Picture it - thousands of Mickey Mouse heads floating over Orlando, Florida. That is the plan for later this month when Walt Disney Co. uses a new invention to promote Disney World. Now picture the Nike logo or the Apple Logo or even your logo taking to the air. How? Flogos!

What is a Flogo? It's lighter than air foam, made from proprietary surfactant (fancy word for soap), and pressed into the shape of a logo.

Source: WTPOP News

Flogos have a life expectancy of minutes to an hour or more, depending on wind speed and direction. They travel slowly, can go twenty to thirty miles in distance and as high as twenty-thousand feet in the air.

Source: ABC News

First conceived of in the 1990s by Francisco Guerra and Brian Glover, two international special effects inventors, it takes about ten days for the in-house Flogo art department to create your Flogo stencil, then a certified Flogo tech will place a Flogo generator in the optimum location, and Presto, Flogo! Sky trash or innovative ads that really soar?

Source: Armageddon

One great thing is they are a Green product, 100% environmentally safe. Currently available in white, in 2009 they will launch a line of colored Flogos. Maybe one day, they'll even figure out how to write messages in the foam.

Flogos come in 24-inch and 36-inch models, but a new 48-inch generator is in development. While the most intricate design I could find was the Olympic circles (picture unavailable) the possibilties seem endless.

It was all going so well at April's inaugural event at the shiny new National Stadium in Beijing.

Bottoms were wiggling as a women's 20 km race-walking event got underway. Sexually frustrated male journalists were wriggling in their seats as they watched, and Chinese investors were rubbing their hands in glee. After all, they'd poured four billion yuan ($576 million) into the concrete-and-steel lump. It all looked very promising.

Until the Westerners began to visit the restrooms. A ripple of consternation spread through the watching crowd. Squat toilets, someone whispered. You know, Turkish toilets. State-of-the-art Swiss-and-Chinese design, 36 km of twisted steel and great solar power systems, and the Chinese had installed squat toilets.

The Beijing authorities appear rather bemused by the issue and promise that some sit-down replacements are on the way:

"As many as we can," says Yao Hui, one of the senior managers for Olympic venues. "Especially those for the key clients, athletes, Olympic family members and the media."

(The Greek historian Herodotus once demonized the Egyptians by claiming their men pissed sitting down and their women went standing up--a messy business if ever there was one. And this was back in the 5th century BC! Then, as now, people's toilet habits are a window to their souls.)

There are allegedly 5,200 public toilets in Beijing, not including back alleyways and buildings sites. That's more public toilets than any other city in the world. But they must be better hidden here than in any other city in the world, as we didn't manage to find any.

The sit-or-squat issue isn't just about toilets, though. Everywhere in the streets of Beijing, you'll see Chinese squatting together in groups, taking a rest or having a bite to eat. To a Westerner--used to resting his or her hard-working buttocks on an actual seat--it looks incredibly uncomfortable. But since there aren't any benches in Beijing, we guess, you have to make do with what you haven't got. Ditto the toilets.

The real eye-opener will come when Europe and America start installing squat toilets in their cities, the telling sign that yes, China really has taken over the world. But we have a better solution: How about some sit-down toilets with handy non-slip footholds built into the seat?

If you don’t live in Japan, you might have never heard of Dr. NakaMats, although he is an inventor extraordinaire! Not only has he invented the Floppy Disk, he has also earned the IG Nobel Price for his research last year. What if I tell you, that he has also invented the fax machine, magnetic paper train tickets, the synthesizer and written over 80 books? He has made over 3218 inventions already (as opposed to Thomas Edison with 1093 only) and hopes to complete 7000 inventions before his estimated death at age 144. Now what do you think? Is he the greatest unacknowledged mind of our time? Or has he simply been involved in many inventions? Or… what kind of person could he be living in a giant house in a very prestigeous neighbourhood producing one revolutionary product after the other? PingMag decided to visit this excentric Dr. Nakamats at his home and laboratory to find out. Here is the essence of a long and quirky interview.

Written by Uleshka
Photos by Maris Mezulis

It all started with the tea we were served…

Dr. Nakamats: This is made out of 13 different herbs, has a very nice taste and it makes you smarter. It is my invention called “Brain Drink”!

Thanks a lot! Tastes like… tea!?

