Although Bangladesh has seen a delayed appearance of COVID-19 with the first identified case on March 8, 2020, it was still caught off guard, with regard to its healthcare and economic preparedness. COVID-19's impact on Bangladesh's economy is particularly pronounced because of the country's reliance on globalized supply chains of international fashion brands and human resource exports. Banks have considerable exposure to industries in general and ready-made garments in particular. The effect on these sectors, combined with a shrinking consumer economy has hit all sectors hard. This paper, based on expert interviews, primary data from government websites, and news reports, attempts to assess current and potential damages to Bangladesh, at a time when the country has yet to reach the peak in its infection growth rate.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games are promising comprehensive changes to accessibility for all who will be attending, including athletes, coaches, spectators, volunteers and organizers. The promises of accessibility will have impact on disability sport, society and culture, and the economy. This article examines accessible design features for promotional materials, training venues, hotel accommodations and local transportation, followed by a report on the progress made towards the accessibility goals for the Tokyo 2020 Games

Taiwan was the first country to anticipate the threat of COVID-19, to send a medical team to investigate the initial outbreak in China, and to implement a comprehensive and successful public health response that avoided repeated infections or catastrophic lockdowns. Counter-intuitively, Taiwan's success was achieved in part due to its exclusion from international bodies such as the World Health Organization, which led it to adopt a highly vigilant approach to health threats, especially those that emerge in China, whose irredentist claims impinge on Taiwan's participation in the international community and constitute an existential military threat. Taiwan's response to COVID-19 was recast by its diplomatic representatives into “The Taiwan Model”, a formulation used to pursue increased international recognition and participation.

The 2020 Olympics will be held in a Japan that confronts challenges that are a world apart from the Japan of the 1964 Olympics. None is more profound than Japan's demographic dilemma. The population pyramid has been inverted from what it was half a century ago when Japan was a vigorous nation bursting with vitality and hope. The upbeat messaging in 2020 can't obscure questions about how Japan will cope with serious economic and security challenges.

The University of California, Berkeley, is considering a proposal to un-name a building that honors Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), one of the leading liberal anthropologists in the United States. Tony Platt describes the controversy and explains why it is time to come to terms with Berkeley's “salvage archaeology” that deepened the misery of survivors of genocide by plundering the graves of 10,000 ancestors on Kroeber's watch.

With mass-scale testing and extensive contact-tracing, South Korea's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been among the strongest in the world. This success has often been credited to the Korean public's cultural willingness to trust their government and put up with measures that supposedly infringed on their liberties and privacy. While the trust has indeed been important, the reductive attempts to locate the source of the people's trust in Korea's Confucian heritage, homogeneous society, or deferential culture are misplaced. Contrary to the orientalist caricature, South Korea's political culture is marked by low trust in government and deep polarization along ideological lines, making it an obstacle to be overcome rather than a foundation for success. This paper will analyze the measures taken by the Moon Jae-in administration to manage the fractious politics surrounding the outbreak and foster the public trust in the government's response, and also explore the limits of such measures.

The Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) – a short-term labor rotation system that originated in 1993 – brings young and middle-aged workers from developing countries to Japan with a stated objective to transfer Japanese vocational skills and techniques to these workers. However, the program faced criticism for doing little more than covering the chronic labor shortage in unskilled blue-collar jobs that are regarded unfavorably by many Japanese in recent years. This paper highlights the heightened vulnerability of the technical intern trainees as cheap and disposable sources of labor, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on digital communications with 16 Vietnamese technical trainees and an analysis of the content on media platforms since the outbreak of the pandemic, the paper extends my previous work on the challenges faced by technical intern trainees, analyzing the handling of Japanese governments and the accepting companies. The article also introduces the roles of support groups in Japan devoted to protecting vulnerable technical intern trainees. At a moment when the Japanese government is reforming and promoting the TITP, this analysis of Vietnamese technical trainees during the COVID-19 crisis is particularly timely.

In the case of Bangladesh, COVID-19 has laid bare the shortcomings of the state, underscoring the complicity of the military, elite class, Islamists and intelligentsia in the government's dysfunctional, apathetic, and authoritarian approach. This essay breaks down the Bangladeshi government's response along three key lines: the first to examine the legal basis for its response to the pandemic, the second the exploitation of labour rights and how it affects public image, and third the suppression of freedoms of speech and expression. Through discussion of these key tenets, this essay provides a comprehensive indictment of how Bangladesh is turning a crisis into a disaster.

The Olympic Games are burdened with this inherent paradox of universal humanism and chauvinistic nationalism. Japan took palpable national pride in being the first ever Asian host of the modern Olympic Games in 1964 and in executing the mission with zeal, precision and order. Hosting the 2020 Olympics again represents Japan’s aspiration to play a significant role in the global world - and rebranding Tokyo as a leading global city – but this grand scheme has also invoked some antagonistic sentiments at home.

In 1936, after the Berlin Olympics concluded, Tokyo won the right to host the 1940 Olympics. The sequence of events that led to the 1940 games' forfeiture can be said to have begun on July 7, 1937, when Japanese and Chinese troops clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Beijing. The IOC's initial reaction was to transfer the 1940 games to Helsinki; but with Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, the ‘missing Olympics’ were cancelled for good.

