Shortly after the Meiji government assumed administrative responsibilities in 1868, the Iwakura Mission left Japan to circumvent the globe, searching for information on institutions that could centralize a divided archipelago. In so doing, it encountered a world embarking on a new phase of imperial expansion. While the majority of the Mission's participants returned with visions of a large, expansion-oriented Japan, others saw their country's future as a small, neutral state. Debates over the suitability of either vision continued throughout the Taisho period, especially as Japan incorporated territories at its peripheries, including Ezo (Hokkaidō), the Ryūkyū Islands (Okinawa), Taiwan, and Korea. This paper examines the impact of the Mission participants' perspectives, which were informed by their first- and second-hand experience of American and European amalgamation of peoples of diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial origins. How did the participants' experiences influence their views on Japan's future as an expansionist state? What did their experiences teach them about the assimilation of peoples of diverse backgrounds? This paper identifies the legacy of these debates as extending to the present, where Japan seeks to rescind postwar restrictions against extending military powers beyond its borders.

A generation ago, infectious diseases were seen as a medical backwater, with the eradication of smallpox and widespread vaccination against polio. However, the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s, followed by SARS in 2003, pandemic influenza in 2009 and Ebola on an unprecedented scale in 2013-14 showed that infectious diseases of zoonotic origin could cause major new pandemics. Covid-19 has shown that very old public health techniques of quarantine and isolation are still needed to respond to new outbreaks. Public health always tries to get ahead of an emerging epidemic but rarely succeeds.

With China's Chang'e 5 rocket launch, which landed on the moon on December 1 and deposited a capsule in Inner Mongolia early in the morning on December 17 Beijing time after a 23 day voyage to the moon and back, the long US-Russian domination of space has a major challenger. The issues extend beyond national pride to a global leadership initiative in rocketry whose implications extend to military, economic and diverse scientific applications at a time of mounting US-China rivalry in all spheres.

The Summer Olympic Games is the most watched sports mega-event in the world. It is also the costliest, the most politically precarious, and the most strangely constructed sports mega-event on the planet. At the 2020 Games in Tokyo, athletes and spectators alike will be focused on the elite bodies in motion, in agonistic contests and aesthetic displays of excellence and effort. Behind the scenes, however, is a less apparent but deeply powerful institutional and ideological apparatus—the Olympic Movement—that sets the stage, establishes the rules, and reaps many of the benefits of this quadrennial spectacle. My essay offers an anatomy of the Olympic Movement (OM) through the five ways in which it has come to dominate global sport: through the International Olympic Committee as the apex of a transnational governance structure; through the OM management of the Olympic brand as the most lucrative in global sports; through Olympism as the OM's philosophy of universal sports humanism; through OM's power to define and defend multiple subjectivities—Olympic sports, Olympic genders, Olympic citizens, and Olympic bodies; and through the ability of the OM to orchestrate the rhythms of global sport through Olympic temporal regimes. It would appear from these powers that the OM is unassailable and unaccountable, yet the essay concludes by arguing that the OM is an example (perhaps a rare example) of how powerful interests can be made vulnerable to what we can call “rhetorical self-entrapment” and the revenge of unintended effects.

The Coronavirus hit Japan during our study-abroad semester in Kyoto. Here we present similarities in Japanese societal response to chemical pollutants throughout the long twentieth century and to COVID-19, as they became apparent to us through a chemistry course on Japanese industrial pollution.

This pair of articles draws on talks by Tomomi Yamaguchi and Satoko Oka Norimatsu at the seminar “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Woman’ Issue: Revisionism and the Right-wing in Contemporary Japan, U.S., and Canada,” at the Institute of Asian Research, the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC), hosted jointly by the Centre of Korean Research and the Centre for Japanese Research, on November 21, 2019. Tomomi Yamaguchi discusses the “history wars” over the “comfort woman” issue in Japan and the U.S., followed by Satoko Oka Norimatsu's “Canada's ‘History Wars’: The Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre.”

Korea Policy Institute (KPI) Executive Board Member Haeyoung Kim spoke with Dr. Kee Park on December 9, 2019 about his work in the DPRK, the unique features of the North Korean health system, and how geopolitics, above all the US travel ban and sanctions on trade impact public health and human security in North Korea. Dr. Park documents the severe challenges to health care in North Korea, the surprising strengths of the health system, and the contributions of a small group of American physicians of Korean descent in aiding health care in North Korea over the past twelve years.

