mr-damon/asia

Lee Si-kap, a shy farmer living in this central South Korean town, holds a record: He owns more satellite dishes than any other South Korean -- 85 of them, receiving 1,500 satellite television channels from more than 100 countries, some as far away as South Africa and Canada.

To be sure, in this correspondent's five years here, the city has inched toward global status. A mall for luxury watches was built. Restaurants began to serve miso-encrusted sea bass. Indian-Western fashion boutiques started to attract global jet-setters. People began to spout words like "couture" and "Davos" as if they were everyday topics. The air kiss became as Indian as not kissing once was.

But it takes a muscular suspension of disbelief to pretend that Mumbai is what its elite wishes it were. Residents will tell you that Mumbai is "just like New York," before beginning a tirade about why it is not: nowhere nice to eat, same constrained social scene, no offbeat films, no privacy. There is a sense in this crowd of a city forever striving to be what it isn't.

But, minute after minute, migrants pour in with starkly different pasts and starkly different ideas of Mumbai.

They arrive from the 660,000 villages of India. Perhaps the monsoon failed and crops perished. Perhaps their mother is ill and needs money for surgery. Perhaps they took a loan whose mushrooming interest even cow-milking and wheat-sheafing cannot repay. Perhaps they are tired of waiting for the future to come to them.

They arrive by train and locate relatives or friends to help get them on their feet. Seeking work, they walk the streets asking building security guards if the tenants inside need a servant. They live in cramped rooms or in hutments in a slum-city like Dharavi, where one million people pack 2.5 square kilometers, or one square mile.

"To be honest," Toshinori Fujiwara, 69, a Japanese community leader, said, "I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this would ever become a multiethnic neighborhood."

A generation from now, more Japanese are likely to be making similar comments as Japan's population ages and its work force shrinks. Recently labor shortages have spread from factories to farms, fishing boats, hospitals and other areas, prompting Japan to open its doors to temporary workers from China and elsewhere in Asia.

As the demographic squeeze grows tighter, Japan may have to open itself further to immigration, experts say, if it is to have the workers it needs to remain a major industrial power. A homogeneous and insular nation, however, Japan is notoriously unwelcoming to immigrants; Koreans who came here during World War II are still treated as second-class citizens.

To make itself an attractive destination for immigrants, the experts say, Japan will have to undergo a difficult cultural transformation for which the Japanese-Brazilians pose an elementary test case. If even they cannot gain acceptance, what chance will there be for immigrant groups that may be ethnically, racially, religiously and nationally different from native Japanese?

Immigration is an unpopular and politically delicate topic. But the country's 317,000 Japanese-Brazilians -- whose children are growing up in Japan and, in many cases, coming of age here -- effectively make up Japan's largest immigrant population. Of the total, nearly 94,400 have acquired permanent residence, while the others can stay in Japan indefinitely. Children born in Japan of foreign parents do not automatically get citizenship.

A city within a city, Homi Estate -- 40 apartment buildings, detached houses, schools and shops -- looks like any other Japanese housing complex from afar. But, on closer inspection, street signs are in Japanese and Portuguese. In the community's shopping complex, restaurants serve Brazilian dishes; a convenience store displays Brazilian magazines. A Japanese supermarket was replaced by a Japanese-Brazilian one last year, reflecting Homi's shifting demographics.

Amartya Sen, the Indian-born Nobel Prize-winning economist who argued convincingly for the ability of democracies to prevent famine, acknowledged that those same states, including India, were far less effective at preventing sectarian strife.

In the case of hunger, a lively public debate can quickly generate enough political capital to prevent famine. Stopping demagogues from fanning hostility is another matter, he said. Just having a democratically elected government, he said, is insufficient.

"The role of democracy in preventing community-based violence depends on the ability of universalist political processes to subdue the poisonous fanaticism of divisive communal thinking," he wrote in an e-mail message. "Much will depend on the vigor of democratic politics, not just the existence of democratic institutions."

The next total solar eclipse will occur on July 22, 2009, starting in India and moving across Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, China and over the Pacific Ocean.

The Ainu had lived on Japan's northernmost island for centuries, calling their home Ainu Mosir, or Land of Human Beings. Here, they had fished, hunted, worshiped nature and established a culture that yielded "Yukar," an oral poem of Homeric length.

But just as with America's expansion West, the Japanese pushed north in the late 19th century in the first sign of their imperialist ambitions. Japanese settlers decimated the Ainu population, seized their land and renamed it Hokkaido, or North Sea Road.

And yet it was only a few weeks ago that the Japanese government finally, and unexpectedly, recognized the Ainu as an "indigenous people." Parliament introduced and quickly passed a resolution stating that the Ainu had a "distinct language, religion and culture," setting aside the belief, long expressed by conservatives, that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous nation.

Like many countries, South Korea has long been troubled by contradictions over sex outside marriage. Until this century, women faced ostracism -- shunned even by their birth families -- if they cheated on their husbands, but men, especially wealthy ones, were allowed to keep concubines.

Now, even as some hold to fairly puritanical standards -- sex education in schools is still discouraged -- the country's strict social code seems to be weakening somewhat. Divorce is becoming more common, and so-called love motels, which cater to guests having illicit sex, are opening throughout the country.

Those who support the adultery law see it as the last bulwark against the "free-sex culture of the West," while opponents call it an anachronism.

"The state meddling in which sex partner we should have -- that's too much," Lim Sung-bin, Ms. Ok's lawyer, said this month after a three-hour hearing at the Constitutional Court, where his client did not appear. "Such a time is gone."

The nine-member court said it would rule on the case soon. It is deliberating Ms. Ok's suit, along with three other petitions against the adultery law, all filed in the past year.

South Korea is among a dwindling number of non-Muslim countries where an adultery conviction can earn a jail sentence. About 70 percent of South Koreans support the adultery law, according to surveys conducted in recent years by the government and the news media.

Each year, more than 1,200 people are indicted under the law and about half are convicted.