In the summer of 2012, following an accident at the Fukushima power plant in March 2011, 200,000 people filled the streets outside the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo. This new movement had much in common with contemporaneous movements around the world, such as Occupy Wall Street. These included its use of the internet and the central role played by a highly educated precariat. In this essay, I analyze the results of the research I conducted on this movement, including the characteristics displayed by its main actors and participants, the structure of the organizing group and its methods of mobilization. Furthermore, I analyze Japan's political structure to show why the movement has not directly affected electoral outcomes. While this article analyzes Japanese society, it also contributes to understanding a more universal problem: What is the relationship between twenty-first century social movements and political systems that took shape during the twentieth century?

Documents from the United States Marine Corps reveal that lectures purported to improve Marines' understanding of Okinawa instead disparage local residents and politicians, downplay military crimes and mislead service members about the island's 27-year occupation by the U.S.

The struggle over reshaping postwar Japan entered a new phase on March 2, 2016, when Prime Minister Abe Shinzo declared at an Upper House Budget Committee hearing that he was committed to revising the constitution within his term of office, that is, by September 2018. Changing the postwar regime by fundamentally revising the present pacifist constitution has been Abe's goal since he returned to power in 2012, but for some time he had avoided clearly stating his plan, knowing that the majority of voters oppose constitutional revision.

Theorists of class have long predicted the end of the peasantry: Marx, Hobsbawm and Bernstein have all argued that in the transition to capitalism, peasants would be either transformed into individual specialized commodity producers (commercial farmers), or forced into wage-labour by fragmentation of their land holdings, and dispossession, debt and impoverishment. On the other hand, these theorists have been uncharacteristically ambivalent about whether or not the peasantry constitutes a class. Marx, for example, argued that although peasants' economic exploitation and political and social subordination placed them in an antagonistic relationship with other classes, they lacked any consciousness of, and capacity to articulate, their common class interests, much less organize politically. Pointing to the uneven, contradictory impacts of globalized agriculture and consequent differentiation among agriculturalists, Bernstein, too, cautions that ‘“the peasantry” is hardly a uniform or analytically helpful social category in contemporary capitalism… The same stricture necessarily applies to any views of peasants as a (single) “class” (“exploited” or otherwise)‘.

Ishimure Michiko (1927-) is one of Japan's leading literary writers and social critics. Her extensive work, comprising over 50 volumes, spans a wide range of genres including novels, poetry, plays, essays, children's stories, and autobiographical writing. Ishimure is the recipient of numerous literary awards, internationally and in Japan, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award from the Philippines in 1973 and the Asahi Prize for literature in 2001. A seventeen-volume critical edition of her collected works in Japanese was published in 2013.

Late last month, the Asia Pacific hosted two very important and starkly contrasting international conferences on the region's energy and climate choices. A very high level, invitation-only summit in Singapore declared that the region's energy options are limited to choosing from a mix of coal, gas and nuclear, with renewable energy's role merely marginal. But a far more diverse and innovative conference in Honolulu, one that included the US military, demonstrated that renewable energy is the region's economically and environmentally rational choice. As we shall see, there was one key difference between these polarized positions on what is perhaps the single most important issue of our era. The Singapore event focused on the supply side of energy whereas the Hawaii summit examined the energy system in its entirety. The Hawaii event paid particular attention to the increasingly crucial role of microgrids and other enabling infrastructures that reshape the demand side as well as the supply side. This short article reviews both events and asks why the Singapore summit ignored the role of smart networks. We then conclude by showing how smart infrastructures are becoming central to climate-change mitigation and adaptation.