There is widespread concern over the scale of China's consumption of fossil fuels, and particularly over recent increases in coal burning in the electric power sector. Nevertheless it is a fact that China is greening its power sector more than blackening it. We present updated evidence that China's electric power system has been greening – in terms of capacity added from renewable (WWS) sources, growth in electricity generated from WWS sources, and investment in new generation infrastructure. We present the results for the green renewable sector (WWS), the black fossil fuel sector (thermal) and the nuclear sector (growing, but not nearly as fast as WWS). This evidence reveals that China's extreme dependence on coal and other fossil fuels is moderating, as it ramps up alternatives – particularly the generation of domestic power from renewable sources based on water, wind and sun (WWS). In short, China's energy system is diversifying: it is greening within a large and growing carbon-intensive existing system. At the same time, China has steadily increased levels of coal burning in the past two to three years – even while the green trend in domestic power generation has continued. China's level of fossil fuel investments abroad (particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative) remain a source of concern. China continues to send disconcertingly mixed messages on the energy front.

The International Olympic Committee and local Olympic organizers promised that the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics would change the South American city. Almost all the promises were broken despite Brazil spending at least $13 billion to organize the games, with some estimates suggesting $20 billion. The Olympics turned into lucrative real estate deals for several billionaire developers. It did manage to drive the construction of a $3 billion metro-line extension, but estimates say it cost 25% more than it should have. Mostly the Rio games were scarred by scandals and left a city, starkly divided by rich and poor, pretty much as it was with a few cosmetic changes.

Nominally fought over competing interests in Korea and Manchuria, the Russo-Japanese war had a significance that far outweighed its strategic reach. Central to its legacy was its outcome - the defeat of an old European Great Power by an aspiring non-European imperial state. This outcome inspired a great deal of racial and geostrategic introspection, whilst intensifying concerns in the West about ‘Yellow Peril’ that would one day overthrow European dominance. This article argues that the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on racial thinking in Japan was as significant as it was abroad, to the extent where the conflict was understood by key intellectuals as nothing short of a race war. These figures, including political philospher Katō Hiroyuki, historians Taguchi Ukichi and Asakawa Kan'ichi, and biologist Oka Asajirō, identified the outcome of the conflict as evidence that the established Eurocentric hierarchy of races was wrong. Japan's success, they argued, showed that the Japanese race (distinct, it should be noted, from other Asians) was at least on a par with their white rivals. Furthermore, some argued that it was in fact the Russians who should be excluded from the upper echelons of the racial hierarchy. Their work reveals the profound impact of the events of 1904-1905 on Japanese self-perception and confidence - and reveals the roots of racial attitudes that continue to bedevil the nation in the 21st century.

This article addresses the return of popular protests in Hong Kong in 2020, after the government's adoption of emergency measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong and following calls by the Chinese Communist Party for the government to take a much more repressive stance against protests. The pandemic has also accelerated the downturn in U.S.-China relations. The article reviews the parallel, and at times intersecting, evolution of popular protests and pandemic control measures in Hong Kong. It also outlines the ways in which the 2019 protests were departures from previous protest cycles.

The arrest and detention of Carlos Ghosn attracted global attention to Japan's treatment of criminal suspects, often described as “hostage justice.” Police and prosecutors easily obtain lengthy detentions of criminal suspects prior to filing formal charges during which time attorneys are prohibited from attending interrogations of their clients. Most suspects confess during these interrogations.

Violent extremism in Southeast Asia did not increase as a result of Covid-19 despite exhortations from ISIS leaders to attack, nor was counter-terrorism capacity seriously undermined by the need to divert funds and personnel. Fears remained that the pandemic might increase interest in biological weapons or cyber-attacks; create a favourable climate for recruitment as economic hardship deepened; or lead to prison uprisings. Of these the concern about prisons was most justified.

In the context of transnational production, China remains the heart of Foxconn's global electronics empire and its profitability. For seventeen consecutive years between 2002 and 2018, Taiwanese-owned Foxconn ranked number one as China's largest exporter. Today it operates more than thirty industrial parks across coastal and interior China, creating a 24-hour, high-speed production network predicated on vertical integration and flexible coordination. Most of the world's TVs, desktop monitors and laptops are assembled in China. The United States remains by far its largest export market, as well as a major source of the US trade imbalance with China.

This article is based on a talk that Satoko Oka Norimatsu gave at the seminar “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Woman’ Issue: Revisionism and the Right-wing in Contemporary Japan, U.S., and Canada,” held at the Institute of Asian Research, the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC), hosted jointly by the Centre of Korean Research and the Centre for Japanese Research, on November 21, 2019.

