On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik committed one of the most devastating acts of mass murder by an individual in history. Over the course of one day, he killed 77 people in and around Oslo, Norway, through a combination of a car bomb and shootings. The latter took place on the island of Utøya, where 69 people died, most of them teenagers attending an event sponsored by the Workers' Youth League. During his subsequent trial, Breivik remained outwardly unemotional as he clearly recounted the events of the day, including the dozens of methodical execution-style shootings on the island. His calmness both on the day of the murders and during the trial, shocked many observers. It was also an important factor in an attempt to declare Breivik insane, a move that he successfully resisted. Breivik himself addressed this subject at some length, crediting his supposed ability to suppress anxiety and the fear of death through concentrated practice of what he called “bushido meditation.” He claimed to have begun this practice in 2006 to “deemotionalize” himself in preparation for a suicide attack. According to Breivik, his meditation was based on a combination of “Christian prayer” and the “bushido warrior codex.” Bushido, or “the way of the warrior,” is often portrayed as an ancient moral code followed by the Japanese samurai, although the historical evidence shows that it is largely a twentieth-century construct.

So rank are the injustices wrought upon Okinawa, and so long continuing, that I am led to conjecture that the reason the world pays so little attention to the issues and makes such muted criticism of the governments largely responsible for the injustices must be that the situation is so complex and so little-reported as to defy understanding. Historians and political scientists pay close attention to the East China Sea, but tend to see it, and the military conflicts that occur around it, through the prism of the nation state. In what follows, I look at the present and recent past of the “Okinawa problem” through the prism of Okinawa, paying closest attention to how the Okinawan people see their recent past and present. I focus especially on the years of the (second) Abe Shinzo government (beginning December 2012).

Introduction

Recently, the influential American political pundit, Bill O'Reilly, demonstrated that no nationality or ethnicity holds a monopoly on retrograde views of slavery, on what it means as a human being not to have possession of one's own life. In response to first lady Michelle Obama's evocative observation that her African-American daughters were growing up in a house built by slaves — a house, moreover, they loved — O'Reilly tried to negate this moment's deep significance by quipping that the slaves who built the White House were “well fed and had decent lodgings.”

Introduction

China has made strategic choices favouring renewables over fossil fuels that are still not widely understood or appreciated. Hao Tan and I have been making these arguments for several years now, and in particular in our article in Nature in September 2014 we argued that China had overwhelming economic and energy security reasons for opting in favour of renewables, in addition to the obvious environmental benefits. In this article I wish to take these arguments further and update the picture to incorporate comprehensive 2015 data as well as fresh targets for 2017 and 2020. The context is China's continuing battle to scale back its use of coal; its imminent release of the country's 13th FYP for Energy, based on the overall 13th FYP for economic development over the five years 2016 to 2020, where new renewable energy targets will be announced or consolidated [See ChinaDialogue]; and China's hosting of the G20 meeting in Hangzhou in September, where it will be promoting an international drive for greening of finance – with China itself playing a key role in this process. China is becoming a major promoter of international infrastructure development, in Africa and across Central Asia through the One Belt-One Road strategy – and this too carries strong implications for other countries' energy choices.

“Those of you from Fukushima, please stand. Hello, everyone! I came here from Fukushima. I came today with many busloads of companions from Fukushima Prefecture and from the places where we've evacuated.”

These unassuming words begin the speech that electrified the 60,000-some gathered under an intense autumn sun for an anti-nuke rally in Meiji Park on September 19, 2011. Six months had passed since the triple disaster. The rally was dramatic evidence for a world that had forgotten the first postwar decades that Japanese people could, and indeed do, protest.

The two chapters presented here are taken from The Stories Clothes Tell, a translation of the Japanese book Nuno no Inochi: Hito no Kokoro, Kurashi Tsutaete by Horikiri Tatsuichi published in 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield.

Horikiri was born in 1925 in Kagoshima, Japan. Trained as a civil engineer, he was sent to work in northern China, and within a year was conscripted and sent to the front. He returned to Japan in 1946 to a career in construction. During these years, Horikiri traveled throughout Japan, collecting vast quantities of used clothing and furnishings, all the while recording their stories to illuminate and contextualize them. Horikiri is a respected authority on the history of everyday clothing in the Meiji (1868–1912), Taisho (1912–1926), and Showa (1926–1989) periods, having published nine books and museum catalogues as well as articles on the items in his collection.