The 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima has encouraged comparisons in many quarters with the tragic experience of Minamata more than 55 years earlier, when mercury-poisoned industrial runoff caused widespread illness and death in the human and animal populations. Rather than viewing these disasters as the unfortunate side effects of modern industrial capitalism (to be addressed, in the capitalist view, with financial compensation) Yoneyama Shoko draws on Minamata victim's advocate Ogata Masato to imagine a more humane and life-affirming vision of our obligations to one another. In crafting his response to the Chisso Corporation and the Japanese government, Ogata (who eschewed financial compensation) drew on elements of the popular Japanese religious heritage to affirm an ethos of interdependence and the responsibility that follows. This can be seen, for example, in Ogata's use of the term tsumi, an indigenous Japanese category of ritual impurity that encompasses both physical pollution and moral transgression. Combining notions of “defilement” and of “sin,” tsumi is a principle that (as Brian Victoria notes) has justified some in shunning the victims of chemical or radioactive contamination. Ogata, however, employs the traditional imagery of tsumi to describe, not the victims of pollution but its perpetrators, thereby presenting ecological damage as a profoundly moral matter, one that cannot be reduced to economic impacts or financial compensation.

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.

Why did ROK President Lee, Myung-Bak, changing his position on the issue of “comfort women”, forcefully demand for the first time in December 2011 in Kyoto that Japan's Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko act to settle this issue? The reason is that the ROK government was compelled to do so by the August 30, 2011 decision of the Korean Constitutional Court. As of January 2013, however, there has been no tangible Japanese action on the issues. This article considers possible ways to resolve the issues that continue to poison relations between two neighbors with extensive economic, financial and cultural bonds.

Greene's article explores more deeply the health dangers facing people exposed to long-term low dosages of radiation, as is inevitable for those near the Fukushima plant. An English professor, Greene developed interested in the health effects of low-level radiation when she authored a biography of the late epidemiologist Alice Stewart, who pioneered research in that field. Greene contends that the global media is downplaying these dangers, and she presents alternate studies that show that exposure to radiation following the Chernobyl disaster caused many medical problems. These extend beyond cancer; every human body system is harmed. She argues the pro-nuclear media in Japan is reluctant to connect Fukushima to Chernobyl because doing so would dampen enthusiasm for building new nuclear plants. The misinformation will exacerbate the dangers for Fukushima residents who may follow their government's lead and conclude that it is medically safe to stay there. Most at risk are fetuses and children, on whom the effects of radiation are much more severe.

Historical issues haunt Japan. The world is facing a crisis, which may become a once in a century depression in the wake of Wall Street's financial meltdown and the subsequent recession throughout the world. Japan is no exception. At this time of crisis each country must show its resilience to alleviate immediate pain while implementing a long-term policy to strengthen the fundamentals of its economy and society. Japan is asked to come up with a powerful economic policy to overcome its crisis and contribute to global solutions. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and expectations are rising not only in the States but throughout the world that the U.S. will confront this challenge effectively. This is a golden opportunity for Japan because the fundamentals of Japan-US relations are solid and much of Obama's agenda coincides precisely with what the Japanese government has asserted for decades: the necessity for a sustainable global economy, emphasis on the environment, need for a long-term energy policy, serious concern about nuclear disarmament, cooperation through the United Nations and so on. Why not come up with creative ideas to attract the attention of Obama's new team and consolidate the alliance?

In June 2013, construction workers unearthed more than 20 rusty barrels from beneath a soccer pitch in Okinawa City. The land had once been part of Kadena Air Base - the Pentagon's largest installation in the Pacific region - but was returned to civilian usage in 1987. Tests revealed that the barrels contained two ingredients of military defoliants used in the Vietnam War - the herbicide 2,4,5-T and 2,3,7,8-TCDD dioxin. Levels of the highly toxic TCDD in nearby water measured 280 times safe limits.

On May 27 Ernst & Young Institute Japan (EY) released a Japanese-language study, summarizing Japan's over 200 smart city projects. EY's work is especially well timed. Among other recent developments, June 2 saw Apple join a long list of firms including Toyota Home by entering the “smart home” market. The global background includes thousands of smart-city projects, collectively worth at least USD 650 billion in 2014. At over USD 40 billion, Korea's Songdo smart city project is the costliest private-sector real-estate development ever undertaken.

