East-West Center in the News

(2011-03-21)Monday morning quarterbacks are already asking why Japan, a country known for its frequent earthquakes and occasionally severe Tsunamis (a word that originated in Japan), would decide to build so many nuclear power plants, and site so many of them in coastal areas.

Japan's lack of domestic oil resources was a principal contributor to its role in the World War II, and the end of that war did not change the country's feeling of vulnerability to oil supply disruptions. A program to develop the peaceful uses of nuclear energy was initiated in 1954, and the first commercial reactors were built during the 1970s in cooperation with General Electric and Westinghouse.

(2011-03-28)Since the collapse of North Korea’s centralized state economy during the country’s devastating famines in the 1990s, many ordinary North Koreans have turned to an underground market system as a means to survive, according to economist Marcus Noland, co-author of the recently published book “Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea,” based on large-scale surveys of North Korean refugees in China and South Korea.

As a result, more North Koreans have gained some access to foreign media, and more seem to be privately blaming the regime’s policies for the nation’s woes, Noland said in a talk at the East-West Center in Honolulu, where he is a nonresident Senior Fellow.