The triad of robust state capacity, strong social trust, and competent leadership has been proposed as essential for a successful national response to the COVID-19 crisis. The flow of information among individuals and entities responsible for the response, and from them to the public, is the thread which unites and activates this triad itself. Effective response depends on timely and unambiguous information being openly available to government bodies, leaders, and society alike. Although Japan's pandemic experience at the time of writing has been mercifully mild, the official Japanese response has objectively been quite flawed on many counts. What can be observed about the accessibility and transparency of the information concerning the pandemic that has been provided to the Japanese public?

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics facilitated Japan's symbolic rebirth in the wake of World War II. Infrastructural projects like the Shinkansen were intentionally blended with remnants of ultra-nationalism into a new type of post-war patriotism. The games sanctioned Japan's redemption and reinforced a sense of national purpose and collective identity while providing a stage for Emperor Hirohito's rehabilitation. In subtle ways the Olympics created an opportunity to rebrand Japan as modern and cutting edge while also symbolically embracing a history and traditions that had been implicated and discredited by wartime depredations.

Till March 13th 2020, India's government was assuring citizens that the coronavirus disease was not a health emergency. Preparations soon proved inadequate. Bigotry, superstition, and poor governance worsened an increasingly bad situation in which government efforts to suppress unfavorable news censored information that would have been useful in containing the disease. A lockdown imposed without warning crashed the economy and caused immense suffering to millions. Poor internal migrant workers were worst affected. Many died trying to walk home hundreds of miles away in the punishing heat of India's summer. The lockdown was lifted with the COVID-19 curve heading sharply upward.

This essay reflects upon the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, explaining the socio-political context in which the Games were planned. How far has Japan come since 1940? There are issues and problems that were apparent around 1940 that have not been fully resolved. Contemporary Japanese society seems to embrace racial diversity on an unprecedented level, most visibly in sports. This embrace, however, seems to be limited to cases where the racial difference is visible and excludes those of mixed Asian ancestry due to unresolved historical issues.

This article explores the impact of COVID-19 on restaurants owned by Indian migrants in Japan as they struggle with financial and occupational risks. The owners try to balance their business interests with their relationships and with the Indian community in Tokyo and their desire to be good citizens by complying with pandemic guidelines. The cooks, who were brought to Japan by the owners, are in a more precarious position, having lost work hours and income, but without the ability to look elsewhere for work. Through the voices of both owners and cooks, I try to document these different experiences within a single ethnic community, and even a single enterprise, that has been tested by the virus.

This is a collection of original articles on diverse vulnerable populations in Japan in the wake of the new coronavirus pandemic. The effects of COVID-19 are felt differently, with some among us at much greater risk of infection due to preexisting health and welfare conditions. For others, perhaps more than the risk of infection, it is the precautions taken to mitigate the risk for the whole population, such as lockdowns and business closures, that have pulled away the already fragile safety net of state and civil society organization (CSO) support, leading to increased marginalization and social exclusion. The goal of this set of papers is to document the conditions of those that have been most directly affected by the virus and to provide background on the conditions that made them vulnerable in the first place, notably chronic conditions that are brought into more obvious relief in light of emergency measures. Each of the authors had a pre-established relationship with those affected populations and employed various ethnographic approaches, some face to face, others digitally via Zoom interviews and SNS exchanges. In this moment of what appears to be relative calm, we hope that our collection, quickly compiled in an attempt to capture the ever-changing situation, will give some insight into how those most vulnerable are faring in this time of crisis and provide information that will allow us to prepare better before the next wave comes our way.

As of 30 June 2020, 14,046 COVID-19 positive cases have been confirmed in Nepal out of around 233,000 tests administered since January. So far, only 30 people have died of the coronavirus - a small number compared to worldwide trends. After the lockdown was eased on 14 June, the number of positive cases has spiked. An atmosphere of anxiety looms large over a spike in COVID-19 infections and possible deaths, and along with the pandemic, people fear hunger, inefficient government response, and the possibility of dystopia in the long run. Amidst this challenging time, popular protest and community solidarity have worked together with local government to provide some hope.

As the first phase of Japan's response to COVID-19 ends with reasonable success, the country now moves on to the second phase. This essay aims to explain the first phase response from three perspectives. First, how does Japan's response compare to that in Taiwan and South Korea? How and why did Japan lag behind? Second, despite not matching the success of these regional neighbors, Japan has been relatively successful. What accounts for this success? Third, we will examine several unresolved issues during this first phase such as testing capacity, drug treatment and development of a vaccine.

In 2020, spectacle reigns virtually unchecked. That the Japanese government would increase the acceptable level of annual radiation exposure from one to 20 mSv to quickly manufacture the semblance of recovery and declare Fukushima safe for the Olympic Games hauntingly corroborates Situationist Guy Debord's argument that spectacle domination is the destruction of history. Against government decisions that count on historical amnesia, and against the spectacle's unlimited capacity to absorb hyperbole, critical art today needs to avoid replicating or attempting to exaggerate the spectacular. An installation by Kobayashi Erika recently featured in the “Narratives in Contemporary Art” exhibition held at the National Art Center, Tokyo, is exemplary in this regard and provides a rare opportunity to think about the 2020 Olympic Games critically and historically.

This is a memoir about the hectic preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that proved to be a successful coming out party. For the Japanese, the success of the games was a source of pride. The world discovered a new Japan, one that was no longer a shunned militarist rogue regime but rather a peaceful democracy on its way to becoming a world economic powerhouse. For the citizens of Tokyo, the Olympic success was doubly important because their city was now rebranded as the capital of cutting-edge technologies.