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The given text is a review of two books. The first book, "China, Faits Accomplis and the Contest for East Asia: The Shadow of Shifting Power" by Joshua Adam Hastey, examines the relationship between state power shifts and China's use of territorial revisions in the South China and East China Seas. The book provides an analysis of faits accomplis in international relations conflict and offers insights into rising and declining state interactions. The second book, "When the Shooting Stopped: August 1945" by Barrett Tillman, explores the events of August 1945 in the Pacific theater of operations after the conclusion of World War II in Europe. The book discusses the tenuous ceasefire, the postwar era, and the gradual cessation of combat operations after Japan's surrender. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the Chinese popular response to the U.S. atomic bombings of Nagasaki, Japan, and Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II and the subsequent development of nuclear weapons and power. The author explains how early interpretations of the atomic bomb were largely influenced by the Chinese millennialist religious tradition and subsequently colored with an apocalyptic outlook. Consideration is also given to the frightening portrayal of atomic weaponry in anti-American propaganda released by China's Communist government. Chinese people's support for the anti-nuclear Stockholm Peace Appeal of 1950 is outlined, as is Chinese propaganda supporting nuclear technology and power development. The Chinese state's support of nuclear physics is also explained.

This article compares practices of commemoration of the war dead at three sites—Nanjing Memorial Hall, Hiroshima Memorial Hall, and the Yasukuni museum in Tokyo—in elucidating the ethical, political, and religious implications of commemoration. Drawing upon the ethical theories of Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou, I argue that institutional commemoration is not only a political but also a religious practice—religious because commemoration is an act of transaction with the dead. I adapt Badiou's critique of Levinasian ethics as a kind of cryptotheology in which the “other” is construed as a transcendental being to reveal the intrinsically religious function of commemoration, in which the dead, ontologically distinct from the living, are genuinely other. This framework reveals the religious dimensions of the ostensibly secular commemorations at Nanjing and Hiroshima Memorial Halls (established and operated by the local and national governments), while also providing grounds for a critique of the explicitly religious Yasukuni museum, which exploits the dead in the interest of promoting nationalistic sentiments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why did Japan's military and government leaders trigger the Manchurian Incident and then launch the Sino-Japanese War? Why did the nation opt to go to war with the United States and continue to fight recklessly? Wasn't it possible to end the war before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? To find answers to these questions, we, the War Responsibility Reexamination Committee, an ad hoc in-house panel of the Yomiuri Shimbun, delved thoroughly into, combed through and examined historical developments during the period from the early 1930s to 1945. The Yomiuri Shimbun presented its readers with its findings of a yearlong "War Responsibility" series ending on August 15, 2006, the 61st anniversary of the end of World War II. We comprehensively touch on Japan's mistakes committed at various key points from the Manchurian Incident to the Soviet Union's entry into a war with Japan and named those who should chiefly be held responsible for each event. We elaborate upon the accountability of those who were so deeply responsible and we summarize a host of historical lessons from which we should leave for the future generations to learn. The Yomiuri Shimbun decided to define the wars in East Asia and the Pacific Ocean as the "Showa War." This series of wars has been called the Great East War or the Second World War, the Pacific War, the 15-Year War, the Asia Pacific War or the Second World War. Each of these titles has some justification, but they are not necessarily appropriate when considering factors such as the sense of resistance against certain ideologies, the period of the wars and the areas where fighting took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]