The Japanese anti-nuclear movement has been characterized by the same kinds of political divisions as other popular movements, while it also reflects some uniquely Japanese features. Today, with the risk of use of nuclear weapons climbing towards levels not reached since the darkest days of the Cold War, the Japanese movement, led by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the aging "Hibakusha" (survivors), plays a key role in the global nuclear abolition movement, serving as its conscience and its inspiration. At the same time it is confronting new challenges at home. The Japanese government maintains an ambivalent relationship with nuclear weapons. While it rhetorically calls for global nuclear disarmament in the United Nations, it remains firmly situated under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella." Meanwhile, the U.S. is refurbishing and upgrading its still vast nuclear arsenal, and expanding the role of nuclear weapons in its national security policy. With an enormous civilian nuclear power program, and huge stocks of plutonium, Japan has the capacity to produce its own nuclear weapons, should it decide to do so - a fact that does not go unnoticed by its neighbors in the region, China, and the Koreas.

Japan's three nonnuclear principles of not possessing, not producing, and not allowing nuclear arms on its soil, and Article 9 of its 1946 post-war constitution, which renounces war and prohibits maintenance of armed forces, are under serious attack. In 2004, Japan, one of the U.S.'s closest allies, deployed 1000 members of its "Self Defense Forces" to Iraq - the first time Japanese troops have been sent into combat zone since World War II. According to some estimates, Japan is second only to the U.S. in its military spending.

On the 60th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of their cities, the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki declared August 6, 2005 until August 9, 2006 to be an international Year of Inheritance, Awakening, and Commitment.

Jacqueline Cabasso has served as Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation (WSLF) in Oakland, California since 1984. Founded two years earlier, the nonprofit WSLF seeks to abolish nuclear weapons as an essential step in making possible a more secure, just, and environmentally sustainable world. Since 1994, Ms. Cabasso has participated as an accredited non-governmental organization representative in 12 negotiating and review sessions of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 1995, she co-founded the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which has grown to include more than 2000 organizations in over 90 countries, and she continues to serve on its international Coordinating Committee. Ms. Cabasso chairs the Coordinating Committee of the multi-issue Peoples NonViolent Response Coalition, located in the Bay Area, and formed in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Jeffrey R. Cooper is an SAIC Technical Fellow, Vice President for Technology, and Chief Science Officer of SAIC Strategies, Simulation & Training Business Unit at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He received his undergraduate and graduate education at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was later Professorial Lecturer in Arms Control and Defense Analysis at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In addition to long-standing focus on strategic analysis and military transformation, his core interest is using information to improve intelligence analysis, decision making, C2, and operational effectiveness in order to enhance U.S. national security. Cooper served in a range of senior government positions, including White House Staff and Assistant to the Secretary of Energy.

For the past several years, Cooper's focus has been largely on intelligence matters, with particular emphasis on analytic failures and methods to improve all-source analysis capabilities. Most recently, he chaired the Panel on Unexpected Threats for the DNI's Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR). Cooper was a Professional Staff Member of the Presidential Commission on Future Intelligence Capabilities (Silberman-Robb Commission) and has been actively involved in work on the Revolution in Intelligence Affairs and Intelligence Transformation. His monograph on "Curing Analytic Pathologies" will be published shortly by CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.

This talk addresses a set of intimately intertwined contradictions that characterize military-societal relations in present-day Japan: the contradiction between Article 9 of Japan's constitution, which forbids a standing army and the existence of its armed forces; the contradiction between the civilian prohibition of violence and the military's training for and potential demand of violent acts; and the dilemma of representing a profession that must negotiate between societal mores and the demands associated with military service. More specifically, Professor Frühstück will untangle the Self-Defense Forces' public relations strategies, ranging from comics to live firing exercises. She argues that these strategies are deeply embedded in Japanese culture and affecy various segments of the Japanese public in radically different ways.

Sabine Frühstück focuses her research on the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society include problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military-societal relations. Frühstück is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern and present-day Japan, Avant-garde: The Army of the Future. Her book, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, is a history of sexual knowledge in Japan and the different uses made of that knowledge. Based on a wide variety of sources including military data on soldiers' health, sex education treatises for youth, and pronatalist and expansionist propaganda that fought frigidity in women and impotence in men, the book analyzes the techniques at work in conflicts and negotiations that aimed at the creation of a normative sexuality. Frühstück has co-edited Neue Geschichten der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien and Zentraleuropa 1700-2000 and The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure.