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During the 2nd World War, large numbers of allied military personnel in south-east Asia became prisoners-of-war (POWs) of the Japanese. During their internment of three and a half years, they suffered undernutrition, exposure to tropical diseases and frequently overwork. Perhaps the harshest POW experience was the construction of the railway between Thailand and Burma. This paper explores the medical conditions during Far East imprisonment, and in particular on the Thai-Burma Railway, as well as the long-term health effects in post-war decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare states in East Asia have been widely considered underdeveloped. Since the definition and measurements of social policy and the welfare state are subject to change depending on the specific historical, political and economic context, the welfare underdevelopment thesis deserves scrutiny. In Japan, Korea and Taiwan, agricultural protection and enterprise welfare, among others, have been surrogates of conventional welfare policies. As a way of critically engaging in the debate over the East Asian welfare model, this paper focuses on these two areas of surrogate social policy and explores their empirical basis with the OECD data on Japan and Korea. The result shows that surrogate social policy measures such as producer support estimates for agricultural protection and mandatory private social spending for enterprise welfare add up to make a difference between the East Asian countries and the other OECD members. This suggests a distinct political-economic model for East Asian social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dibamid reptiles have a known current distribution on two continents (Asia and North America). Although this clade represents an early-diverging group in the Squamata and thus should have a long evolutionary history, no fossil record of these peculiar burrowing squamate reptiles has been documented so far. The fossil material described here comes from the early Oligocene of the Valley of Lakes in Central Mongolia. This material consists of jaws and is placed in the clade Dibamidae on the basis of its morphology, which is further confirmed by phylogenetic analyses. In spite of the fragmentary nature of this material, it thus forms the first, but putative, fossil evidence of this clade. If correctly interpreted, this material demonstrates the occurrence of Dibamidae in East Asia in the Palaeogene, indicating its distribution in higher latitudes than today. The preserved elements possess a unique combination of character states, and a new taxon name is therefore erected: Hoeckosaurus mongoliensis sp. nov. The dentary of Hoeckosaurus exhibits some characters of the two extant dibamid taxa. However, the open Meckel's groove, together with other characters, show that this group was morphologically much more diverse in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin of intraplate volcanoes in Northeast Asia is considered to be associated with upwelling of hot and wet asthenospheric materials in the big mantle wedge above the stagnant Pacific slab in the mantle transition zone. Among these intraplate volcanoes, Changbai is the largest and most active one, and very deep earthquakes (500–650 km depths) in the Pacific slab under East Asia occur ∼300 km to the east of the Changbai volcano. Integrating the findings of geophysical, geochemical and petrologic studies so far, we suggest a link between Changbai volcanism and the deep earthquakes in the Pacific slab. Many large shallow earthquakes occurred in the Pacific Plate in the outer-rise areas close to the oceanic trench, and sea water may enter down to a deep portion of the oceanic lithosphere through the active normal faults which generated the large outer-rise earthquakes. Sea water or fluids may be preserved in the active faults even after the Pacific Plate subducts into the mantle. Many large deep earthquakes are observed that took place in the subducting Pacific slab under the Japan Sea and the East Asian margin. At least some of the large deep earthquakes are caused by the reactivation of faults preserved in the subducting slab, and the fluids preserved in the faults within the slab may cause the observed non-double-couple components of the deep earthquake faulting. Fluids preserved in the slab may be released to the overlying mantle wedge through large deep earthquakes. Because large deep earthquakes occur frequently in the vicinity of the Changbai volcano, many more fluids could be supplied to this volcano than in other areas in Northeast Asia, making Changbai the largest and most active intraplate volcano in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]