You earned the IG Nobel prize last year. May I ask what they gave you the prize for?

For nutrition, meaning my research in finding the best possible food to eat to keep you healthy and your brain fit. I did that by taking photos of every single meal I ate for the last 35 years and analyzing what is good for health and what isn’t.

Interesting! It says, that you have licensed 16 patents to IBM for the creation of the floppy disk, the hard disc, tape transport, etc. and in your book it says that you already invented the floppy disk while you were still at college…

Yes, it took 35 years for it to eventually get produced, but I already invented it much earlier.

I see! So how did you become an inventor in the first place?

My mother taught me physics, chemistry, English, Japanese, history and humor… these basic elements from the age of 3. Then I did my first invention at the age of 5, which was an automatic gravity adjustment equipment, basically inventing how all airplanes fly now.

At the age of 14 I invented the pump. I saw that my mother was having a hard time refilling soy sauce from a big bottle to a smaller one, and wanted to create something that made life easier for her. After the war and even now people use it to refill Kerosene a lot.

That is the core of my inventions: not money, but the spirit of my inventions is LOVE!

There is an incredible variety of products in your “The Legend of Dr. Nakamats’ Inventions” book and many items can be purchased from your website. So you are not just an inventor, you are a producer as well?

Usually, inventors only “think”. I don’t consider that to be perfect. Inventors should have the capability to produce and distribute their products so that users can benefit from their thought process. My principles are theory, flash (trigger) and production. The “idea” alone does not count as an “invention”.

Is there a secret to becoming an inventor? How do you come up with new ideas?

I am teaching philosophy at the University of Tokyo and this image (above right) shows my theory: the “Pagoda of Creativity”. The base for everything is a strong spirit, followed by a strong body, hard studies, experience and finally leads to a “trigger” experience. You “trigger” a bullet which contains spirit, body, study and experience - and finally that releases the actual invention.

How do you ‘trigger’ an invention?

A lack of oxygen is very important.

A lack? Isn’t that dangerous??

It’s very dangerous. I get that Flash just 0.5 sec before death. I remain under the surface until this trigger comes up and I write it down with a special waterproof plexiglas writing pad I invented.

Do you do that a lot? Putting yourself in that kind of situation to come up with a new invention?

Of course.

This is the Dr. Nakamatsu method. Another possible method is to use a completely calm room - that could even be my toilet which shuts out every noise and every magnetic and electronic field. Such a calm room erases all noise from your brain, you can concentrate and think.

After that you can go to a dynamic room, listen to music and mix thoughts inside your brain. The environment is very important for inventing.

True! You seem to be quite interested in passing on your knowledge about how to become a genius. You even have a so called “Genius Academy” in your house. Could you quickly explain what that is?

Well, I’m doing many things here… I have 29 guest houses called “Dr. Nakamats Green Terrace” and there are 29 geniuses living here: computer geniuses, artistic geniuses… There is a waiting list of about 100 people who simply want to live here to get inspired by me and my inventions. Every month I give a lecture where I teach spirit, creativity and many other things. We also sing a song about the spirit of invention being LOVE.

Oh! I’ve heard the Dr.NakaMats song!
Drinks for thought, “Yummy Nutri Brain Foods”, exercise, singing songs or using your Cerebrex chair (which is supposed to improve the brain capability by increasing your blood circulation through electricity)… All these inventions should help you to get smarter.

But is there anyone you consider close to becoming the next Dr. Nakamats? The next genius? Your sons maybe?

No. Invention is very difficult.

A friend of mine has seen some students wearing your flying shoes on a campus in the US and you wore them on stage yourself when House of Pain played “jump around” in Japan. What would you call your most successful invention? What product is used most by people?

All my inventions are a 100% success, because they are based on the philosophy of creativity and inventiveness.

I made many things… sampling, too! Sampling is the basis of a synthesizer, so every musician is using my invention. Who is that blind musician again….

Stevie Wonder?

Yes, he came up to me and said “thank you for inventing this”.

On our way to the Dr. Nakamats Lab, we noticed many little strange things around the house. One being the funny angle on the left side of the stairs. Encouraged by Dr. Nakamats I used them accordingly (half stepping on them while going up) and realized that this little trick really made my way up easier!

