This is the text of an interview with Kinjo Shigeaki (85) about his experience as a survivor of the compulsory mass suicides which occurred on Tokashiki Island, Okinawa in late March 1945. The interview took place on April 23rd 2014.

I am from the Kerama Islands, about 30 km off the coast of Naha, the capital of Okinawa. There are about 10 islands in the group.

This article summarizes relevant historical developments involving Taiwan and Okinawa in Asia-Pacific multilateral relations over the longue durée, and suggests future prospects.

1. Both Taiwan and the Ryukyus are within the Kuroshio (Black Tide) Current Civilization Zone (from approximately the beginning of the 3rd Century): At that time, crops such as cassava and yams traveled northbound with the Kuroshio Currents, which ran from the Philippines to Taiwan and the Ryukyus to Kyushu, while crops such as millet in northern parts of South East Asia traveled to Taiwan via the South Sea and further traveled to the Ryukyus and Kyushu. Together with the path of rice from south of China's Yangtze River via Korea to Kyushu, Japan these were two important sea-borne cultural exchange paths in the Asia-Pacific. However, by the 3rd Century, the direct route from south of the Yangzi to central Japan, as well as the Silk Road from Chang'an in Northwest China to Central Asia, and the shipping route from Guangzhou to India superseded the aforesaid routes. As a result, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands became isolated on the international stage for about one thousand years (Ts'ao, 1988).

Aileen Mioko Smith is the executive director of Green Action, a Japanese citizens’ organization (NGO) working to end nuclear power in Japan. Following the Fukushima disaster, governments and international organizations became more receptive to the message of Green Action and other anti-nuclear groups (like Stop Tomari and Beyond Nuclear). This article explains the mission of these groups, which is typical of anti-nuclear activists in Japan. It profiles several individuals who traveled to the U.S.A. to spread their message, arguing that nuclear power must be phased out around the world.

This article strives to give a voice to survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake who suffered from the tsunami but not the nuclear disaster; their invisibility makes the case that these survivors are a separate group of Japan's “abandoned people.” They have been poorly represented in discussions on Japan's future energy policy; Thompson uses individual accounts to explain the residents’ “short and long-term needs, the full social, cultural, and economic impact of the tsunami disaster, and the future prospects of the region.”

While many Chinese studied in Japan, Lu Xun was iconic both because of his status as China's most important modern writer and because of the impact his time in Japan had on his life. Lu Xun was preparing to be a medical doctor until his teacher showed a slide of listless Chinese prisoners at the end of his anatomy class. Lu was shocked by his compatriots’ passivity and the laughter they induced from his Japanese classmates, and he later wrote that this experience convinced him to abandon his studies of modern medicine and return home to awaken the Chinese people. This became known as the Magic Lantern Incident, and it is probably the best known story of nationalist awakening for modern Chinese.

In March and April 1948 Koreans across Japan rose up in protest after the Japanese government began to enforce an order handed down to them by the American Occupation administration to close Korean ethnic schools. One such protest took place in Kobe on April 24 when Koreans stormed the Hyogo Prefecture offices in an attempt to get the governor to rescind the order to close the four Korean ethnic schools in the prefecture. American and Japanese administrations reacted harshly to the Korean actions. Police arrested thousands of Koreans and inflicted stiff penalties on the incident's leaders. As was often the case, the Occupation administration misinterpreted Korean intention to keep the schools open as a leftist attempt to disrupt U.S. occupations in Korea and Japan. Here the incident is examined through the eyes of one Occupation employee, Elizabeth Ryan, a 31-year old court reporter who included detailed information on the incident and its participants in personal letters that she sent to her family in the United States.

More than two years after the triple disasters that included the meltdowns at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, between 160,000 and 300,000 Tohoku residents remain displaced, the power station teeters on the brink of further disaster, and large swathes of northern Japan are so irradiated they may be uninhabitable for generations to come. But today in Tokyo, it is as though March 11, 2011 never happened. The streets are packed with tourists and banners herald the city's 2020 Olympic bid; the neon lights are back on and all memories of post-meltdown power savings seem long forgotten.

