Paper City (2021), directed by Adrian Francis, is a documentary film that highlights the 70th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945. The film presents three elderly survivors' oral accounts of the firebombing and observes their work as memory activists in a long campaign to compel the Japanese government to publicly memorialize the event in a way commensurate with its enormous devastation. Reflecting on issues of memory and forgetting, Francis intends the film as a way of passing survivors' experiences to audiences, who can help to transfer memory to others and to generations beyond.

J. Mark Ramseyer's 2020 article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” provoked numerous highly critical responses from the general public and the scholarly community. Our group composed a report that analyzed the article and concluded that it should be retracted because it misused and distorted evidence. After more than two years of investigation, during which Ramseyer published a response to his critics, the editors of the International Review of Law & Economics decided not to retract the article, but to keep a statement of concern attached to the final published version. In this follow-up report, we explore the legacy of the original article as it relates to problems of academic integrity and historical denialism in public discourse. We highlight Ramseyer's persistent strategies of obfuscation and suggest how historians might continue to address the problem of deliberately misleading scholarship masquerading as “academic freedom.”

The Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo (IHIC) was opened in 2020 as part of the Japanese government's 2015 agreement with UNESCO to disclose the full history behind each newly listed World Heritage site. However, the Center has been disseminating a one-dimensional narrative that denies that forced labor has ever happened and labels claims to the contrary as “groundless lies.” Testimonies of Korean, Chinese, or Allied POW forced laborers are entirely absent. This article examines the content of the IHIC's guided tours and their most repeated claims. It also covers the debate surrounding the legitimacy and reliability of oral histories.

This essay argues that modes of conceptualizing global-local entanglements provide a useful lens for looking at the different ways Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects localize in BRI-host countries. The essay draws on recent work on George Ritzer to examine examples of BRI projects where global norms and practices are locally conceived and controlled, in contrast to other cases where the projects barely reflect local culture. Examples of Serbia and Hungary are provided to illuminate these points.

A little over 75 years ago, a Japan-designed Asia-Pacific community collapsed, leaving not only Japan, but much of the region, in chaos. Millions were dead, with cities left in ruins. Important lessons the world—and many Japanese people—took from the catastrophe of the Asia-Pacific War and the demise of the Japanese Empire were incorporated in the American-crafted constitution of Japan that took effect one year later, which pledged under Article 9 that Japan would forever renounce “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” adding that “land, sea, and air forces … will never be maintained.” That pledge remains, unrevised but steadily emptied of content, and the 1946 aspiration to create a new kind of state, one resting on the “peace” principle, has been largely forgotten. Over subsequent decades, the US, which had imposed Article 9 on an occupied Japan, came to regret its recrafting of Japan as a “peace state,” and began steadily exerting pressure on it to revive and expand its military. Thus, with US encouragement, Japan has, over time, indeed built formidable land, sea, and air forces, evading constitutional proscription by calling them “Self-Defence” forces (rather than Army, Navy, and so on).

This article provides a critical analysis of the representations of collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. The discussion of the “subject debate” over the inscription of the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims, politics over the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the preservation of the A-bomb Dome transpired the memory mechanisms at work with regard to the US responsibility for the A-bomb, the Japanese aggressive war leading up to the A-bomb, Japan's colonial rule of Korea, and denationalization and universalization of the A-bomb experience in Japan as a result. The article analyzes the chronology of the “only A-bombed nation” notion in the post-WWII Japanese “peace” discourses and concludes that it was a process to reconstruct Japanese national victimhood as a reaction to the “discovery” of the Korean A-bomb victims and the DPRK nuclear program. The article overall challenges the notion of “peace” and “pacifism” in post-WWII Japan that revolve around the experience of the atomic bombing.

Twelve years after the TEPCO nuclear accident in coastal Fukushima, the newly revised compensation policy and the discharge of water at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Station are threatening to produce social and political divisions among the residents in coastal Fukushima between scientific experts and lay public, and between countries. In a time of heightened societal divisions, what is the role of scholars? By sharing ethnographic stories in Fukushima's gray zone in 2023, the essay explores how scholars can learn from people on the ground to challenge narratives and systems that divide people from the environment and the land from the ecosystem to explore stories, voices, and perspectives that provide connections. (This article is based on Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone, recently published by the University of California Press).

This essay explores two different approaches to disaster found in fiction following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923: trauma and differential vulnerability.

The recent China Balloon Incident has all the appearance of high drama, though the heat is mainly provided by domestic politics rather than a strategic face-off of the U-2 or Cuba Missile Crisis variety. This is a drama in three acts. In Act 1, “Discovery”, the Biden administration went into action mode on finding that a Chinese “spy” balloon had crossed the US. An air force jet shot the balloon down, displaying Cold War-style toughness with China. In Act 2, “Evaluation”, new facts emerged that shed further light on the episode. Act 3, “Blaming”, involves mutual recriminations that obscure the real issue: escalating great power tensions between the United States and China.

Disaster risk reduction experts and organizations across Tokyo are using the 100th anniversary of the Great Kantō Earthquake as an opportunity to not only remember the disaster, but also to urge residents to rethink their disaster preparedness in anticipation of the next big earthquake. At Yokoamichō Park, the Tokyo Metropolitan Memorial Association worked with local primary schools in Sumida ward to bring to life precious records written by children who experienced the 1923 earthquake and fires. From September 2023, a multi-media compilation of children's accounts will be featured in a new exhibition at the Great Kantō Earthquake Memorial Museum.

