In 1973, just months before the Yom Kippur War, Muki Tzur, an Israeli historian, wrote in the introduction of the German translation of “Siach Lokhamim” (A Warriors' Conversation), “[this book] was written by Jewish youths of the 20th century. This century was shaped by two colossal events, two earthquakes in modern civilization: Hiroshima and Auschwitz. It seems that there is no young man in this world who is free from relating to these two events…we (young Israelis) are looking for meaning between these two extremities.” Haim Guri, one of Israel's leading essayists, took offense at Tzur's equating of the two tragedies. In a biting critique titled Al ha-hevdel (About the difference), Guri dismissed any effort of comparison or connection between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Guri presented Hiroshima as a tragedy but one that was conducted as part of a war in which the Japanese were the aggressors, while the Jews were not in any way conducting warfare against the Germans. Furthermore, accepting official American interpretation of the events, Guri presented Hiroshima as an “evil with a purpose,” which was the lesser evil by preventing many more casualties, both Japanese and American, in the event of an invasion. Auschwitz was different. “It had no purpose…it was a crime.” Implicitly (and a-historically) condemning the allies, Guri added, “If the A-bomb was dropped on Auschwitz millions would have been saved.” Guri hinted at what was really at stake when he concluded, “the Germans would be pleased with this false confluence of Hiroshima and Auschwitz,” thus implying that the very comparison served to undermine German guilt. In a forceful reply, Tzur responded to Guri, “I cannot forget Hiroshima… not because I could identify with its victims to the same degree I could with my own people. Not, also, because I attribute to Truman and his advisers the same motives I attribute to Eichmann or Heidrich. But because Hiroshima has put us under the threat of a total weapon…we must understand the horrible absurdity [which is Hiroshima]; even I as an Israeli cannot release myself from that shadow.”

Ran Zwigenberg makes a case for revising the history of Hiroshima and its global connections and importance. Focusing on the little known episode of the 1962 Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March, he argues that the march was a unique point of convergence between multiple national narratives of victimization. The Peace March illustrates the emergence of a shared discourse of commemoration of WW II following the Eichmann trial and others, which agents like the marchers facilitated and which emerged from multiple Western and non-Western sources.

This article is the first of a three-part symposium. See parts two and three here.

Perhaps it should have been foreseen, but it was not evident in 1995 just how farcical, tragic, and alarming the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII would look in Japan. Then, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, the Socialist politician in an extraordinary coalition, to put it politely, with the Liberal Democratic Party, issued a statement acknowledging that his country, “through its colonial rule and aggression, [had] caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.” That followed upon a declaration two years earlier by the then chief cabinet secretary, Kōno Yōhei, which states, “Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military authorities of the day. The then Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women. The recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military. The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments. They lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” This remarkably straightforward observation from what is known as the “Kono Statement” exists in “unofficial” translation on the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

To Japan and to the world Japan is a democratic country, in which popular sovereignty, the rule of law, and the division of powers (executive, legislative, judicial) are assured. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has repeatedly told international fora – including the US Congress and the UN General Assembly – that such is the case. But what is evolving now in the course of confrontation between the Abe government and the people of Okinawa, led by their Governor, suggests otherwise.

Recently, young people have been out on the Tokyo streets and in the mass media in opposition to Prime Minister Abe's efforts to pass the State Secrecy Acts, the “reinterpretation” of Article 9 of the Constitutions and the Security Bills. None have garnered more interest or exerted more influence than SEALDs, Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy. They are worthy of attention for various reasons, but we should note at the start they are the first college-based social movement in 50 years to have drawn such attention in their efforts to directly address the Japanese government's policy. They are speaking out in favor of constitutional democracy, due process and respect for popular opinion; for peace in Asia and social equality within Japan.

Despite its relative invisibility to most people living in the urban Asia-Pacific, endemic malaria occurs across the region. The unique character of Asian-Pacific malaria includes a serious problem of drug resistance, dominance of a particularly difficult species to control and treat, and another that normally dwells in monkeys but often infects humans. Most nations in the region with endemic malaria have called for its elimination by the year 2030. Meeting that ambitious goal will require mobilizing technical and financial resources, and social and political will. Malaria is a formidable foe fully capable of defeating halfhearted efforts to eliminate it.