The War of Resistance Against Japan, also known as the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, devastated much of the Chinese countryside and its major cities. The war brought more Chinese into contact with Japan than ever before. Earlier contacts were sometimes peaceful interactions, ranging from intellectuals reading Japanese books to workers laboring in Japanese textile mills. After 1937 the contact primarily meant that ordinary Chinese were likely to be bombed, turned into refugees, or in some other way suffered direct violence under Japanese occupation, in some cases at the hands of fellow Chinese. In “China and Japan at War: Suffering and Survival, 1937-1945,” Diana Lary outlines the impact of the war on Chinese society. These years still have a profound influence on contemporary Chinese attitudes towards Japan because the war has also had a profound impact on Chinese national identity. The Chinese Communist Party came to power in part because of the war, and the Party claims their resistance to Japan as a key source of legitimacy.

In a New York Times op-ed following the public's rejection of president Barack Obama's call for air strikes on Syria, Michael Ignatieff, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and former leader of the Canadian liberal party, sought to reaffirm the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, stating that while the public had become weary over the failure of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, Western democracies had a responsibility to protect civilians when they are threatened with mass killing. In his view, the use or threat of force may be “illegal but legitimate,” and the US sometimes needs to “go at it alone to stop atrocity crimes…. Rebuilding popular democratic support for the idea of our duty to protect civilians when no one else can or will,” thus represents “a critical challenge in the years ahead.”

This article focuses on the politicization of women following the Fukushima disaster. Slater argues that women are the most “effective anti-nuke spokespersons” because their role as mothers gives them moral authority on issues relating to the safety and health of children. Women from the Tohoku region (which contains Fukushima prefecture) have influenced political conversations all around Japan by organizing protests and issuing statements criticizing the Japanese government. Their actions have inspired more protests in other regions of Japan. One woman, SATO Sachiko, who was mentioned in Smith's article above, travelled to the U.S.A. to extend her message beyond Japan's borders.

Sociologist John Lie has written extensively on multiculturalism in Japan and elsewhere. He authored two books on Zainichi Koreans in 2008, and this article is adapted from a chapter in Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity. His other book is Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, which he edited with Sonia Ryang, whose article is also included in this course reader.

This article expands on Greene's thesis, providing more information on the dangers of exposure to low levels of radiation. Mark Selden introduces the transcript of a speech given by Chris Busby, a British chemical physicist known for his research on the negative health effects of low-dose ionizing radiation. While Busby is a controversial figure within scientific circles, his conclusions are deeply disturbing even if they turn out to be overstated. Most alarmingly, Selden explains that Busby's findings in Ukraine show that amounts of radiation that may be acceptable for adults are lethal to children and developing fetuses.

Radiation has long been known to cause cancers such as leukemia, but Busby shows that children exposed to low levels of radiation actually often develop heart disease before any cancers develop. Because one radioactive particle can damage twenty percent of a small heart (lethal because heart tissue repairs itself relatively slowly), Busby recommends that the Japanese immediately evacuate all children near the stricken nuclear complex. Needless to say, this has not happened.

This essay provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic ideology of “Gomanism” in the manga of Kobayashi Yoshinori (b. 1953), particularly Yasukuniron (On Yasukuni, 2005) and Tennoron (On the Emperor, 2009), in order to flesh out the implications of the author's “revisionist” approach to Japanese religion, politics and history.

Japanese imperial authorities sought to justify their imperial project in Hokkaido by racializing the Ainu, whom they displaced in 1869. At the time, the Ainu, with their Caucasian features and beards, were considered racially and culturally distinct from the Japanese (wajin), explaining why some western anthropologists marveled at the feat of a yellow race colonizing a white race. Therefore, the Japanese racialization of the Ainu as a culturally inferior and primitive race at the brink of extinction turned conventional racial taxonomies on their head. In this article Hirano introduces the term “colonial translation,” referring to the process by which the cultural and social differences between the Ainu and Japanese were rewritten to cast the Ainu as primitives. The institutionalization of these depictions of Ainu as primitive people enabled the colonizer to justify rule over the colonized. Although by the turn of the 19th century the majority of Ainu were engaged in wage labor or trade with the Japanese, the passage of the 1899 Protection Act attempted to turn the Ainu into farmers. More precisely, the imperial project in Hokkaido was justified by the argument that the Ainu were not capable of settling the land and cultivating it; the Japanese as a more civilized and advanced race needed to take charge. Expropriation of land and the limitation of Ainu hunting and fishing rights all occurred simultaneously with the “nativization” of the Ainu.