On August 6, 2020 Japan's Renewable Energy Institute (REI) released a lengthy and ambitious “Proposals for the 2030 Energy Mix” (REI, 2020). The REI proposals are aimed Japan's strategic energy policy, currently under review. The proposals centre on the power sector, perhaps the most crucial element of any “green recovery” from Covid-19's massive economic impacts. The REI surveys Japan's electricity system and outlines a “sustainable electricity generation mix” consistent with what the REI views as Japan's principal challenges in the context of global energy trends and climate policy. In the REI's estimation, Japan could and should achieve a dramatic revamp of its power mix by 2030. The REI argue that more aggressive policy could allow Japan – in a decade - to attain a 45% share of renewable electricity generation (tripling solar and octupling wind). Over the same period, this massive and rapid expansion of renewable power would be backed up by a huge increase in power generation from natural gas. In tandem, both nuclear power and coal-fired generation would be completely eliminated from the power mix. If achieved, this would rank among the world's most far-reaching renewable energy programs.

Abe Shinzo has exercised extraordinary influence over the Japanese state. On 20 November 2019, as he passed his 2,587th day in office (over eight years) he became modern Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister. But what are the sources of this longevity and what will be the consequences for Japan and the Asia-Pacific? Probably few, even among his close supporters, suggest that he has been exceptionally popular. His parliamentary dominance rests on a combination of political apathy, absence of credible opposition, and a well-funded political party machine honed by more than half a century of Cold War and post-Cold War parliamentary dominance. From a narrow electoral base, during his second term of office that followed the general election of December 2012, Abe moved to concentrate an unprecedented measure of control over the levers of state, nominating his close associates to special policy advisory committees and to head the Cabinet Legislative Bureau, the National Security Council, the Bank of Japan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the national broadcaster (NHK). He also paid close attention to the cultivation of the major national media groups. In October 2017 the support of just 17.9 per cent of eligible voters (48.2% of the vote) in the small seat electorate division was sufficient to secure the Abe camp 61.1% of the parliamentary seats. In September 2018 Abe extended his party leadership position to three terms (nine years from 2012) and so anticipated steering the country through the 2020 Olympic Games and beyond to the adoption of a new constitution before retiring in glory late in 2021. Coronavirus upset that design by causing the Olympics to be held over for at least a year, but early signs were that Abe would turn that delay to his political purposes.

Over the past decade, the concept of the “uncanny valley” (bukimi no tani) coined by roboticist Mori Masahiro (b. 1927), has appeared in over ten thousand (English-language) articles and chapters, Briefly, the concept presumes that the scary surprise of realizing that, say, a flesh-and-blood human was actually a zombie will send one tumbling into a valley of existential queasiness. As an application, this effect was hypothesized by Mori as grounds for avoiding the design and manufacture of humanlike robots or androids. In this edited and augmented excerpt from chapter 6 (Cyborg-Ableism beyond the Uncanny [Valley]) of my book, Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (2018), I interrogate the 'uncanny valley“ hypothesis, which has been accorded an almost ”natural-law“-like status. I critically examine Mori's original 1970 essay in Japanese and draw attention to some of the problems posed both by translating bukimi as ”uncanny“ and by treating the ”uncanny valley“ as a self-evident truism.

Of the many populations at risk in these corona times, the homeless are among the most vulnerable. Without shelter, having to do without personal protective equipment, often without health insurance and unable to limit contact with strangers, the risk of infection is very high. The emergency measures taken by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government included the closure of many public spaces, indoors and out, depriving them of access to the few spaces of survival. . This ethnographic article outlines how an older group of homeless men responded to the risk of infection and inconsistent government efforts to address this issue. Finally, we examine the response of civil society organizations to compensate for weakness of the government’s response.

In “Okinawa Demands Democracy” Maedomari Hiromari patiently details the cruel political and economic injustices that burden Okinawans today, such as their pseudo-citizenship and semi-colonial status, a status that arose from the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa (which began with the horrific 1945 Battle of Okinawa). His analysis reveals the way that such injustices are an inevitable result of Tokyo's subservience to Japan's imperial masters in Washington, and it demonstrates that, as a result of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, none of the people of the Archipelago, in fact, enjoy full sovereignty. That same government that repeatedly plundered Okinawa during the past three quarters of a century under the banner of fighting for freedom and democracy has also repeatedly violated Japan's sovereignty.