sent from the company to a labor union formed by employees of an elder care service company in Tokyo last November, together with employment rules totaling about 50 pages.

Tanter: The New American-led Security Architecture in the Asia Pacific:
Mar 17,2007
When Prime Ministers Abe Shinzo and John Howard signed Japan's first comprehensive security agreement in half a century, and its only one apart from the treaty with the United States, the two countries raised five crucial foreign policy signals, and fundamentally securitised the relationship between the two countries.   Firstly, the Japan-Australia Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation [1] codifies and publicly acknowledges for the first time the existing wide-ranging security cooperation between Japan and Australia.

McCormack: A Denuclearization Deal in Beijing:
Feb 14,2007
On 13 February 2007, a historic deal was struck in Beijing commencing the process of the denuclearization of Korea, comprehensive regional reconciliation, ending the Korean War, and normalizing relations between North Korea and its two historic enemies, Japan and the United States. The agreement is complex, and its implications are enormous, not just for the peninsula.

Marshall: Japan’s Worker Co-operative Movement into the 21st Century
Jun 3,2006
The pace of Japan’s economy is picking up again after more than a decade of stasis. During this long period of economic stagnation, the many personnel practices favoring employees known by the rubric “lifetime employment” have been subjected to increased criticism by pro-investor, neo-liberal voices.

NOMI: Inequality and Japanese Education: Urgent choices
Feb 19,2006
In December 2004, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced preliminary results of the second Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey that had been conducted in 2003 on 15 year olds from the 30 OECD members and eleven "partner countries" in mathematics, science, reading, and problem solving. [1] This survey confirms two trends in Japanese education that have been widely recognized in recent years: the general decline in academic standards of Japanese students and growing bifurcation in student performance.

Underwood: Mitsubishi, Historical Revisionism and Japanese Corporate Resistance to Chinese Forced Labor Redress
Feb 11,2006
Just as Nazi Germany did in Europe during World War II, Imperial Japan made extensive use of forced labor across the vast area of the Asia Pacific it once occupied. Today, however, Japan's government and corporations are dealing with the legacy of wartime forced labor very differently than their German counterparts.