A new issue of Inside Indonesia is out. Rumi Sakamoto (Auckland): Pan-pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature. Fan Gang on China’s Great Migration. Tiger Girls on the loose: Burma gets its first girl band. The Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden: Walk through depictions of the torture inflicted on those who go to Buddhist hell. What do young Cambodians think about their country? An excerpt from East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute by David C. Kang. For now, Bhutan conforms better than any other modern state to criteria for national greatness: a sane way of life, a thriving ecology, civilized aesthetic and ethical principles, an absolute prohibition on strip malls, and general harmlessness. In China, as tourists come, culture goes. What comes to the minds of a young population that didn’t live through a bloody civil war, a hellish genocide, the Vietnamese invasion of the late 1970s, or American bombings a decade before that? Pankaj Mishra on a new Cold War in Asia? Opportunistic speculators are eying Nepal’s burgeoning hydropower potential; does wealth or woe lie ahead for the poverty-stricken nation? Hong Kong’s rising temperatures have created a pervasive dependence on A/C, but some are trying to break the habit. Though junta leadership changed Burma's name in 1989, debate continues to be divisive (and more). The Japan syndrome: The biggest lesson the country may yet teach the world is about the growth-sapping effects of ageing. From Lapham's Quarterly, Ross Perlin on China’s instant cities, thirty years on. After 500 years of Western predominance, Niall Ferguson argues, the world is tilting back to the East. Jakarta's Capital Idea: Indonesia may move its capital out of Jakarta but it won't solve the city's problems. How to negotiate with North Korea: Reaching an accord on nuclear-weapons development was a difficult proposition even before the recent revelations.
