It sounds reasonable – after all, even hardened autocrats pay lip service to lofty abstractions like “rule-of-law.” But the chief justice in question is in the midst of an impeachment trial for abuse of office, and was a so-called midnight appointment by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, taking up his post two days before she stepped down and Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III won a May 2010 election, partly on a platform of rule-of-law reform and curbing graft.

When the Aquino government sought to stop Arroyo – who is herself accused of corruption and rigging elections – from traveling abroad for medical treatment for what she claims is a life-threatening bone illness, the courts intervened and sought to overrule the government travel ban on the former president, who is now a heavily bandaged congress representative for Pampanga in central Luzon.

That the Supreme Court decided to break up an Aquino family plantation called Hacienda Luisita, 60 miles north of Manila – and distribute almost 11,000 acres of land to more than 6,000 farm workers – only adds to the intrigue in a country where calls for land reform have long gone unheeded by powerful landed aristocrats.

But Aquino’s media team has been keen to dismiss any link to the impeachment, and media secretary Ricky Carandang said that “we were in favor of the redistribution and supported the decision,” during an interview on Thursday at Manila’s Malacanang Palace.

Similarly, when asked whether the case against Corona was merely part of a broader factional arm wrestle, presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda said that “this is in fact about our commitment to hold all officials accountable, and is not about attacking the judiciary.”

If a trial enmeshed in dynastic intrigue and possible score settling wasn’t compelling enough, earlier this month, the defense had ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales testify in an attempt to clear Corona of allegations he held secret bank accounts. But that backfired spectacularly, when the ombudsman instead alleged that the chief justice had more than $28million dollars in 82 different accounts.

“We are giving them just enough rope to hang themselves,” said Edsal Tupaz, a lawyer working for the prosecution. He asserted that ombudsman Corona’s revelations were “a game changer.” But on Tuesday, the chief justice will testify, and his defense team said Friday that it has evidence to refute some of the allegations against Corona.

Journalist and academic Luis Teodoro cautions that the Philippine legal system has major weaknesses. “One of the problems in this country is that it’s difficult to prove a lot of things,” he says, a reminder perhaps that neither defense nor prosecution can take anything for granted in this case.

Back at the Paranaque city hall, a few doors down from the poster backing the chief justice, another hearing was taking place – this time for a murder case from one of Manila’s slums, a reminder of how the country’s legal system works for the tens of millions of Filipinos living on the breadline.

*Roger Buendia was 17 when the alleged crime took place, and though kept in a youth detention center, this was in the same building as adult criminals. “The place was filthy and when it rained the floor welled-up with water and we couldn’t sleep,” he says. That was the least of his worries, however.

NGO Preda assists minors in detention in the Philippines, helping them pass at least some of their sentences at Preda centers outside Manila – rather than in jails in Manila where sometimes they are kept with adults, or, in some cases, are locked up on trumped up or false charges by corrupt cops seeking to boost their promotion chances by scoring a certain number of arrests.

Francis Bermido Jr., a Preda social worker, took up the story. “Some of the older prisoners downstairs were threatening Roger because of the murder charge – some said they knew the man he’s accused of killing.” Preda secured a court order allowing Roger to stay with the organization, for his own safety.

Mother of the accused Selena wipes away tears while talking at the cramped but neat family apartment in the barangay Don Bosco slum, a couple miles from the city hall. She sells halo-halo for a living, and handing me one of these ice cold Filipino desserts, she says she has mixed feelings about her son staying at Preda.

“Preda is so far away and I can’t take that much time to visit because I need to make ends meet here,” she sighs. ”But it’s better than the jail, where they treat the prisoners worse than dogs.”

*pseudonym used to protect the accused’s identity

Simon Roughneen is a Southeast Asia-based writer. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, South China Morning Post and Asia Times, among other publications.

