What follows is a translation of the second half of Ōe Kenzaburō's article, America ryokōsha no yume—jigoku ni yuku Huckleberry Finn, which was first published in the September 1966 issue of the monthly Sekai (The World). The untranslated first half begins, “America. I shall never become entirely free from the oppressing, demonic power of the word America,” and describes how the writer has lived since boyhood “within the conflicting, extremely complicated [inferiority] complex that the word America evokes.”

This summer, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PAC) held the first oral hearings in the case brought by the Philippines against China concerning the South China Sea. Before considering any substantive issues, the PAC has to decide whether it has jurisdiction to issue a ruling. Earlier, the closing weeks of 2014 had seen three significant developments, with Hanoi making a submission to the PAC, Beijing publishing a position paper (while not submitting it to the Court), and the United States issuing a position paper of its own. We can also mention the continued interest in the South China Sea by other countries, including India and Russia. Taken together, it means that the time may have arrived to take stock of the arbitration case, updating our previous summer of 2013 piece “Manila, Beijing, and UNCLOS: A Test Case?”. At stake is not only this arbitration case, or even the entire South China Sea, but the role of international law in contributing to peaceful solutions to territorial conflicts, specifically whether it can help accommodate changes in relative power without recourse to military conflict.