Rising 3776 meters above the Kanto plain, the volcanic cone of Mt. Fuji is Japan's tallest mountain. Its size, location, and its striking symmetry have all contributed to its standing, since at least the medieval period, as a paradigmatic mountain in Japanese religion and aesthetics, inspiring religious observances, poetry and the graphic arts. As Byron Earhart demonstrates, however, the significance of a symbol lies in the history of its employment, of the ways its meaning is appropriated and contested over time. Surveying the imagery of Mt. Fuji in propaganda, advertising and popular culture over roughly four decades, he suggests the ways in which this mountain — as a symbolic representation of Japan itself — was employed by both the Japanese government and the Allies as a symbol of the Japanese homeland. During the occupation, images of Fuji were initially censored by the Allies, who were wary of its nationalist implications, while American troops employed the image in their insignia, symbolically capturing the Mountain as the Allies had captured Japan itself. Eventually, of course, images of the mountain returned to the public sphere, serving again as a symbolic stand-in for Japan, but now as a peacetime commercial power.

In April 2014 Prime Minister Abe unveiled Japan's new national energy strategy, reinstating nuclear energy as a key source of energy even as the shambolic cleanup and decommissioning at the Fukushima Daiichi lurches from one blunder to the next malfunction, and radiation contaminated groundwater flows into the ocean. This is a major milestone in the comeback of nuclear energy despite a seemingly endless cascade of damning revelations about lax safety practices and perfunctory oversight since the three reactor meltdowns in March 2011. As a result, 2014 may be Japan's last nuclear free summer for the next few decades as pressure is mounting to restart some of Japan's 48 idled reactors.

We are now facing a critical situation. Not just Japan, but the world as a whole is in crisis. With America at the center, globalization is racing ahead, but there are also strong countercurrents with nationalism becoming stronger in various places. In the midst of war and terror, the threat of global warming is becoming clear to all. In this world, I believe that we should advance toward regionalism. In 2003 I hoisted this flag in a book entitled The Common House of Northeast Asia — Declaration of a New Regionalism published by Heibonsha.

Yi Sunsin (1545-1598) was perhaps the most highly successful military commander of Korea's Chosŏn dynasty, earning particular regard for his naval engagements during the sixteenth-century invasion of Korea by Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi. It should perhaps be unsurprising that Admiral Yi, a symbol of Korean defiance of Japanese aggression, would take on fresh significance in the years following World War II, as Korea worked to reimagine itself after a generation of Japanese occupation. The following article by Saeyoung Park describes the ways that Hyŏnch'ungsa - one of many small Chŏson-era shrines dedicated to Yi Sunsin - was transformed into the first national shrine following President Park Chung Hee's rise to power in a 1961 coup d’état. Over an eight-year period, the shrine architecture, its commemoration rituals and the surrounding countryside was transformed into an evocation of South Korea as a modern power, even as its connections with the sixteenth-century continued to be emphasized.

On 30 October 1940, six days after meeting with Adolf Hitler in the railway station at Montoire, Philippe Pétain announced on French radio that “a collaboration has been envisioned between our two countries.” Since then, “collaboration” has been the word by which we denigrate political cooperation with an occupying force. Pétain's choice of language to characterize the arrangement he made with Hitler—he claimed he would shield France from the greater threat of military occupation—was not of his own devising. The French army had signed an armistice with Germany four months earlier that committed French officials “to conform to the decisions of the German authorities and collaborate faithfully with them.” This first iteration was vague and innocent; Pétain's was not, and less and less could be. As war and occupation subordinated France's economy and polity to German control, collaboration unravelled into a tangle of compromises that few could anticipate at the outset of the war.