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Yet the ongoing conflict in the northern state of Kachin looks like it could remain an intractable blot on the landscape as Burma attempts to shake off a 40-year legacy of rule by a brutal military junta.

“The president called for a ceasefire in March. But more troops were sent,” says Ja Seng Khawn, daughter of former Kachin Independence Organization Chairman Brang Seng. “The conflict has intensified. Government troops burnt down villages, and 65,000 civilians have fled from their homes.”

Earlier this month, government troops moved closer to Laiza, the largest town inside the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) liberated zone. And, despite calls for peace talks, the fighting is continuing.

Karen, Kachin, Chin, Shan and other dissident ethnic forces have been demanding equal rights and local autonomy for more than forty years, and their repression at hands of the military has thwarted any attempt to create a genuine Union of Burma based on its myriad cultures and diversity.

Prospects appeared to be brightening with the apparently reform minded President Thein Sein reaching out to non-Burmans, and efforts to bring a halt to the fighting have enjoyed better results in the case of the  Karen National Union and its armed wing. A draft agreement for a ceasefire has already been signed.

After decades of bitter conflict with the central government, the dissident Karen forces never dreamed that one day the president would invite their banned organization to peace talks in the capital. However, on April 12,Thein Sein hosted seven KNU leaders in Naypyidaw after another round of peace talks was successfully concluded in Yangon.

Various sets of talks have taken place with other small ethnic armies, including the Karenni, Chin, Shan and others, but it’s primarily the resource rich Kachin state that finds itself excluded from the friendly embrace of the government’s charm offensive.

Indeed, there’s been very little charm exuded by the government peace panel responsible for the talks. The panel is led by Aung Thaung, a former industry minister described in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables as a “notorious hard-liner.” It has met a KIO Kachin delegation in China on three occasions, but without any success in reducing hostilities.

“Wecalled for military operations launched since June 2011 to stop, in order to achieve a ceasefire,” says Ja Seng Khawn, now based in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin state, after years of working with the KIO leadership. “They didn’t listen to us. There’s no trust between the two sides.”

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Prime Minister Najib Razak has attempted to change this. He has announced a series of political and economic reforms that he and the reformers in his United Malays National Organization (UMNO) hope will make Malaysia a fairer and more competitive place.

The initiatives, however, haven’t stopped protestors like the Bersih movement from campaigning for free and fair elections. They also fear Malaysia won’t change, and will instead slip back to its autocratic ways, which found real traction under Najib’s predecessors, in particular former premier Mahathir Mohamad. His style of autocracy has never been far from the surface of Malaysian political life and was again on display in Kuala Lumpur in recent weeks when political mischief went on show in the guise of putting Western leaders in the dock through a court with no jurisdiction or legitimacy other than it being backed by Mahathir, who attended the hearings.

As an eye witness to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the wanton destruction caused elsewhere by the War on Terror, I can testify to the sheer ferocity of the conflicts. There’s little doubt that a legal case against Western leaders for their behavior throughout the first decade of this century could be made. But the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) is certainly not the answer.

In its final round of hearings, the KLWCT has found former U.S. President George W. Bush along with another seven associates guilty of crimes of torture.

It said the eight accused – Bush; former Vice President Dick Cheney; former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; former counsel to Bush, Alberto Gonzales; former general counsel to the vice president, David Addington; former general counsel to the defense secretary, William Haynes II; former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and former Deputy Assistant General John Yoo – had engaged in a web of instruction and directives leading to a common plan, purpose and conspiracy to commit crimes of torture and war crimes in relation to the War on Terror as conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among the evidence provided, Abbas Abid testified his fingernails had been pulled out with a pair of pliers. Moazzam Begg told how he was kept in a hood, beat and locked away in solitary confinement.

The tribunal says Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were aware that the U.S. had violated the 1984 Torture Convention and the Geneva Conventions but they had failed to intervene. This came after legal opinions asserted in their defense that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees and that as such there was no torture occurring within the meaning of the Torture Convention. As a result, interrogation techniques which included cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, were actually allowed.