In this paper, I look into the lesser-known history of “comfort women” in the Philippines. I engage with the following questions: how did the trafficking and sexual exploitation of Filipino women emerge as part of state policy in the Japanese Empire? How was it dealt with in the aftermath of the war, especially in the face of shifting post-war alliances and the changing place of Japan in the geo-politics of the Cold War? How did events in the international arena, in turn, affect diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Japan, specifically with respect to aid and trade? Finally, how did the market forces at play affect state policy in the Philippines?

At a cursory glance, much of Japan's new economic security policy resonates with US-Biden policy language of building resilient supply chains and strengthening strategic partnerships. Mainstream scholarship has been quick to interpret this as a new form of economic statecraft and the strengthening of the US-Japan partnership. However, little has been discussed about how the adoption of economic security policy has entailed state restructuring and reconnected different social forces. There has been a shift in the functions of state institutions which are, to some extent, becoming fused. Security institutions are drawn into economic domains while economic institutions increasingly adapt to discourses on military issues. This fusion has been facilitating the reconnection of industrial capital, military capital, and state elites who attempt to leverage the interlocking components of US-led policies and economic security, that in turn reproduces the developmental form of the Japanese state. This paper offers a theoretically-informed way of understanding new geopolitical lines underpinning state transformation in Japan and sheds light on the constitutive elements we currently see as ‘networked security architecture’ such as the Quad or ‘friendshoring’ industrial policy.

This article explores an unusual archive of student-authored film journals written between 1945-1960 in order to better understand the ideals, motivations, and expectations of a young, relatively elite, and ambitious section of postwar Japan's population who would go on to shape the direction of the country after defeat in 1945. These writings, archived in The Makino Mamoru Collection at the CV Starr East Asian Library in the University of Columbia contains, were generated by self-organized student groups known as film ‘circles’ (sākuru) or ‘film study groups’ (eiga kenkyūkai) based at universities around Japan. Many circles authored amateur publications, often modeled on commercial magazines or journals. However, there was one important difference between amateur and professional publications in the early postwar period: commercial publications were subject to censorship, whereas amateur publications were created for a smaller audience and under freer conditions. Student writings featured in university film circle journals therefore offer a unique view of early postwar attitudes during a period when professional media communications were censored by the Allied forces in charge of the Occupation of Japan (1945-1952).

The recently released eight-part Japanese docudrama THE DAYS (Netflix 2023) ostensibly concerns the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactor explosions and subsequent meltdowns at Fukushima. We highlight the problematic rendering of this particular Fukushima screen history by analysing THE DAYS' narrative veracity and reliance on ‘heroic’ disaster tropes, absent-presences, the glossing over of the radiological legacy, and the context of related nuclear accident teledramas and docudrama re-enactments.

Signaling by politicians, bureaucrats, and educational administrators plays a key role in curbing academic freedom in Japan by highlighting taboo subjects and funding priorities. Structural constraints on autonomy, however, represent the most insidious threat to academic freedom. Neoliberal reforms enacted in Japan over the past two decades have compromised academic freedom and undermined university autonomy. Overall, under the pretext of reform, higher education has become more rigidly hierarchical while there is a chronic lack of diversity that fosters narrow groupthink. On Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's watch, online harassment of academics surged while prominent revisionists targeted scholars over interpretations of wartime history.

This Diary written by twentieth-generation sake brewer of Futaba, Tomisawa Shūhei, from March 11, 2011 until April 21, 2011, depicts the experience of his family as they navigated the forced evacuation of their ancestral home as a result of the disastrous nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The Diary is translated to reflect the original and only occasionally adds names or descriptions for clarity.

There was an ongoing public debate on earthquake forecasting in the early 20th century between two Japanese seismologists, Akitsune IMAMURA and Fusakichi OMORI. In 1905 Imamura pointed out in a magazine article that historically Tokyo had been hit by large earthquakes every 100 years on average. Imamura argued that as the last one was 50 years ago, assuming quasi-periodicity, another one could be expected in the next several tens of years. Imamura's thesis was reported sensationally in several newspaper articles in early 1906. Omori responded by making strong criticisms of Imamura's work in a magazine article. The debate flared up in 1912, and simmered in following years. On Sept. 1, 1923 the Great Kantō earthquake occurred, killing approximately 105,000 persons. Some people regarded the occurrence of the 1923 earthquake as proof that Imamura made a successful prediction and that Omori's criticisms were wrong. This episode has lessons for us even today.

The issue of forced labor during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) remains a stone of contention in Japanese-Korean relations. While the governments of the two countries seem to put the issue aside in order to improve economic and military ties, civil society in both countries remains suspicious. The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus here introduces the positions of representatives of two civil society organizations from South Korea and Japan, respectively, explaining why the government approach to address historical injustices remains unsatisfactory.

“The Dog with Vanishing Spots” is a 1939 work of detective fiction by Miyano Murako. One of only a few women writers of detective fiction in the prewar period, Miyano presents a work in tune with the state of the genre during its Golden Age, while also displaying the interest in character psychology that figured prominently into her writings. The result is a mystery of lost dogs, stolen jewels and murder in the continental city of Dairen, all centered on a character that just might be the lone instance of a teenage female sleuth in Japan's prewar detective fiction canon.

This article analyzes labor informality in the Chinese platform economy. Drawing on participant observation at a parcel delivery station in Beijing, the author discusses how individual and family lives are impacted by the hectic world of logistics work, and indeed, how companies have increased cost competitiveness through driving exploitation into forms hidden within the household. Migrant family members frequently assist each other by calling customers and wrapping parcels while their unpaid labor is subsidizing the company's business operations. Although the spheres of production and social reproduction can sometimes be integrated in cities, they confront precarious work and unequal urban citizenship.