Overlooked by most scholars of Taiwanese history and almost entirely forgotten in the history of Tokyo, sightseeing tours organized by the Japanese colonial government brought groups of Taiwanese aborigines to the imperial capital twenty-one times between 1897 and 1941. The aim of these tours was to show the aborigines the “light of civilization” and impress upon them Japanese superiority. The aboriginal tourists, however, did not always learn the intended lessons of their visit. The tours made Tokyo the stage for complex cultural encounters that undermined the simple imperial narrative of civilization and savagery.

Readers familiar with my research will know that its focus has been on the wartime actions and statements of Japan's institutional Buddhist leaders, most especially those affiliated with the Zen school. Nearly to a man, their actions and statements were strongly supportive of Japanese aggression and imperialist actions. In the postwar era many of these same Zen leaders played a seminal role in the introduction of Zen to the West. Thus, it came as a shock to their Western adherents to learn that their beloved Zen masters had once been fervent advocates of aggressive war. They believed, or wanted to believe, that “enlightened” Zen masters were unlike those priests, rabbis, chaplains of other faiths who, with but few exceptions, have always expressed their unstinting support for the wars fought by their nations.

The passage of the Act on Protection of Specified Secrets (Secrecy Law) in Japan on December 6, 2013 was a turning point for many antinuclear and anti-discrimination activists, causing them to shift their energies to protesting Prime Minister Abe Shinzō's policies. This law, which would jail people for inquiring about state secrets even if those secrets had not been so identified, has been flagged by the UN Human Rights Council and the Japan Federation of Bar Associations as compromising the people's right to know and undermining democracy. When it was passed in the middle of the night on December 6, 2013, about 40,000 protesters had been maintaining a vigil in front of the Diet. On a live internetradio program on Dommune on July 30, 2014, the activist Banchō expressed concern that the Secrecy Law could turn Japan into a “police state” that did not require police to explain the reasons for one's arrest “because it was secret” (Banchō, Dommune, Tokyo, July 30, 2014). Lawyers like Tamura Yūsuke of Asu no Jiyū o Mamoru Wakate Bengoshi no Kai (Association of Young Lawyers for the Protection of Tomorrow's Freedom) have also highlighted the problematic nature of the Abe Cabinet's reinterpretation of the Constitution without undergoing an amendment process, which would require a two-thirds majority in the Diet. He argued that the Right to Collective Self-Defense primarily enables overseas wars in cooperation with the United States rather than Japan's self-defense, which is already constitutionally permitted (Tamura Yūsuke, Dommune, July 30, 2014).

On the 110th anniversary of the death of Lafcadio Hearn, Roger Pulvers examines the legacy—for Japan and the United States—of Japan's most famous gaijin.

A small cage was opened at Lafcadio Hearn's funeral, setting birds into the air, the soul of the deceased presumably taking flight with them. His coffin was draped in chrysanthemums and fragrant olive, adorned by a laurel wreath. Seven Buddhist priests read the sutras at Kobudera (now Jishoin Enyuji Temple) in Shinjuku Ward's Ichigaya-Tomihisacho district in Tokyo, where Hearn had frequently strolled among the gravestones.

“And if it does start a war, hopefully people will say, ‘You know what? It was worth it. It was a good movie!‘”

–Seth Rogen

“Wacky dictators sell newspapers, and magazines-for example, the 2003 Newsweek cover depicting Kim [Jong Il] in dark sunglasses over a cover line that read ‘Dr. Evil.’ …But demonization, and ridicule, can be dangerous. At its worst, dehumanizing the other side helps to lay the groundwork for war.”

The last engagement between the armies of Japan and the United States, the Battle of Okinawa, was fought in the final stages of the Pacific War, predominantly on the main island of Okinawa, but also on other small islands in the vicinity.

China's renewable energy revolution is powering ahead, with the year 2013 marking an important inflection point where the scales tipped more towards electric power generated from water, wind and solar than from fossil fuels and nuclear. This means that its energy security is being enhanced, while carbon emissions from the power sector can be expected to soon start to fall, we argue.

After the 3.11 triple disaster, massive information flooded the media. However, a comprehensive picture of the information ecosystem regarding 3.11 is yet to emerge. This article presents a quantitative analysis of a large amount of information and discourses concerning 3.11. In addition to gaps in information about damage and danger, we found that the areas most affected by the triple disaster had a greater number of people lacking access to vital information. These people were not only left behind during the first weeks of the catastrophe, but also thereafter, in the agenda for reconstruction.

One of the most striking aspects of the international history of the 1930s is the revival and official endorsement of a pan-Asian vision of regional world order in Japan. The pan-Asian discourse of East-West civilizational difference and comparison was influential in various intellectual circles in Asia. But during the 1920s, as a political project of Asian solidarity, it was irrelevant for Japan's foreign policy, and it did not have any international momentum or movement. The period after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, however, witnessed a process by which pan-Asianist ideas and projects became part of Japan's official foreign policy rhetoric. After 1933 Japan's pan-Asian internationalism began to overshadow liberal internationalism, gradually becoming the mainstream vision of an alternative world order. This process culminated in the declaration of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere in 1940, a project that relied heavily on the rhetoric of panAsian internationalism. In 1943, seventeen years after the ineffectual 1926 Nagasaki pan-Asiatic conference that was ridiculed by official and liberal circles in Japan, the Japanese government itself hosted a Greater East Asia Conference to which it invited the leaders of the Philippines, Burma, the provincial government of India, the Nanking government of China, Manchukuo, and Thailand.

In this country it is uncommon to have the opportunity to reflect on the conscience of those who were opposed to war. However, now is the time to direct our thoughts to the way of life and words of a Buddhist priest who risked his life in the prewar era to proclaim: “War is a Crime.”