Unanimously, under KLWCT President Lamin Mohammad Yunus, a bench of five judges ruled the prosecution had proved beyond reasonable doubt charges of crimes of torture in accordance with Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter. The court says it was following the Nuremberg model.

People inside the court also like to compare the KLWCT with the Russell Tribunal, established by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell and his French counterpart Jean-Paul Sartre to evaluate American foreign policy in North and South Vietnam after the defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

The KLWCT wouldn’t be described as a kangaroo court if it had any form of legitimacy. It does not.

But when following the proceedings in the mainstream press or through the national wires one could be forgiven for thinking that this tribunal ranks alongside the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia or similar international courts established to try those responsible for tragedies in Rwanda, Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia.

Indeed, the coverage has been unquestioning and has found friends elsewhere. The Tehran Times, for example, trumpeted the Malaysian verdict as: “It’s official – George W. Bush is a war criminal.”

It was a second KLWCT conviction for Bush. He and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair were last November found guilty in absentia of committing “crimes against peace” during the Iraq war after a four day hearing. It then said: “Unlawful use of force threatens the world to return to a state of lawlessness. The acts of the accused were unlawful.”

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But on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, at the Extraordinary Chambers for the Courts in Cambodia (ECCC), this country’s main event has motored along at a steady, if grisly, pace and has now gone into recess after another marathon session of sensational revelations of atrocities committed by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge between April 1975 and January 1979.

Critical for the prosecution was how the regime, blamed for the deaths of up to two million people, had turned on itself and linked the surviving leaders of the Standing Committee – Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan – to the atrocities committed by the ultra Maoists.

All threedeny charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Among the most startling evidence was testimony that Nuon Chea, once second in charge of the Khmer Rouge, had condemned members of his own family. He sent two nieces – Lach Vary and Lach Dara, both Chinese trained doctors who worked for the regime’s health ministry – their husbands and another two nephews to the dreaded S-21 at Toul Sleng to meet their end.

Pol Pot had also dispatched a sister-in-law of his to a security center where she perished.

Much of the evidence was produced by the prosecution’s star witness, Kang Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who has already been jailed for life after being convicted of committing crimes against humanity for the deaths of about 12,000 people at Toul Sleng. However, the final S-21 death toll has been estimated as much higher, up to 24,000 people. Nuon Chea has denied any involvement and denies that he was Duch’s boss. Duch testified he met regularly with Nuon Chea or Son Sen to give them updates on the prisoner “confessions” and camp operations.

Typically, 10-minute meetings were held every three to five days.

“I reported to him about the confessions, and he instructed and advised,” Duch said. “All the power was concentrated in the hands of the secretariat of the communist party, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea.”

Duch said Nuon Chea replaced Son Sen in 1977 as head of Santebal – the Khmer Rouge secret police. Son Sen remained in favor but was eventually killed along with his family amid a factional split in 1997 on the orders of Pol Pot.

“When Pol Pot was absent, Nuon Chea replaced him, and when Pol Pot issued an order, Nuon Chea followed up on how it was applied,” Duch told the court.

Favoritism wasn’t allowed and Nuon Chea sought to prove his purity among the hierarchy of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) by dispatching his own kin to the Killing Fields. This ruthless culture was corroborated by Saloth Ban, now 67, who was secretary general of the regime’s foreign ministry and Pol Pot’s nephew.

He told the court that despite his family connections he was always terrified for his own life and the lives of his immediate family. He added that Ieng Sary – his chief and the former foreign minister – had also lived in fear of the regime he helped rule.

“I had such fear, and I think others had bigger fear than me,” he said, adding that no one was safe and that Pol Pot’s oldest sister-in-law, Khieu Thirath, was killed in a Khmer Rouge security center. Thirath’s sister, Ponnary, was the first Cambodian woman to receive a baccalaureate degree and had married Pol Pot in 1956 but suffered chronic schizophrenia as the regime began to assert control over the country.

