Compelling women's fiction in Japan hardly began with its two brightest contemporary stars, Kawakami Mieko and Murata Sayaka. Tawada Yoko won the Akutagawa Prize back in 1993 and her work is widely read outside Japan (Tawada has long lived in Germany and writes in German and Japanese). Ogawa Yoko won in 1990 for her novel Pregnancy Diary (Ninshin karendaa, 妊娠 カレンダー). In 2004 the Akutagawa went to two young women, Wataya Risa (19) and Kanehara Hitomi (20). There have been English translations of fiction by Japanese women for decades.

Certain fundamentals of the geopolitical frame of inter-state relations in East Asia remain as set around 70-years ago in the wake of the cataclysmic Second World War and subsequent San Francisco Treaty (1951), when the US was undisputed master of the world, China divided and excluded, Korea divided and at war, and Japan occupied. The economic underpinnings of that system, however, are now rudely shaken. The United States, in 1950, with about half of global GDP, is now 16 per cent (in “purchasing power parity” or PPP terms) while China, already (2016) 18 per cent, has grown by an astounding fifteen times in the two decades from 1995. Chinese GDP, one-quarter that of Japan's in 1991, trebled (or even quadrupled) it in 2018. Late in 2020 the IMF declared that China had become the world's biggest economy, $24.2 trillion to the US's $20.8 trillion, with the gap widening. The alliance system as a design to preserve US hegemony looks increasingly incongruous in a period of mounting US-China conflict.

By analysing how all wars affect women and examining the approach to sexual violence taken by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, this article attempts to locate issues of the “comfort women” in international perspective, to examine intellectual foundations for the study of war, and the role of rape in Japan's China war in particular. The article further explores the role of the military and the Japanese state in establishing and controlling the comfort women system in the course of the Asia-Pacific War.

Although Prime Minister Abe Shinzo repeatedly touted Japan's values-oriented foreign policy in Asia there was little substance to this agenda. Like other nations, Tokyo downplays human rights and democratic values in favor of maintaining trade ties and securing geo-strategic advantage. It is thus a values-free diplomacy of pragmatism and expediency, dealing with regional governments as they are, not as one might wish them to be. Japan is certainly not unique in this regard, but Abe invites scrutiny of the government's record due to his rhetorical grandstanding. Colonial and wartime legacies have made it problematic for Japan to lecture and pressure regional governments on their political systems and practices. Moreover, the escalating rivalry with China for regional influence reinforces Tokyo's hesitation to promote democratic reforms for fear that it will lose clout by driving governments into Beijing's unconditional embrace.

In recent years, Japan has been labeled an “environmentally backward country.” Yet Japan's integration of decarbonization and all-hazard-resilience is more advanced than critics generally admit. The evidence shows that, when compared to its peer countries, Japan is achieving significant climate mitigation and adaptation via a multilevel industrial policy. Moreover, Japan's synergistic integration of mitigation and adaptation to climate is important for the 2030 Agenda, which comprises the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals, and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction. That is not to say Japan's present pace of reductions in emissions and waste, increased resilience against climate and other hazards, and performance on other metrics is sufficient to meet the goals of the 2030 Agenda. However, the evidence assessed in this paper suggests that Japan deserves closer scrutiny for potential lessons in collaborative, cost-effective and equitable mitigation and adaptation.

The COVID-19 pandemic generates many uncertainties for everyone, but for Asia's poor and marginalized, there is little doubt about the devastating consequences. It's not only about unequal access to public health care, but also the loss of livelihoods that wreaks havoc in disadvantaged communities living on the edge of subsistence that are more likely to experience police abuses under the pretext of lockdown and quarantine enforcement. As second and third waves strike, the menace of this coronavirus and the high risk of letting our guard down becomes all the more evident. Resurgences of cases in Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan provide stark reminders that turning the corner does not mean being out of harm's way. Much debate focuses on the trade-off between public health and jobs as various degrees of lockdowns boost unemployment, especially for contingent workers. Moreover, the contagion of fear and anxieties about the future, along with travel restrictions and closed schools, keep people at home and purse strings tight, forcing many businesses to close in a downward spiral of contraction and dislocation. Despite governments around the region rolling out various countermeasures to soften the economic pain, including massive stimulus packages, these schemes are but a band-aid. Even relatively prosperous nations remain vulnerable to the gathering economic typhoon, because the pandemic is a transnational catastrophe that is disrupting markets and supply-chains while battering down growth rates and demand.

In Japan, Covid-19 has led to an accelerating diffusion of all-hazard, disaster-resilient, policy integration. This paper shows that Japanese experts not only built a resource-efficient Covid-19 response, but are also using the crisis to ramp up Japanese-style collaboration on resource-efficient and sustainable communities, both in Japan and overseas. In a year when action on the climate challenge everywhere risks being derailed, Japan's initiatives are an important indicator of how it remains possible to stay on track. Japan's measures further integrate the UN 2030 Agenda's three pillars of the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Sendai Framework of Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR). In short, Japan is using the pandemic as yet another opportunity to accelerate transformative industrial policy.