Arriving in the lab, we felt like entering a museum of its own kind. All inventions could be seen as prototypes or final products: Cerebrex chairs, the first floppy disk reader ever made and Dr. Nakamats’ revolutionary golf putter.

What is this? Looks like a motor…

Yes, this is also an important invention. In the future all the cars will be running with this, called the Dr.Nakamats Nostradam vs Engine II. It can run with just water, so there is no pollution at all.

Suddenly I look up and notice… What is this table doing there on the ceiling???

Oh, this is the table I used with my mother and father. I invented some things sitting at that table, which is why I put it in this room.

On the ceiling…

Yes.

I see! What are you actually currently working on?

Many things, but the latest invention is probably the Love Jet 200, the strongest of this series so far. If you spray this onto yourself, you can attract people and your skin will get better, too.

(All laugh)

What is this wig with wheels doing on that table?

This is for a film called Dura deka (Police detective with a wig), which is currently screened at Cine Quint in Shibuya. I’m in the film, too and I invented this wig for it.

Well, it’s been a very inspiring tour! Is there anything else, any message from you to our readers?

My message is… the spirit of invention is LOVE.

Thank you very much, Dr. NakaMats! It’s been a very interesting conversation.

Mastering a foreign language is a tough slog. For the 1.5 million college students hunched over a foreign language textbook, spending hundreds of hours trying to perfect their Spanish or French, their studies are meant to be a promising investment. Increased pay and plum jobs have long been dangled before students as an incentive for bilingualism.

But if American students think they are going to command a much higher salary after graduation because of their language skills, they are in for disappointment.

Spanish, for example, is far and away the most popular foreign-language class in American colleges, but bilingual job seekers earn the smallest wage premium. In 2006, there were roughly 823,000 American students enrolled in Spanish courses--accounting for 52% of all enrollments--according to the Modern Language Association (MLA). But bilingual Spanish speakers earned only a 1.7% wage premium.

Calculating the exact value of learning a second language has vexed economists. For example, it is difficult to separate the wage increases associated with learning a foreign language from other, closely co-related variables like education and motivation.

Still, some economists have tried. In 2005, Albert Saiz, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elena Zoido, an economist at the consulting group LECG (nasdaq: XPRT - news - people ), published a study comparing wage premiums for American college graduates who spoke Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese as a second language.

In their findings, the law of supply and demand prevailed. With its 1.7% wage premium, Spanish was the least valuable, followed by French (2.7%). Knowledge of German, Italian, Russian and Chinese was slightly more valuable, translating into an average 4% income boost.

Those gains are paltry compared with simply staying in school a bit longer. In the same study, Saiz and Zoido found that an extra year of schooling yielded an 8% to 14% wage premium.

Of course, learning to speak a foreign language is not just about increasing one's income. It's silly to try to put a dollar value on the ability to read Sartre in the original French or chat about the latest telenovela in a café in Bogotá.

But if income maximization is the key, savvy college students would do well to learn high-demand languages instead. According to the MLA, enrollments in Chinese and Arabic between 2002 and 2006 spiked by 51% and 127%, respectively. Enrollments in Spanish courses during the same time increased by only 10.3%.

In addition to Chinese and Arabic, the top 10 most popular languages for American college students include Japanese, Latin, and Russian. American Sign Language is actually the fourth most popular language course, but when excluded from the list of foreign languages, ancient Greek slips into the top 10 with roughly 22,850 enrollments.

Ambitious students with an interest in geopolitics can try taking up Swahili, Urdu, Farsi and Bahasa Indonesian. These are among the FBI's most sought after foreign language skills.

But no matter which language they study, the income gains for native English speakers learning a foreign tongue are tiny compared with the gains for non-English-speaking immigrants who learn English.

Aimee Chin, an associate professor in the economics department at the University of Houston, has found that immigrants to the U.S. who transition from speaking English "well" to "very well" have seen their wages rise by 30%.

Chin's research, published in 2003, evaluated earnings of individuals who had emigrated to the U.S. as children and eventually entered the job market. Chin and her co-author found that compared to a person who speaks English poorly, those who have mastered it earn 67% more.

The disparity between earnings for bilingual native-English speakers and immigrants is no surprise to Chin. "For Americans, a [foreign] language isn't used as widely in the business world," she says, "so we don't get a big premium for it."

So at least for the foreseeable future, monolingual American students shouldn't stress about employment possibilities.