A third sister, Tirith, married Ieng Sary, became the minister for social affairs and is widely regarded as the first lady of the Khmer Rouge. She’s also facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, but the tribunal has ruled her mentally unfit to stand trial.

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Controversy in South Korea over U.S. beef isn’t new, but has been largely dormant for the past four years. In 2008, the then new Lee Myung-bak government agreed, after extensive negotiations, to restart imports, which had been halted since cases of mad cow disease were found in the United States in 2003.

That decision set off a firestorm of controversy, leading hundreds of thousands of citizens to come out in the spring and early summer of 2008 in protest over the resumed imports. Sensationalist media reports and online rumors fueled speculation that the new president was recklessly putting South Koreans’ health at risk of contracting bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease.

 The issue has been mostly quiet since then, with most South Koreans choosing to eat the more widely available Australian beef or the domestic beef, known as hanwoo. This week’s protests coincide with the four-year anniversary of the 2008 demonstrations.

At the May 2 protest, South Koreans carried signs that read, “We can’t live like this” and “Lee Myung-bak: resign.” The fact that protestors chose to light candles is a sign of the seriousness they attach to the beef issue. Around 4,000 armored riot police lined the streets in front of the police buses that transported them. The security appeared to be an exaggerated response to an exaggerated concern.

“We’re here because we want to get rid of our president,” says Jeong Yoon-shik, a university student. “The government just wants to expand its own power; they aren’t concerned about citizens.”

The reaction to the beef issue is fuelled in part by widespread displeasure with the Lee government, which is often accused of being corrupt and elitist. In an effort to quell public discontent in 2008, the politically vulnerable Lee promised in newspaper advertisements that imports of U.S. beef would be halted in the future if another case of mad cow surfaced in the United States. The protestors at this week’s protests are incensed that a case was indeed discovered, and yet imports are continuing.

But Lee would have a tough time stopping imports even if he really wanted to. Under the terms of the 2008 bilateral agreement, South Korea can’t stop importing U.S. beef simply because a case of mad cow is discovered – imports can’t be suspended as long as the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) maintains the U.S. status as a “controlled risk” country.

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If the vice minister were to ask me what parts of Finland’s education system I thought China could and should emulate (he didn’t) I’d tell him there were two things.

First is Finland’s pre-kindergarten system, in which children as young as nine months-old can attend until they are six. In each class, four university-educated teachers supervise about twenty children as they play sports, eat meals, and sleep together. This voluntary and pay-as-you-can daycare may seem costly, but it’s the best investment a society can make if it wants to ensure equality of opportunity for its children.

That’s because this daycare system helps close the achievement gap between rich and poor kids. Researchers at the University of Kansas have reported that by the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children raised in well-educated families, and this is as true in China as it is in the United States. Because Finnish children spend their day talking with and playing with university-educated professionals, it empowers them with such a large vocabulary that when they do start school they learn more quickly than their Western peers. 

More important, this daycare system takes children who might be from violent and volatile homes, and puts them in a safe and predictable learning space.  Research has found that children whose parents can’t be trusted to put food on the table (or to even just be present) will develop long-term issues with self-esteem and self-control, leading to poor test scores and relationship issues. 

The second thing that I think China can emulate is Finnish education’s emphasis on empathy, which starts at daycare.  From the moment they enter school, Finnish children are taught to help each other, and to appreciate difference and diversity.  Students as young as 14 years-old can define for me that empathy is “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, and knowing how he or she thinks and feels” because they’re taught that by their parents and teachers, and given the space to develop it by playing with their friends, dating, and working part-time. Cultural sensitivity is as much a national pride as self-reliance and Nokia, and English textbooks emphasize tolerance as much as syntax.        

