In July 2014, the front page of the Mainichi Shinbun featured a small picture of a young man in glasses with the headline, “Today's Faces.” A blurb below the photo declared, “The real name of the early Showa author Hōjō Tamio, who had Hansen's Disease and lived a life under quarantine, will be made public in a booklet to be published next month.” The article then revealed that Hōjō Tamio, the author of the novella “Life's First Night,” was born Shichijō Kōji and raised in Anan-shi, on the island of Shikoku in Tokushima prefecture.

As the 1970s drew to a close, Forbes Burnham (1923-85), Guyana's controversial leader of 21 years, received Pyongyang's assistance in importing the North Korean tradition of Mass Games, establishing them as a major facet of the nation's cultural and political life during the 1980-92 period. The current study documents this episode in Guyanese history and seeks to explain why the Burnham regime prioritized such an experiment in a time of austerity and crisis, its ideological foundations, and how Guyanese interpreted and responded to Mass Games.

I argue that the Burnham regime's enthusiasm for Mass Games can in large part be explained by their adherence to a particular tradition of socialist thought which holds education and culture as the foundation of development. While such a conception of socialism has roots in the early Soviet Union and, in the case of Guyana, was greatly influenced by the North Korean model, it was also shaped by local and regional contexts.

The deep aversion of parents to their children losing class time to Mass Games training, along with ethnic division and Indo-Guyanese hostility to the Afro-Guyanese dominated government in particular, proved the central obstacles to widespread public support for the project. Despite these contradictions, Mass Games, which took on a local flavour distinct from its North Korean progenitor, did in fact resonate with those who believed in Burnham's promise of a brighter, socialist future, while also appealing to a certain widespread longing with in Guyanese culture for a more “disciplined” society.

On the 70th anniversary of the division of the Korean peninsula, the Korea Policy Institute, in collaboration with The Asia-Pacific Journal, is pleased to publish a special series, “The 70th Anniversary of the U.S. Division of the Korean Peninsula: A People's History.” Multisited in geographic range, this series calls attention to the far-reaching repercussions and ongoing legacies of the fateful 1945 American decision, in the immediate wake of U.S. atomic bombings of Japan and with no Korean consultation, to divide Korea in two. Through scholarly essays, policy articles, interviews, journalistic investigation, survivor testimony, and creative performance, this series explores the human costs and ground-level realities of the division of Korea. See Part II, Charles Hanley, In the Face of American Amnesia, No Gun Ri finds a home.

On a sunny September day, last year, I tumbled from a diving boat into the bright clear blue sea of Henoko's Oura Bay, feeling both fear and hope. Would the corals living there still be fine, as they had been during my previous visits in years past? Or would they and other marine life here be suffering and dying from various negative impacts of human behavior (toxic runoff, sedimentation, garbage, ocean acidification, global warming, overfishing, etc.) which are steadily and inexorably killing coral reefs all around the world?