While Chinese and Spanish are becoming global languages, the demand will rise at the same pace as supply. This dynamic, according to Boston University economics professor Kevin Lang, is what makes English so valuable.

"We're not talking about dramatic differences," says Lang. "It's not the case that if you don't speak Mandarin in 20 years you'll be relegated to flipping hamburgers."

Source: Forbes

World's Most Popular Foreign Languages:

1. Spanish

52.2%*

The 823,000 college students studying Spanish will be dismayed to know that learning the most popular language will yield a very small earnings increase. A study published in 2005 by economists Albert Saiz and Elena Zoido found that bilingual Spanish speakers with several years of work experience earned only a 1.7% wage premium over their monolingual peers.

*Percentage applies to the total number of U.S. undergraduates studying a foreign language.

2. French

13.1%

Speaking the language of love may be good for romance, but it's not great for the pocketbook. Bilingual French speakers in the workforce for several years earned only a 2.7% wage premium.

3. German

6.0%

There are about 94,260 college students enrolled in German classes, and they can expect their language skills to be worth more than their Spanish- and French-speaking peers. Bilingual German speakers with several years of work experience earned a 4% wage premium.

4. Italian

5.0%

More American college students are studying Italian. According to the Modern Language Association, course enrollments increased 22.6% between 2002 and 2006.

5. Japanese

4.2%

American college students are becoming less intimidated by the idea of becoming fluent in this challenging language. Enrollment in Japanese courses increased 28% between 2002 and 2006, according to the Modern Language Association.

6. Chinese

3.3%

It's debatable whether Chinese will become crucial for their careers, but American college students aren't hedging their bets. Course enrollment increased 51% between 2002 and 2006, according to the Modern Language Association.

7. Latin

2.0%

The Western canon is not dead, at least not for the 32,190 college students enrolled in Latin courses. According to the Modern Language Association, the number of Latin students increased 7.9% between 2002 and 2006, outpacing the increase of French and German enrollments, which ranged from 2% to 3.5%.

8. Russian

1.6%

The Cold War is over, but American college students are still interested in Russian. There were 24,845 enrollments in 2006.

9. Arabic

1.5%

No doubt influenced by current events, more American college students are taking Arabic than ever before. Enrollments increased 127% between 2002 and 2006, according to the Modern Language Association, and now, for the first time, Arabic is among the top 10 most studied foreign languages in America.

10. Ancient Greek

1.4%

Fans of Homer, Euripides and Sophocles can rejoice: There will be a next generation of translators. In 2006, there were about 22,850 students studying ancient Greek.

20 Things Japanese Robots Can Do:

01. Can simulate basic expressions- anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, disgust
02. Make sushi
03. Plant rice
04. Tend to rice paddies
05. Be a receptionist
06. Be a guide in hospital
07. Vacuum corridors
08. Spoon feed the elderly
09. Serve tea
10. Greet company guests
11. Be a home helper
12. Be a mechanical pet (Tamagotchi, Robot Dog Aibo)
13. Be welcomed at factories with Shinto religious ceremonies
14. Be capable of 10 Japanese manufacturing employees' workload
15. Won't be claiming overtime or drawing pension when it's retired (none of the 370,000+ of the lot
)
16. Don't threaten the Japanese psyche if they have feelings
17. Be a speaker
18. Behave as an infant (Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body)
19. Play with you or your children
20. Look exactly like you

Robots are already taken for granted in Japanese factories, so much so that they are sometimes welcomed on their first day at work with Shinto religious ceremonies. Robots make sushi. Robots plant rice and tend paddies.

There are robots serving as receptionists, vacuuming office corridors, spoon-feeding the elderly. They serve tea, greet company guests and chatter away at public technology displays. Now startups are marching out robotic home helpers.

They aren't all humanoid. The Paro is a furry robot seal fitted with sensors beneath its fur and whiskers, designed to comfort the lonely, opening and closing its eyes and moving its flippers.

For Japan, the robotics revolution is an imperative. With more than a fifth of the population 65 or older, the country is banking on robots to replenish the work force and care for the elderly.

In the past several years, the government has funded a plethora of robotics-related efforts, including some $42 million for the first phase of a humanoid robotics project, and $10 million a year between 2006 and 2010 to develop key robot technologies.