Empathy is an education imperative because Finns want first and foremost a polite and orderly society. But empathy can also lead to an innovation economy. It permits Finns to work together, and to understand and access foreign markets. Emotional intelligence also often leads to creativity, something that China is desperately searching for now. 

Unfortunately, China’s vice minister of education didn’t see Finland’s focus on equity and empathy while he was in Helsinki.

The school where I ran into the vice minister’s delegation is considered the top school in Finland, producing many of the nation’s doctors, lawyers, and professors.  It lets in only the nation’s best students, focuses on preparing them for the college entrance exams, wins more international science and math competitions than any other school in Finland, and offers the elite International Baccalaureate program. 

In a chemistry classroom, a teacher told the vice minister that her students did at least two hours of homework a day (most Finnish high school students I’ve spoken with don’t do any), and the vice minister paid the students the highest compliment:  “I only wish that Chinese students could work as hard as you!”  The students laughed proudly.    

The student council president joined us during the tour, and asked me what I thought of the school, and I said that the school seemed too academic and too conservative. He replied that the problem is that Finland’s college entrance exam rewarded rote memorization.  Once he and his classmates graduated from high school, they had half a year to memorize five thick textbooks. There was so much new information to memorize that everyone in the school had to pay good money to learn test-taking strategies from cram courses. (An alternative to all this is to do what most Finnish students actually do, and just not care.) 

Then and there, it dawned on me the irony of the situation: The Chinese vice minister had traveled nine hours by plane to find himself in a Finnish school that most resembles a school he could have just walked to from his office.

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If today we were to pose an updated version of the Commentary question, we would no doubt ask, “Has There Ever Been Anything Like Communist China?” As with the Soviet Union, China today is sui generis. Its leaders have erected a flexible structure of control, combining repression of select targets with the openness that has enabled China to grow into an economic powerhouse. Having set aside policies that caused decades of isolation, the regime has been able to integrate itself into the global economy without abandoning the principles that enshrine the guiding role of the Communist Party.

It’s this calibrated economic integration that has allowed China’s government to evade opprobrium for its domestic repression. To be sure, the regime’s crimes aren’t ignored. Human rights organizations denounce the jailing of dissidents, the mistreatment of minorities, and the lack of the rule of law. But in an age when Ukraine and Turkey are chastised for breaches of democratic standards, China gets a pass for policies that have brought misery to millions. The separate category that China has carved out for itself goes beyond the usual double standard that has historically been applied to “progressive” dictatorships – Cuba, for example. Instead, there’s a kind of stand-alone China Exception, under which repression is acknowledged but actual objections are seldom voiced.

There are many examples of this China Exception. I’ll mention just two of the more egregious cases – egregious because of the ugliness of the policies and because of the world’s decision to ignore or condone Beijing’s actions.

The first example is the one-child policy. The fact that I take issue here will itself draw furrowed brows. The policy, most agree, is a settled issue, a hard but justified measure required by Chinese circumstances.

But why should the world treat the one-child policy with such tolerance? I’m not aware of any scheme of universal values that justifies the state’s intrusion into the most personal and important decisions of human life. Regimes that prevent their citizens from travelling abroad are routinely criticized as oppressive, not to say anachronistic. Is the denial of travel abroad as outrageous as a law that imposes limits on reproduction?

There’s no shortage of evidence of forced abortions and compulsory sterilizations of women who became pregnant in violation of the law. Regulations in more than half of China’s provinces endorse mandatory abortions, and officials risk disciplinary action if they fail to meet birth and sterilization quotas. And, of course, it’s well established that the one-child policy has led to an epidemic of sex-selective abortions and infanticide by parents who prefer boys. The central authorities sometimes blame overzealous local officials in order to deflect criticism. Indeed, the Communist Party leadership seems more focused on the public image of the population control policy than on its implementation. For example, it recently urged officials to use less menacing slogans, phasing out “old fashioned” examples like “If you don’t receive the tubal ligation surgery by the deadline, your house will be demolished!”