Introduction

In Part I of this series we looked at the battlefield experiences of Sōtō Zen Master Sawaki Kōdō during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Sawaki's battlefield reminiscences are relatively short, especially as he had been severely wounded early in the war. Nevertheless, he was able to express the relationship he saw between Zen and war on numerous occasions in the years that followed.

As I was researching Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese, I wondered whether Orwell ever wrote about China. His interest in India, where he was born in 1903, is well known, and he served in the Burma Police after leaving school and before becoming a writer, but my guess was that China didn’t concern him greatly. But when I went to the British Library to check in his massive, 20-volume Complete Works [CW], I was surprised to discover that he wrote quite a lot about China and its fate under Japanese occupation, in particular when he was working for the BBC's Eastern Service during World War II.

Duara argues that the relationship between Manchukuo and Japan was a new form of imperialism, rather than a mirror-image of European imperialism. As Duara explains, the political relationship between the two showed “a strategic conception of the periphery as part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power.” The Japanese developed this strategy in response to growing nationalist movements by colonized people for independence after World War I. Many Japanese also thought they could win the cooperation of those movements by stressing their own frustrations at racial discrimination in the international sphere. Further exacerbating the sense that they were criticized by everyone, the Japanese faced racial discrimination when they tried to emigrate to Europe and North America and were refused even the principle of racial equality at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. Japan thus began to articulate itself as the anti-imperialist leader in Asia, set to lead the other Asian nations and throw off the yoke of western imperialism.

Japan's ruined and radioactive reactor plant at Fukushima Daiichi has been an abiding source of concern among knowledgeable observers. There are a host of good reasons for this reemergence. As this Mainichi survey observes, it is now clear that several hundred tons of radiation-contaminated water is entering the ocean per day. Over the past week, it suddenly returned as an intense focus of concern in the Japanese and quality overseas press. There are a host of good reasons for this reemergence. As this useful summary of articles and expert statements reveals, it is now clear that several hundred tons of radiation-contaminated water is entering the ocean.

According to accounts published after Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972, nuclear weapons were stored in the northern Okinawan village of Henoko at an Army ordnance depot adjacent to the Marines’ Camp Schwab. The depot was constructed in 1959, becoming the Army's 137th Ordnance Company (Special Weapons) and was turned over to the Marines as Camp Henoko (Ordnance Ammunition Depot) following reversion in 1972. The camp is located only a few hundred yards from the proposed site of the replacement base for the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, which is located in the middle of densely populated Ginowan City. Newly re-instated Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has vowed to push for construction of the base, delayed more than sixteen years by local protests and despite widespread Okinawan opposition. The January 11, 2013 Japan Times reported, “The [Japanese] government may apply next month to bring in earth to fill a coastal area in [Henoko,] Okinawa where a U.S. Marine Corps air base is to be relocated, ahead of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's trip to the United States, government reports said Thursday.”

The haiku has been a universal poetic form for more than half a century now. The second UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjōld expressed his private thoughts in it; the founding executive director of the UN Population Fund Rafael Salas recorded his daily observations through it; so does the current President of the European Council Herman Achille Van Rompuy.

Last year the Belgrade-born physician- filmmaker Dimitar Anakiev compiled a large anthology of haiku by writers from 48 countries on war and other forms of violence.

During the late 1930s, as Japan escalated war preparations with China, and after GovernorGeneral Minami formalized the assimilationist ideology of “Japan and Korea as One Body”, cinema in Korea experienced a fundamental transformation. Korean filmmakers had little choice but to make co-productions that aimed to draw Koreans toward Japanese ways of thinking and living, while promoting a sense of loyalty to the Japanese Empire. Within this colonial context, and especially after the 1940 Korean Film Law facilitated the absorption of the Korean film industry into the Japanese film industry, a particular type of masculine hegemony was encouraged by a comprehensive censorship process. To show how this fluid and dynamic process worked, this article draws on some key theoretical concepts of hegemony to analyze the construction of masculinity in three of the most notable of these wartime co-productions: Angels on the Streets (1941), Spring in the Korean Peninsula (1941), and Suicide Squad at the Watchtower (1943). It analyzes how the colonial authorities sought to reorient Korean audiences toward a particular worldview by means of a process that we call a “cinema of assimilation” - a cultural hegemonic exercise designed to draw Koreans closer to the social, political and economic habits and priorities of their occupiers.