The government estimates the industry could surge from about $5.2 billion in 2006 to $26 billion in 2010 and nearly $70 billion by 2025.

Besides financial and technological power, the robot wave is favored by the Japanese mind-set as well.

Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction.

This is, after all, the country that invented Tamagotchi, the hand-held mechanical pets that captivated the children of the world.

Still, Japan faces a vast challenge in making the leap — commercially and culturally — from toys, gimmicks and the experimental robots churned out by labs like Takeno's to full-blown human replacements that ordinary people can afford and use safely.

"People are still asking whether people really want robots running around their homes, and folding their clothes," said Damian Thong, senior technology analyst at Macquarie Bank in Tokyo.

"But then again, Japan's the only country in the world where everyone has an electric toilet," he said. "We could be looking at a robotics revolution."

That revolution has been going on quietly for some time.

Japan is already an industrial robot powerhouse. Over 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan in 2005, about 40 percent of the global total and 32 robots for every 1,000 Japanese manufacturing employees, according to a recent report by Macquarie, which had no numbers from subsequent years.

And they won't be claiming overtime or drawing pensions when they're retired.

"The cost of machinery is going down, while labor costs are rising," said Eimei Onaga, CEO of Innovation Matrix Inc., a company that distributes Japanese robotics technology in the U.S. "Soon, robots could even replace low-cost workers at small firms, greatly boosting productivity."

That's just what the Japanese government has been counting on. A 2007 national technology roadmap by the Trade Ministry calls for 1 million industrial robots to be installed throughout the country by 2025.

A single robot can replace about 10 employees, the roadmap assumes — meaning Japan's future million-robot army of workers could take the place of 10 million humans. That's about 15 percent of the current work force.

"Robots are the cornerstone of Japan's international competitiveness," Shunichi Uchiyama, the Trade Ministry's chief of manufacturing industry policy, said at a recent seminar. "We expect robotics technology to enter even more sectors going forward."

Meanwhile, localities looking to boost regional industry clusters have seized on robotics technology as a way to spur advances in other fields.

Robotic technology is used to build more complex cars, for instance, and surgical equipment.

The logical next step is robots in everyday life.

At a hospital in Aizu Wakamatsu, 190 miles north of Tokyo, a child-sized white and blue robot wheels across the floor, guiding patients to and from the outpatients' surgery area.

The robot, made by startup Tmsk, sports perky catlike ears, recites simple greetings, and uses sensors to detect and warn people in the way. It helpfully prints out maps of the hospital, and even checks the state of patients' arteries.

The Aizu Chuo Hospital spent about some $557,000 installing three of the robots in its waiting rooms to test patients' reactions. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, said spokesman Naoya Narita.

"We feel this is a good division of labor. Robots won't ever become doctors, but they can be guides and receptionists," Narita said.

Still, the wheeled machines hadn't won over all seniors crowding the hospital waiting room on a weekday morning.

"It just told us to get out of the way!" huffed wheelchair-bound Hiroshi Asami, 81. "It's a robot. It's the one who should get out my way."

"I prefer dealing with real people," he said.

Another roadblock is money.

For all its research, Japan has yet to come up with a commercially successful consumer robot. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. failed to sell even one of its pricey toddler-sized Wakamaru robots, launched in 2003 as domestic helpers.

Though initially popular, Sony Corp. pulled the plug on its robot dog, Aibo, in 2006, just seven years after its launch. With a price tag of a whopping $2,000, Aibo never managed to break into the mass market.

One of the only commercially successful consumer robots so far is made by an American company, iRobot Corp. The Roomba vacuum cleaner robot is self-propelled and can clean rooms without supervision.

"We can pretty much make anything, but we have to ask, what are people actually going to buy?" said iRobot CEO Helen Greiner. The company has sold 2.5 million Roombas — which retail for as little as $120 — since the line was launched in 2002.

Still, with the correct approach, robots could provide a wealth of consumer goods, Greiner stressed at a recent convention.

Sure enough, Japanese makers are catching on, launching low-cost robots like Tomy's $300 i-Sobot, a toy-like hobby robot that comes with 17 motors, can recognize spoken words and can be remote-controlled.

Sony is also trying to learn from past mistakes, launching a much cheaper $350 rolling speaker robot last year that built on its robotics technology.