The fear of being forgotten that haunts the victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster set in quickly in the months following March 11, 2011. The Tokyo Olympics, touted as the “Recovery Olympics,” has served as a powerful vehicle for accelerating amnesia, on the one hand justifying the rushed reopening of restricted zones and other decisions of convenience, on the other, programming moments highlighting Fukushima in the Games. As preparations for the latter, especially the torch relay, reached fever pitch, the novel coronavirus intervened to force an abrupt postponement. It also disrupted ongoing and special events planned for the ninth 3.11 anniversary. The essay below elaborates on that context as an introduction to two texts by Muto Ruiko, head of the citizens' group whose efforts led to the only criminal trial to emerge from the Fukushima disaster. The first, a speech anticipating the torch relay, outlines what the Olympics asks us to forget about Fukushima; the second is a reflection on living under two emergency declarations, the first nuclear, the second, COVID-19.

The Meiji era (1868–1912) marks the initial process of Japan's passage into modernity through Westernization, and its identification as a modern nation-state. As part of the process of identifying with European discourses, of altering its position in Asia, and of adopting Western models and values, Japan changed its political, social and cultural dispositions towards industrialization and capitalism, as well as towards nationalism and colonialism, cultural and artistic creation.

Over the course of modernization, and of adapting various Western discourses on science and culture, Japan accepted several new approaches, especially those setting Europe apart and above from the rest of the world. As a result, Japan saw the rise of racial discourses, which eventually contributed to the state's imperial expansion into Asia.

Japan's path to modernity was a twofold movement: on one hand, it was an internal struggle for association with Western civilizations and adoption of their modernity. On the other hand, Japan sought to conceptually distance itself from Asia, only to return a few decades later as a conquering and imperial power. In the Japanese imagination, European cultures served as a perfect model for its own reformation, yet, at the same time, Japan found itself on a pendulum movement between Europe and Asia. Japan distanced itself from what it perceived as a primitive, underdeveloped region and its cultures, while simultaneously seeking to include China and India in its vision of a unified Orient, a stronghold of Asian cultures positioned against the Occident. Ultimately, Japan's self-definition came about through the notion of Otherness: the concept of “Japan” was defined primarily against the background of European civilization, but also, against a range of other cultures, including China and the United States, as well as its own immediate past of Tokugawa Japan.

In the first stage, the primary task was to set Japanese culture apart, and essentialize “Asia” as its Other. The desire to associate Japan with the West then led to a sense of Japan's “inferiority” (especially in terms of technological and scientific achievements), at the same time that Japanese leaders adopted a Western position in claiming “superiority” over Asia. The double movement of association (with Europe) and disassociation (from Asia) produced a new subtext to the binary opposition between the advanced and sophisticated, versus the primitive and simple-minded. This double movement, much like the binary logic that drove Western colonialism, laid the foundations for racial ideologies and imperial practices in Hokkaidō and Ryūkyū, Korea and Taiwan, Manchuria and China, as well as the South-Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia.

The articles in this issue look at the roots of the discourses on race in the Meiji era, in tandem with the Japanese empire's development in the latter part of the 19th Century. These concepts of race and empire lay at the center of Japan's racist ideologies and imperialist fantasies, and now serve as the focus of our discussions.

This transnational collaborative special issue is an effort to assess the impact and implications of the COVID-19 outbreak in Asia. This is a two-part special issue with Part I focusing mostly on East Asia, while Part II includes case studies from South and Southeast Asia in addition to transnational geo-political assessments. Most of the essays feature probing analyses of public policies and pandemic politics, but some provide more personal reflections on life in a time of outbreak (see Chen, Cleveland, Horiguchi, and Wake in Part I).

In this collection of essays our authors explore a range of issues not covered in Part 1, examining the broader impact of the Olympic Movement, efforts to spin the message and whether hosting the games is worth the extravagant costs. Two authors focus on the Paralympics, another presents excerpts from a graphic guide to the Olympics while others delve into previous Olympics, what they represented and how they influence the 2020 games. There are also several essays on opposition to the Olympics and lingering concerns about how the government has managed the Fukushima nuclear accident. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic casts an ominous shadow over the games, amid concerns that Prime Minister Abe is sacrificing public health through inaction and minimizing risks in order to save the Olympics.

Like many world leaders, PM Shinzo Abe has not managed the COVID-19 outbreak very well. Back in early February, when the Diamond Princess cruise was transformed into a coronavirus incubator due to botched quarantine procedures, the alarm bell rang about the coming pandemic, but Abe dithered and downplayed the risk in an abortive attempt to save the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The government tested relatively few people for the coronavirus leaving policymakers shooting in the dark. The health care system is in crisis due to inadequate preparations. Abe's complacency and lack of leadership set the tone for Japan's crisis response. Despite a relatively low number of deaths, public opinion polls indicate that most Japanese believe he declared a national emergency too late and has not handled the crisis well. Other leaders in East Asia have been more resolute, but so far Abe has not passed the pandemic leadership stress test.