On 11 March 2011, the northeastern area of Japan, known as Tōhoku, was hit by an unprecedented earthquake and tsunami. The disaster damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, one of a number of such facilities located in what was already an economically disadvantaged region. This led to a series of explosions and meltdowns and to the leakage of contaminated water and radioactive fallout into the surrounding area. Around 20,000 people were reported dead or missing, with a disproportionate number from the aged population of the region. Nearly four years later, hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced: evacuated to other areas, living in temporary accommodations, or living in makeshift shelters in former public buildings. There has been despoliation of the environment and contamination of food, air and water. Primary industries like fishing and dairy have been curtailed. Livestock have suffered excruciating deaths due to injury, radiation sickness and starvation, or have had to be “put down”. The nuclear power industry in Japan is effectively shut down, and people are enjoined to save electricity (setsuden) in order to cope with the reduced capacity for power generation. This multiple disaster has reverberated on a number of scales - in the local communities immediately affected, in civil society groups who have sent volunteers to the region, in more distant places which have welcomed refugees from the disaster, in the responses of local and national governments, and in international expressions of solidarity and concern.

The long-running, multi-party dispute over control of islets in the South China Sea (SCS) is worsening both in rhetoric and provocative activity. Meeting in late May at the Shangri-La Dialogue on regional security, US and Chinese defense officials sparred over responsibility for the increased tension, though they stopped short of issuing threats. In fact, all sides to the dispute say they want to avoid violence, prefer a diplomatic resolution, and support freedom of navigation. Both the US and China insist that the dispute notwithstanding, their relationship overall is positive and enduring. But China, citing its indisputable sovereignty over the SCS, is backing its claim in ways that alarm the US and several Asian governments: construction of an air strip on the Spratly Islands, a land reclamation project that has artificially expanded its claimed territory, and most recently emplacement of two mobile artillery vehicles.

In this paper I use a transborder lens to investigate the region encompassed by the Russian Far East, northeast China, eastern Mongolia, northern Korea, and the Sea of Japan. We need to transcend the framework of nation-states and restore the region's historical agency in a broader geographic, geopolitical, and economic context. We also need to view the socioeconomic development of the area in terms of a protracted process in which various indigenous groups played crucial roles. Recognizing the historical dynamic of this region helps to reconceptualize its present and future development.

Cornell's Asian Studies Department has awarded the 2015 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize to Andrew Murakami-Smith for his translation of the 1977 short story “Muddy River” (“Doro no kawa”) by contemporary author Miyamoto Teru. Set in the city of Osaka in the late 1950's, the story won the Dazai Osamu literary award the year it was published in Japan. In 1981, it became the basis for the well-known film of the same name, directed by Oguri Kōhei. Another of Miyamoto's works, Phantom Lights, has been made into the acclaimed Maborosi, directed by Koreeda Hirokazu in 1995. Professor Murakami-Smith teaches at the Graduate School of Language and Culture at Osaka University and is a specialist in the language, literature, and culture of the Osaka area. He is a previous winner of the William F. Sibley Prize offered by the University of Chicago.

This paper considers Africa's place in China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. The Maritime Silk Road is a major component of the “Belt and Road” development framework announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in late 2013. While the People's Republic of China has been actively engaged in Africa since 1960, the Maritime Silk Road promises an intensification of Chinese investment on the continent, especially in infrastructural projects including the construction of railways, airports and deepwater ports. The paper will contextualize these development projects in China's new normal of single-digit growth, and explain that the “Belt and Road” should be seen as one of China's new engines of growth. The paper will conclude with an examination of the question of whether China is engaged in neocolonialism in Africa.

Myanmar's accidental bombings of China's Yunnan province on 8 and 13 March 2015 are symptomatic of a recent decline in Sino-Myanmar relations. This article will first examine the recent unrest in Myanmar's Kokang region that led to the bombings of Yunnan. The relationship between China and the Communist Party of Burma will be shown to connect the unrest in Kokang with the Myanmar government's long-term suspicions of China. It then shifts to a broader overview of Sino-Myanmar relations, with their close ties during the international isolation of Myanmar after 1988 shown to be one of necessity for Myanmar, which ended with Myanmar's rapprochement with the US in 2011. The final section focuses on the collapse of Chinese investment in Myanmar following the Myanmar government's 2011 suspension of the Myitsone Dam project, and discussion ends with the reminder that Chinese energy concerns, manifest in the oil and gas pipelines connecting Yunnan with the Indian Ocean, make Myanmar an essential component of China's long-term plans for its energy security, thereby making it crucial for the Chinese foreign policy establishment to seek an improvement of China's bilateral relations with Myanmar.