"What we need now isn't the ultimate humanoid robot," said Kyoji Takenaka, the head of the industry-wide Robot Business Promotion Council.

"Engineers need to remember that the key to developing robots isn't in the lab, but in everyday life."

Still, some of the most eye-catching developments in robotics are coming out of Japan's labs.

Researchers at Osaka University, for instance, are developing a robot to better understand child development.

The "Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body" is designed to mimic the motions of a toddler. It responds to sounds, and sensors in its eyes can see and react to people. It wiggles, changes facial expressions, and makes gurgling sounds.

The team leader, Minoru Asada, is working on artificial intelligence software that would allow the child to "learn" as it progresses.

"Right now, it only goes, 'Ah, ah.' But as we develop its learning function, we hope it can start saying more complex sentences and moving on its own will," Asada said. "Next-generation robots need to be able to learn and develop themselves."

For Hiroshi Ishiguro, also at Osaka University, the key is to make robots that look like human beings. His Geminoid robot looks uncannily like himself — down to the black, wiry hair and slight tan.

"In the end, we don't want to interact with machines or computers. We want to interact with technology in a human way so it's natural and valid to try to make robots look like us," he said.

"One day, they will live among us," Ishiguro said. "Then you'd have to ask me: 'Are you human? Or a robot?'"

By John Feffer

 

Diplomats remain upbeat about solving the nuclear stand-off with North Korea; optimists envision a peace treaty to replace the armistice that halted, but failed to formally end, the Korean War 55 years ago. Some leaders and scholars are even urging the transformation of the six-party talks over the Korean nuclear issue, involving the United States, Japan, China, Russia and the two Koreas, into a permanent peace structure in Northeast Asia.

 

The countries in the region all seem determined to make nice right now. Yasuo Fukuda, the new Japanese prime minister, is considerably more pacific than his predecessor, the ultra-nationalist Shinzo Abe. The new South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, despite his conservative credentials, is committed to

continuing the previous president's engagement policy with North Korea and plans to reach out to Japan via his first post-inaugural state visit.

The party that won the recent Taiwanese parliamentary elections, the Kuomintang, wants to rebuild bridges to the mainland and, when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party there, mend fences the ruling Democratic Progressive Party tried to pull down. Beijing, for its part, is being super-conciliatory toward practically everyone in this Summer Olympic Games year.

Despite all this talk of peace, something else, quite momentous and hardly noticed, is underway in the region. The real money in Northeast Asia is going elsewhere. While in the news sunshine prevails, in the shadows an already massive regional arms race is threatening to shift into overdrive.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, five of the six countries involved in the six-party talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.

The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is where four of the world's largest militaries - those of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan - confront each other. Together, the countries participating in the six-party talks account for approximately 65% of world military expenditures, with the US responsible for roughly half the global total.

Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today: wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan and large swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster must start with the militaries that face one another there.

The Japanese reversal
The Northeast Asian arms buildup - a three-tiered scramble to dominate the seas, beef up air forces and control the next frontier of space - runs counter to conventional wisdom.

After all, isn't Japan still operating under a "peace constitution"? Hasn't South Korea committed to the peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula? Didn't China recently wake up to the virtues of soft power? And how could North Korea and Russia, both of which suffered disastrous economic reversals in the 1990s, have had the wherewithal to compete in an arms race? As it turns out, these obstacles have proved little more than speed bumps on the road to regional hyper-militarism.

Perhaps the most paradoxical participant in this new arms race is Japan. Its famous peace constitution has traditionally been one of the few brakes on arms spending in the region. The country has long limited its military expenditure to an informal ceiling of 1% of its overall budget. As that budget grew, however, so did military spending. Japan's army is now larger than Britain's, and the country spends more on its military than all but four other nations. (China surpassed Japan in military spending for the first time in 2006.) Nonetheless, for decades, the provisions of its peace constitution at least put limits on the offensive capabilities of the Japanese military, which is still referred to as its Self-Defense Forces (SDF).

These days, however, even the definition of "offensive" is changing. In 1999, the SDF first used offensive force when its naval vessels fired on suspected North Korean spy ships. Less than a decade later, Japan provides support far from its "defensive" zone for US wars, including providing fuel to coalition forces in Afghanistan and transport in Iraq.