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Of course, one is unlikely to find the discussion of such sensitive issues in most official publications (although some media outlets affiliated with official publications have been particularly adventurous in carrying articles on these topics in the past few months). The range of issues is wide and diverse. Despite disagreement among participants in this incipient post-1989 Chinese intellectual renaissance, the discussion is fast converging on three critical issues. First, there appears to be a widely shared consensus among China’s thinking class that the country’s economic reform is either dead or mired in stagnation. Second, those who believe that economic reform is dead or stuck argue that only political reform, specifically the kind that reduces the power of the state and makes the government accountable to its people, will resuscitate economic reform (some advocate for more radical, democratizing changes, although the consensus on this particular point has yet to emerge). Third, the status quo, which can be characterized as a sclerotic authoritarian crony-capitalist order, isn’t sustainable and, without a fundamental shift in direction, a crisis is inevitable.

Such signs of an intellectual awakening are worth noting for many reasons. Its timing is certainly significant. Many people would connect this development with China’s pending leadership transition. In China, as in most other countries, pending changes in leadership usually stimulate discussions among the intelligentsia about the future of the country and the accomplishments or failures of the departing leadership. Chinese intellectuals, mostly liberals, may want to seize this once-in-a-decade opportunity to reignite a debate on whether the existing political system serves the country’s long-term needs of economic development, social justice, and national unity. 

Another, perhaps more important reason, is that more than two decades after the Tiananmen crackdown (and after Deng Xiaoping famously admonished his colleagues there should be “no arguing,” essentially ending the ideological debate among the ruling elites over whether post-Mao China was embracing capitalism), members of China’s thinking class have come to realize that the post-Tiananmen consensus, which might be characterized as giving economic reform and development a chance to solve China’s political problems (one-party rule and poor governance), has basically broken down. In other words, the post-Tiananmen model, all but intellectually bankrupt, provides no useful guidance in the coming decades.

One may be tempted to dismiss such discussions as idle chatter among marginalized Chinese intellectuals. This would be a mistake. Some of the participants in these discussions are influential opinion makers or advisors to the Chinese government. Their views reflect the thinking of at least some insiders of the Communist Party. So the frustrated tone and anxiety conveyed by their views could suggest that more open-minded elements in the party, some of whom may be in line to assume senior or important positions as a result of the leadership transition, share the same sense of crisis and urgency. 

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In the run up to this month’s China Professional Baseball League’s opening day, Lu Wen-sheng, long-time manager of defending champions Uni-President Lions, admitted to prosecutors that he had passed on daily team information and strategy to southern-based mobsters.

That admission was just the latest in a long line of often bizarre match-fixing scandals to rock the league since pro-ball began here in 1989. Since then, authorities have unearthed five full blown match-rigging syndicates – four of them in the last seven years –  and scores of “incidents” that read like the plot of a Hollywood mafia movie.

And for the players who chaffed at the idea of being bought off with money, cars, drugs or prostitutes, things got very ugly, very fast.

Mobsters have kidnapped, beat, pistol-whipped and stabbed scores of players and managers. Guns have been inserted in players’ mouths, bullets sent to their homes as warnings, and rumors abound about players being thrown off balconies or going missing after speaking with investigators. On one occasion, members of a team that failed to deliver a loss after being bribed were kidnapped from their Taichung hotel rooms, bundled into minivans and driven to a hideout, where they were repeatedly beaten until they “came round.”

In 1997, the entire China Eagles team was found to be taking money, and in 2008, a notorious mob boss, known as “The Windshield Wiper” because he could “make problems disappear,” bought a franchise with the apparent sole intention of throwing games for profit.

That trend continued in 2009, when a prominent politician from the ruling Kuomintang party was indicted and eventually sentenced to a lengthy prison term for running his own match-fixing ring.