Reflecting on the 70th anniversary of the end of Japan's War, it is worth noting that teaching the history of World War II to Japanese children has always been difficult at best. As a subject fraught with contentions over textbook content and conflict between teachers and state bureaucracy, teaching war history has long been “a dreaded subject” for many school teachers. Japanese history education has been criticized for not going far and deeply enough to describe perpetrator history - especially the injury and death inflicted on tens of millions of Asian victims. At the same time, it has been admonished for the opposite: that it goes too far in promoting Japan's negative self-identity. This contest to shape hearts and minds of future citizens has long burdened Japan's history education in schools, and has yielded mixed results.

Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9456-978082 4846787.aspx) (University of Hawaii Press and Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 2015) examines key moments in the one-and-a-half-century history of Yasukuni Shrine, beginning with its conceptualization in the late Tokugawa years and culminating in the political turmoil of the twenty-first century. I decided to write a book on the history of the Shrine for a seemingly counter-intuitive reason: there is too much attention on this monument-political attention, that is.

Chinen Masaru, 17, a third-year student at Okinawa Prefectural Yokatsu Senior High School, recited his poem, “Miruku yu ga yayura” (Do we have peace now?), at an Okinawa Memorial Day ceremony on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa at Peace Memorial Park in Itoman on June 23. He expressed his desire to let neither his great aunt's memories nor the misery of war be forgotten. The following is a translation of the poem's full text.

The Asia Pacific Journal presents a link to an extraordinary 12-minute video by Matthew Carney of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation discussing the death penalty and the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. This video explains what went wrong in three cases involving men who were victimized in the worst kind of way by Japan's criminal justice system, and it raises the possibility that these cases could stimulate reform in Japan's system of capital punishment and in the criminal justice system more generally.

The one hundredth anniversary of the Great War is prompting a renewed effort at both the popular and academic levels to ensure that the different units and countries involved are not forgotten. While not supplying combat troops, China entered the First World War on the side of the Allies, furnishing much-needed labourers, 140,000 by conservative estimates and possibly more, who played an essential role on the Western Front and other theatres, taking responsibility for a wide range of tasks. Among others, unloading military supplies and handling ammunitions, building barracks and other military facilities, digging trenches, and even agriculture and forest management. While their essential contribution was recognized in British documents, both Paris and London saw them as a temporary expedient, to be ended as soon as the war was over. Furthermore, their deployment gave rise to all sorts of culture and language clashes, in addition to the dangers of travelling to Europe and surviving in close proximity to the battle field. However, beyond these travails, the Chinese Labour Corps left a significant legacy, with members seeing the world, experiencing other nations, and often becoming literate. More widely, despite being on the winning side, China's failure to secure any gains at Versailles prompted the May 4th Movement and can be seen as a key juncture in the long and winding road from empire to nation-state. It is an important reminder of the global nature of the Great War, whose impact extended far from the battle field to all corners of the world.

M.G. Sheftall, Professor of Modern Japanese History at Shizuoka University and author of Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (Penguin 2005), was in Honolulu, Hawaii, aboard the battleship USS Missouri (site of the Japanese surrender in World War II) speaking at the dedication of a temporary exhibition of the Tokkō Kamikaze suicide pilots on April 10 and 11, 2015.

Recently, adherents of the lay religious organization Soka Gakkai have taken to the streets and the Internet to rebuke Komeito, the junior member of the ruling government coalition and the party founded by Soka Gakkai, for abandoning peace advocacy. This article places the recent protests in historical and doctrinal context as it introduces perspectives from within Soka Gakkai to complicate easy assumptions about adherents' ideology, and it suggests ways to determine how Soka Gakkai political activism may take shape in the near future.

In 1967, 1968, and 1969, Japan was wracked by student uprisings that ultimately forced the closure of university campuses nationwide. Japan's student uprisings more or less coincided with the so-called “Global Revolutions of 1968” raging around the world, including (among many others) civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests in the United States, the Cultural Revolution in China, large uprisings of students and workers in France and Germany, and the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia. Recent research on 1968 has focused on the common characteristics and the mutually reinforcing or convergent aspects of these many uprisings all around the world.