Good Morning! Let’s start the week in the Asia-Pacific…

North Korea

• It looks like US officials met secretly with North Korea three times in 2011 and 2012 without telling Japan or South Korea.  Why the US loaded heavy equipment, including a bulldozer, on their plane during a stopover in Tokyo remains a complete mystery.  Not surprisingly, the Japan-US relationship appears strained on the issue of sharing intelligence about nuclear proliferation.
• Rory Medcalf finds a few silver linings in North Korea’s latest mushroom cloud.
• Our very own Duck blogger, Robert E. Kelly, comments on BBC World News about the North Korean tests and the existing sanctions regime.  We need to buy Bob a Tivo.

Singapore

• Rare but real protests are happening in Singapore over the plans to dramatically increase the number of immigrants in one of the world’s most densly populated city-states.  I love the posters which say: “We are not your sheeple!”  Is it too early to dust off my copy of Chee Soon Juan’s Your Future, My Faith, Our Freedom? Yeah I thought so, lah.
• Dual use technology and a death in Singapore makes for a riveting read.

China

• Chinese military hawks argue for killing one of the three “running dogs” of the US in Asia in order to make the rest heel.

Japan

• Malcolm Cook at the Lowy Institute notes that Japanese FDI to China as a share of total flows to China have stayed relatively stable with a slight uptick in 2012 despite all the tensions.
• The Hoover Institution has uploaded the diary of US General Joseph Stillwell who visited East Asia in 1911.  He was a far cry from Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited East Asia as a young officer, but his private diaries will be of interest to history buffs.