The village of Taruichō in Gifu prefecture once prospered as a stage on the pre-modern Nakasendō main road. Today, when you get off the train at Tarui station on the Tokaidō line, you find yourself in the midst of an agricultural area full of rice paddies. Travelling by car for another four kilometers eventually takes you to an old temple by the name of Myōsenji, affiliated with the Ōtani branch of the Shin [True Pure Land] sect.

The nearly three-month long Battle of Okinawa (April-June 1945) saw what was arguably the most intense combat of the Asia-Pacific theater of World War II and marked the only battle of that war that unfolded on Japanese soil. It is estimated that one in three residents of Okinawa Island—mostly civilians– lost their lives during the battle. It is readily understandable to outside observers why this experience might generate a strong streak of pacifism in contemporary Okinawan political culture. Less readily apparent to the uninformed observer is why the same experience would generate resentment against the Japanese military that was ostensibly defending compatriots from the American attack. Yet the battle not only did so but has also become a source of recurrent conflict among Okinawans themselves, and between Okinawans and the mainland government. Okinawa International University professor emeritus Aniya Masaaki elucidates the historical reasons behind the controversy by describing the circumstances surrounding the “group suicides” of Okinawan civilians that occurred in various parts of the prefecture during the battle and a ground-level account of one such group suicide. It deserves note that this article was written just when controversy was coming to a head in 2007 over the depiction of these “group suicides” in Japan's high school history textbooks. The article helps the reader make sense of the lingering emotional resentment toward the mainland government that many Okinawans still harbor today.

In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called

On December 19, 2014, South Korea's Constitutional Court delivered an unprecedented ruling to dissolve the opposition Unified Progressive Party and disqualify all five of its representatives from the National Assembly.

The ruling was in response to a petition filed by the Park Geun-hye government in November 2013 to dissolve the party based on allegations that it was under orders from North Korea to subvert the South Korean state through violent revolution. The government filed the petition two months after it arrested UPP lawmaker and National Assembly member, Lee Seok-ki, who is currently behind bars on charges of inciting an insurrection and violating the National Security Law (NSL).

At 5.30 pm on 17 September 2014, police and soldiers interrupted a lecture on the topic of “Democracy Classroom #2: The Decline of Dictatorship in Other Countries” at Thammasat University in Bangkok. The officials went up to Professor Nidhi Eoseewong, the noted historian and public intellectual who was speaking, and told him to stop and come with them. Three additional scholars (Prajak Kongkirati, Janjira Sombutpoonsiri, and Chaowarit Chaowsangrat) and three student activists from the League of Liberal Thammasat for Democracy (LLTD), which had organized the event, were also arrested. They were taken to a local police station and interrogated for several hours. At no time were they allowed to speak with lawyers, as the police and military authorities asserted that they were not being charged with any crimes, but were there for the purpose of “creating understanding.” They were released at 9.30 pm that evening. By not charging the seven individuals with the violation of any laws or orders, the authorities can claim that this was not an arrest, but was rather a discussion to “create understanding,” as they have in cases of arbitrary detention following the coup. To be clear: the lack of formal charges does not change the meaning of this incident as a form of intimidation, violation of the rights of the seven individuals to freedom of thought and speech, and part of the ongoing creation and maintenance of a climate of fear in Thailand.

Safecast is a network of concerned citizens created after 3.11 to measure nuclear radiation and provide these measurements in real time on the Internet. This is one among many instances of the production of information on radiation risks after 3.11. While Safecast has contributed to the collective intelligence on these risks, its members have claimed that such measurements and data are “politically neutral”.

Okinawa was administered by the United States military between the end of the Battle of Okinawa in June 1945 and its reversion to Japan in May 1972. Matthew R. Augustine's article covers the period stretching from the start of American military planning prior to the Battle of Okinawa to the return of the Amami Islands, the northernmost portion of the occupied Ryukyu Islands, in 1953. The article outlines the consequences of the American decision to administratively separate the Ryukyu Islands from Japan proper, and allow the military to run it as a military colony, along with the social and political currents that were set in motion as a result. As Augustine explains, this involved not only isolating Okinawa from Japan, but also the different islands of the Ryukyus from one another, in the process disrupting the economic, social, and political networks that had earlier sustained Okinawa's economy and society. However, as he details in the section that follows, Okinawans did not accept these conditions passively, and in their struggle for survival revived earlier links with Japan to the north and neighboring countries to the south through illicit smuggling networks. From there, Augustine discusses how the Cold War confrontation of the late 1940s led to a partial re-establishment of economic links with the mainland while rigorously continuing (or perhaps more accurately systematically monitoring) political separation.

The January 1922 issue of Shonen kurabu (Boy's Club) carried the first episode of an exciting new “hot-blooded novel” (nekketsu shosetsu) drawn from the fertile imagination of noted children's writer Miyazaki Ichiu. For fourteen consecutive issues Miyazaki enthralled Japanese children with depictions of Japanese valour and the Yamato spirit (Yamato damashii) locked in a titanic struggle against a duplicitous and rapacious foreign enemy. The fate of the navy and of the nation itself hung in the balance. The Imperial navy fought valiantly against a technologically superior foe but was ultimately destroyed. Then, in Japan's darkest hour, the nation was saved by a group of true patriots, led by a child warrior commanding a powerful new technology. All Japan wept. This was the Future War Between Japan and America, “the greatest naval battle in history.”

Pedro Iacobelli's essay also elucidates some of the less immediately obvious consequences of the U.S.'s administration of Okinawa, in his case focusing on Okinawa's international legal status during the American occupation. As he details, under the terms of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan in theory retained “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa's population. Iacobelli, after discussing in some detail the historical circumstances that gave rise to this status, traces its practical consequences for a Ryukyu Government-sponsored emigration program to South America.