Japan is still struggling to deal with the hugely complex ramifications of the nuclear accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi. While there is often a hope that disasters may act as a major catalyst, following 3/11 it appears that there has been more continuity than change in Japanese politics. Hymans has identified a similar state of affairs, noting that debate about nuclear power has ‘gone around in circles’ with Japan failing to reach ‘a coherent long-term nuclear policy response.’ Yet the very serious political, economic and technical challenges that have emerged following the fateful events of 11 March 2011 are slowly forcing Japan to come to terms with the role nuclear energy might play in its future.

Whereas some Koreans were coerced to work in Japan and elsewhere in the Japanese empire, many others voluntarily migrated to the Japanese mainland. This trend continued on a more limited basis into the postwar era. Tessa Morris-Suzuki has written on postwar migrations across Japanese borderlines in Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War (2007) and Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (2010). In Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, she has also offered her findings and thoughts on the subject; this article is one example.

On June 10, 2014, the Article 9 Association marks its tenth anniversary, more than ever embattled and determined. As illustrated by Alexis Dudden’s recent article on this site, “The Nomination of Article 9 of Japan's Constitution for a Nobel Peace Prize,” business people figure in the broad swath of “Japanese people who conserve Article 9” recognized as worthy of consideration for the Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Shinagawa Masaji, the subject of this memorial tribute by prominent modern literature scholar and executive secretary of the Article 9 Association Komori Yoichi, was surely the dean of progressive financial leaders of the postwar era. English-language readers who follow Japan are likely to be aware of the political clout of Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), which not so incidentally supports Constitutional revision. Miho Matsugu's generously annotated translation* of Komori's tribute to Shinagawa following his death in August of 2013 provides a glimpse of an association, Keizai Doyukai, or Japan Association of Corporate Executives, that has often projected a contrasting sense of mission. Given the neo-liberal furor reigning over the ever bellicose US and its client state Japan (to borrow Gavan McCormack’s designation, as in “Japan’s Client State (Zokkoku) Problem”), we are right to be painfully aware of the limited capacity of capitalism to benefit all human beings-not to mention our home the earth. It is all the more refreshing, then, to learn not only about Shinagawa's commitment to the “no-war clause” but also his years of union activism and espousal of “revisionist capitalism.” His example prompts wide-ranging comparison, whether to Nordic models (see the intriguing comparison recently published on this site of Sweden and Japan's policies in the face of financial crisis) or in another era of US capitalism, Henry Ford's brand of investment in anti-union employee well-being and espousal of pacifism, albeit a pacifism fundamentally flawed by anti-Semitism.

One of the most significant Pan-Asian figures outside of China and Japan was Rabindranath Tagore. Indian Pan-Asianism had little practical connection to that of China and Japan, as Japanese Pan-Asianism tended to mean only East-Asianism, but Tagore, who traveled in both China and Japan, was a globally famous writer, playwright, composer, and poet who became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913). Tagore was a perfect Pan-Asian interlocutor between the two countries, and Zeljko Cipris's “Seduced by Nationalism: Yone Noguchi's ‘Terrible Mistake’: Debating the China-Japan War With Tagore” looks at a series of letters he exchanged with the Japanese poet and former internationalist Yone Noguchi in 1938. Noguchi claimed that the Japanese invasion of China was an attempt to save the Chinese people and their ancient culture from the evils of Chiang Kai-shek who had killed thousands of Chinese by blowing the Yellow River dikes (to stop the Japanese), and, Noguchi claimed, sold his country to the West, diverging from “oriental ethics.” Tagore refused to give this interpretation any credit, denouncing imperial Japan's betrayal not only of Pan-Asian but of universal values. The letters reflect the complete absorption of Noguchi's flavor of Pan-Asianism into Japanese imperialism, much as did Dazai Osamu's fiction, discussed in the previous article.

This article focuses on two groups of people most affected by the Fukushima disaster, the local residents of nearby cities and the nuclear power plant workers. The interviews discussed here show citizens who are still skeptical of nuclear power plants and wary of returning to their homes; others have decided to return but are concerned about their safety.