Japan

was once incapable of bombing other countries, largely because its air force didn't have an in-air refueling capability. Thanks to Boeing, however, the first KC-767 tanker aircraft will arrive in Japan this year, providing government officials, who occasionally assert the country's right to launch preemptive strikes, with the means to do so. This is not happy news for Japan's neighbors, who retain vivid memories of the 1930s and 1940s, when its military went on an imperial rampage throughout the region.

Tokyo

already has among the best air forces and naval fighting forces in the world, trailing only the US. But leading Japanese officials have displayed an even larger appetite. Some Japanese politicians are lobbying to amend the peace constitution or even scrap it entirely, while sending military spending skyrocketing. To promote these ideas, they use the thin rationale that Japan should be participating regularly in "international peacekeeping missions".

The Japanese Defense Agency - its Pentagon - which was upgraded to ministry level last year, wants more goodies like an aircraft carrier, nuclear-powered submarines and long-range missiles. A light aircraft carrier, which the government has coyly labeled a "destroyer", will be ready in 2009. The subs and missiles, however, will have to wait. So, too, will Tokyo's attempt to take a quantum leap forward in air-fighting capabilities by importing advanced US F-22 stealth planes. Concerned about releasing latest-generation technology to the outside world, Congress scotched this deal at the last moment in August 2007.

Washington

has been a good deal more accommodating when it comes to missile defense. Japan has been a far more enthusiastic supporter of missile defense than any of America's European allies. In fact, the United States and Japan are spending billions of dollars to set up an early-warning-and-response prototype of such an advanced missile system. Part of this missile shield is land-based. Last month, Japan installed its third Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) surface-to-air interceptor and plans on nine more by 2011. The more ambitious part of the program, however, is based at sea. In December, Japan conducted its first sea-based interceptor test.

With Japan and the US in the lead, a space race is also on in Northeast Asia. Last year, China tested its own anti-ballistic missile system by shooting down one of its old weather satellites. While at present this is far from an actual missile-defense system, China effectively served notice that it is up to the technological challenge of hitting a bullet with a bullet in space. Meanwhile, thanks to US pressure, Russia, too, is upgrading its missile defense systems, while pouring money into the development of new missiles that can bypass any putative shield the US and its allies can develop.

Give me peace, but not just yet
The two most recent South Korean presidents, Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jung and the left-leaning Roh Moo-hyun, have been well known for their efforts to foster reconciliation with North Korea. Less well known have been their programs to beef up South Korea's military.

The dark side of their engagement policy has been its unstated quid pro quo of satisfying the security concerns of South Korean hawks by giving the military everything it wants - and then some. Between 1999 and 2006, South Korean military spending jumped more than 70%. In 2007, at the launching ceremony for a new Aegis-equipped destroyer, which brought South Korea into an elite club of just five countries with such technology, Roh declared, "At the present time, Northeast Asia is still in an arms race, and we cannot just sit back and watch." By 2020, the South Korean navy wants to build three more Aegis destroyers at a cost of US$1 billion each.

South Korean hawks are not only responding to concerns about North Korea, the traditional threat around which the South has organized its military. They are concerned about a declining military commitment from the US, which has reduced the levels ofAmerican troops that traditionally garrison the country and pushed hard for greater military "burden-sharing".

South Korea

's leaders and military officials are anxious that the Pentagon may continue to focus on the Middle East and Central Asia to the exclusion of its Pacific commitments. To prepare for the contingency of going it alone, South Korea has embarked on an ambitious $665 billion Defense Reform 2020 initiative, which will increase the military budget by roughly 10% a year until 2020. In those years, while troop levels will actually fall, most of the extra money will go to a host of expensive, high-tech systems such as new F-15K fighters from Boeing, SM-6 ship-to-air missiles that can form a low-altitude missile shield, and GlobalHawk unmanned aerial vehicles.

 

If South Korea's spending spree remains largely under the radar, China's military expenditures have received considerable media scrutiny. They officially rose to $45 billion for 2007. However, that public figure, according to US intelligence estimates, tells only half the story. Beijing's spending, claim these sources, is really in the $100 billion range. With this money, China is pushing forward with an ambitious naval program that will include the addition to its naval forces of five new nuclear-powered attack subs, a mid-sized aircraft carrier, and - clandestinely - the supposed construction of a huge 93,000-ton nuclear-powered carrier by 2020.

