Nuclear War

A very "nuts and bolts" description of the joint U.S. - Japanese military excersices, dubbed Keen Edge and taking place now, appears on the stars and stripes site.

What Stars and Stripes leaves out is any mention of the "enemies." Or the colors they've been assigned, as reported in a Tokyo daily, and repeated (in English, for our reading pleasure) by a Korean paper online:

...Neighboring countries have each been given a color: Japan is blue, the U.S. is green, North Korea is purple, Russia is red and South Korea is the color of tea...

Colors. Like playing RISK?

...The war games include a simulation where the U.S. finds North Korea getting ready to fire a ballistic missile...

yikes.

According to Stars and stripes, "Keen Edge" altenating yearly with "Keen Sword" has been taking place since 1986.

GlobalSecurity.org has a summary of some of these recent joint US/Japanese military excersizes. For example, this from before the Axis of Evil got it's name:

The November 1995 exercise 'Keen Edge' involved 26,500 troops from the US and Japan, including 400 planes and 27 ships, and was reportedly the largest ever joint exercise. Keen Edge may have been a substitute for the cancelled US-South Korean exercise 'Team Spirit', which was cancelled as part of the US-North Korean nuclear agreement.

I do not know whether or not outgoing commander of the 8th U.S. Army in Korea, Lt. Gen. Charles C. Campbell (pictured here showing off his new Korean name, 'Kim Han-soo') will be taking part in Keen Edge this time around.

Another scenario for hostilities between Japan and China described in the article, apparently involves some unihabited rocks that the nations can not agree upon. Read more about Japan not getting on to well with it's neighbors (all the way down at the bottom of the page) in the always informative CIA factbook, including the CIA's compact summary of why Russia and Japan still havn't signed a peace treaty to formally end World War Two!