“Gangsters have been heavily involved in baseball scandals since (former president) Lee Tung-hui’s era of ‘Black Gold’ politics in the 1990s. During that time, a lot of the mafia released from prison had strong ties to the KMT,” says Yu Jun-wei, whose book Playing in Isolation: a history of baseball in Taiwan deals with the murky confluence of Taiwanese gangsters, politicians and pro-ball on the island. “A number of these guys ended up running for office, which made perfect sense. What better way to protect your illegal interests?”

Critics have longed claimed that criminals have been able to leverage their political connections to prop up an illegal sports betting industry that is valued by some estimates at about $3.4 billion yearly. 

“KMT politicians are too close to gangsters, particularly in the south. Everybody knows who these guys are and they should be investigated,” says Democratic Progressive Party spokesman Lin Chun-hsien.  “The only way baseball can survive is if there are guarantees that match-fixing is finished for good. It’s a shame because we grew up with baseball. It’s a game we love.”

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If there’s one image of the March disasters that remains in the global consciousness, it is the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Today, we know that fuel melted in three reactors, ranking Fukushima on par with Chernobyl in terms of the seriousness of the disaster. One year later, although major progress has been made, problems persist.

Over the past year, efforts have focused on stabilizing the reactors. In December, the government declared them to be in cold shutdown. Although the situation in the reactor cores is now stable, the nuclear fuel requires constant cooling. This has generated a lot of contaminated water that requires storage, prompting Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to construct a nearby storage area of 1,100 tanks that can hold 180,000 tons of water. Aside from this water and the area in the immediate vicinity around the plant, the amount of radioactivity in the air or the ocean remains below levels that pose a threat to public health or marine organisms. It’s now believed that as much as 70 percent of the radioactive material released during the height of the disaster, by some estimates, was released into the Pacific Ocean, either by blowing out to sea or leaking from the plant. As a precaution against further leakage, TEPCO plans to seal about 17 acres of seabed near the cooling water intakes of the reactors this spring. While work will continue on the damaged reactors, decontamination efforts, infrastructure rebuilding, and a phased-return of residents are now underway.

Despite its mismanagement of the disaster, TEPCO remains an active entity responsible for providing electricity to as many as 45 million people. Still, public anger against TEPCO remains high. Earlier this month, shareholders of TEPCO filed a lawsuit against its executives. Suing for a historic amount of 5.5 trillion yen ($67.4 billion), the shareholders hope to use the money to compensate those affected by the disaster.

Getting less attention, but just as important, is the fact that other nuclear plants have been slow in preparing protective measures to prevent similar Fukushima-type disasters. Shortly after the March disasters, the government called on plant operators to install/reinforce coastal levees and install strategies to prevent hydrogen explosions. Yet, according to the Asahi Shimbun, only three nuclear facilities will have levees by the end of 2012, while none will have measures to prevent hydrogen explosions. Given that Japan’s seismic activity means another earthquake and/or tsunami is only a matter of time, this lack of preparation is surprising.

Aside from Fukushima, there has been significant progress in other sectors. Consider first the economy. The disasters destroyed or badly damaged Japan’s supply chains and infrastructure throughout Tohoku. According to the Cabinet Office, this led to an annualized 6 percent contraction in the nominal GDP in the second quarter (April-June). Because the government and private sector worked to rapidly restore the supply chains and infrastructure, companies could quickly resume manufacturing. This led to Japan’s nominal GDP to grow at an annualized 5.6 percent in the third quarter (July-September), leading the economy back to pre-disaster levels. By the end of FY2011, although the economy slowed, economic indicators showed that industrial production, private consumption, machine orders, and automobile production have all returned to pre-disaster levels. While full-blown reconstruction efforts are still in their initial phase and exports remained hampered by a high yen, the Cabinet Office expects nominal GDP for FY2012 to grow at about 2 percent. This is because it’s believed that the economy will be driven by domestic demand as reconstruction efforts increase, thereby creating demand and employment.

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