 

Lost in the hype around China's apparent quest for a world-class military to match its world-class economy are the gaps in the country's offensive capabilities. It has only a couple of hundred nuclear weapons and fewer than two dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at the United States. Its navy doesn't have a "blue-water" capability, lacking (as yet) any aircraft carriers, a large force of nuclear-powered submarines, and the overseas basing infrastructure to support them. It relies heavily on imports and can't yet build the sort of aircraft that would allow it to project serious force over large distances.

 

China, however, has been the only modestly credible threat on the horizon that the Pentagon has been able to wield to justify military spending at levels not seen since World War II. The Pentagon can't use its big naval destroyers against al-Qaeda; Virginia-class subs can't do much to fight the Taliban or insurgents in Iraq. Yet these systems figure prominently in the Pentagon's long-range plans to build a 313-ship navy. Democratic Congressman John Murtha, who made headlines in 2005 with his newfound opposition to the Iraq war, is typical of congressional hawks when he warns of the need to prepare for a coming conflict with China.

 

"We've got to be able to have a military that can deploy to stop China or Russia or any other country that challenges us," he recently told Reuters. "I've felt we had to be concerned about the direction China was going." To counter China, the US has pursued a classic containment strategy of strengthening military ties with India, Australia, the Philippines and Japan.

 

The George W Bush administration trumpets its accomplishment of increasing military spending 74% since 2001. In addition to the $12.7 billion for new warships, there's $17 billion for new aircraft and over $10 billion for missile defense. The administration wants to increase the army from 482,400 to 547,400 troops by 2012.

 

A sizable portion of the administration's $607 billion Pentagon budget request for 2009, which doesn't even include massive supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will go to maintaining and expanding the US military presence in the Pacific. The Democratic frontrunners for the presidential nomination have also called for troop increases and have said nothing about slowing, freezing or even cutting the military budget. No matter who is elected, under the next administration, as under the last one, the US will surely continue to be the chief driver of global arms spending.

 

The armies of austerity

Increased military spending is not always just a function of affluence. As the Russian economy contracted in the 1990s, the arms export industry became an ever more critical way for the faltering country to earn hard currency. Today, flush with oil and natural gas revenues, Russia has regained its place as the world's second largest arms dealer by almost doubling its arms exports since 2000.

 

Washington's moves to establish a global missile defense system and encroach on Russian interests in Central Asia have only encouraged Moscow to boost its military spending in an effort to recover its lost superpower status.

 

With the renewed growth of the Russian economy on the strength of energy sales, Russian arms expenditures began to take off again in the new millennium, increasing nearly four-fold between 2000 and 2006. The Russian government, which projected a 29% increase in spending for 2007, plans to replace nearly half its arsenal with new weaponry by 2015.

 

Compared to Russia, North Korea has had the full experience of economic collapse with very little subsequent recovery. Yet, despite its woefully limited means, it has tried to keep up with the great powers that surround it. By many estimates, Pyongyang devotes as much as a quarter of its budget to the military (even though prosperous South Korea still spends as much, or more, on its military than the North's entire gross domestic product).

 

North Korea's failure to match the conventional military spending of South Korea, much less Japan or the US, was what made the building of a "nuclear deterrent" increasingly attractive to its leaders. In other words, the current nuclear crisis that sucks up so much diplomatic attention in Northeast Asia today is at least partly a result of the region's accelerating conventional arms race and North Korea's inability to keep pace.

 

Critics of the North Korean regime often point out that its military spending is ultimately a human-rights violation, because the government essentially takes food out of the mouths of its people to spend on armaments. North Korea is, however, just a particularly gross example of an expanding global problem. Each of the six countries in the new Pacific arms race has devised a wealth of rationales for its military spending - and each has ignored significant domestic needs in the process.

 

Given the sums that would be necessary to address the decommissioning of nuclear weapons, the looming crisis of climate change, and the destabilizing gap between rich and poor, such spending priorities are in themselves a threat to humanity.

 

The world put 37% more into military spending in 2006 than in 1997. If the "peace dividend" that was to follow the end of the Cold War never quite appeared, a decade later the world finds itself burdened with quite the opposite: a genuine peace deficit.

 

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.

 

(Copyright 2008 John Feffer.)