On July 10, 2020, seventy-one Okinawan and Japanese civil society organizations and groups (and one Philippine organization) sent a letter of request and a civil society report to the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission (MMC), the U.S. federal agency in charge of overseeing the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act. The letter asks the MMC to “review and comment” on the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) efforts to preserve the Okinawa dugong, an endangered marine mammal that is Okinawa's cultural icon, now threatened with extinction due to the construction of a U.S. military base at Henoko-Oura Bay, Okinawa.

The total number of Japanese casualties in the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) is estimated to be around 3.1 million, with military fatalities accounting for 2.3 million. In contrast to the popular image in Japan of these war dead as “noble heroes” (eirei) who fought valiantly in service of the nation, however, the realities of war were quite different. Rather than being killed in combat, some sixty percent of soldiers (1.4 million) died away from the battlefield, succumbing to disease and starvation. Others suffered from the military's failure to secure dependable supply lines to provide food and equipment replenishments, resulting in a large number of otherwise preventable deaths. In this article, Professor Yoshida Yutaka focuses on the grim realities of war death as experienced by ordinary soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, a topic rarely touched upon by scholars. Combining a social historical approach with rigorous statistical analysis, Yoshida sheds light on the institutional issues and peculiarities of what was once proudly known as the “Emperor's military.”

As long as U.S. military bases have existed in Okinawa, sex workers have served the troops. What has varied over the decades has been the women's backgrounds, their working conditions, and their degree of agency. During the Pacific War, the Japanese military notoriously set up a “comfort women” system in which they enslaved thousands of women from Japan's colonies and occupied territories to supply sex to Japanese soldiers. After the war, during the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa from 1945 until 1972, prostitution was legal, and thousands of Okinawan women were pushed into sex work around the U.S. bases in order to provide for themselves and their families. After the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, Filipina migrants replaced Okinawan women in the entertainment districts around the U.S. military bases. A common belief has been that these women were trafficking victims. But the story of Daisy, excerpted from Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, illustrates how the migrants also had agency.

The Korean War would generate a wide range of cinematic responses. The fledgling film industry of South Korea produced films that, in sync with an ideology of stark anti-communism, tended to emphasise the immediate physical brutality of the communist enemy. The reaction of American film makers was at first to reproduce the narrative shape and tropes of the very successful films from World War II, usually situated in Europe or the Pacific Islands. Gradually, however, Cold War paranoia about enemies within and about the new insidious threat of ‘brain washing’ took hold in Hollywood, as it swept through other social and political discourses and institutions. This paranoia, a sense of diffuse panic was not limited to the war film genre but leaked out creatively into a new genre of science-fiction features.

The spread of COVID–19 across Japan has exacerbated accessibility issues born out of the nation's past, creating difficulties for disabled people in the present and anxieties about the future. In this article, I consider some of the historical contingencies and geopolitical circumstances that have fueled a precarious pipeline to risk and institutionalization for many disabled individuals. My analysis reveals how inadequate installation and inappropriate use of accommodations like ramps and elevators in various public venues has prevented disabled people from obtaining key supplies. It suggests that some disabled people have survived the current moment by relying on professional caregivers, but others have been unable to do so due to service cancellations and fear of contagion.

For individuals without support networks, assisted living facilities have offered a means of survival. However, many assisted living facilities have long grappled with funding issues and lack of willing workers. Accordingly, their residents have been exposed to neglect, abuse, and now, viral infection.

Aware of the situation, government officials have instituted emergency policies to provide disabled people and assisted living facilities with personal protective equipment and flexible financing. And yet, as activists have argued, those policies have often failed to pan out in practice. The future of disability in Japan remains uncertain. But as I suggest, the current crisis is our chance to intervene. I contend that we must use this opportunity to identify and resolve barriers to accessibility in Japan and build an inclusive society for domestic and international populations of disabled individuals.

Counterinsurgency tactics for winning hearts and minds are key weapons in state efforts to suppress rebellion and the possibility of rebellion. Always predicated on the threat of state violence, hearts and minds counterinsurgency is usually thought to originate in British or French strategies for managing insurgency in their colonies in Asia, especially in suppression of the 1948-1960 communist insurgency in Malaya. However, work with archival data, a genealogical approach to clear, hold and protect population management, which is a key principle of hearts and minds strategy, and careful review of scholarship on Japan's colonial military and governance (especially but not only in Japanese language) indicates that hearts and minds/hold and protect counterinsurgency principles have origins in imperial management of insurgency in Japan's colonies. It is also possible that elements of imperial Japanese “soft” counterinsurgency strategy undergird American and British hearts and minds counterinsurgency strategies in Malaya and South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.

This article assesses the planning, management and repatriation of Japanese civilians in Shanghai between 1945 and 1948. It examines four interwoven dimensions of this history. The first is the removal of Japanese expatriates as the centerpiece of the Kuomintang and Allied Powers' project to end Japanese colonialism once and for all. The second is how the Japanese community continued to exert a degree of autonomy and agency under the extremely unfavorable postwar circumstances. The third is the nature of postwar attempts to match each person with a definitive ethnic-national category. The fourth is how postwar history was experienced at the individual level among Japanese of different social strata and experiences.