The release of Hakamada Iwao from death row in March 2014 after 48 years of incarceration provides an opportunity to reflect on wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. My approach is comparative because this problem cannot be understood without asking how Japan compares with other countries: to know only one country is to know no country well. Comparison with the United States is especially instructive because there have been many studies of wrongful conviction there and because the U.S. and Japan are the only two developed democracies that retain capital punishment and continue to carry out executions on a regular basis. On the surface, the United States seems to have a more serious problem with wrongful convictions than Japan, but this gap is more apparent than real. To reduce the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice, reformers must confront a culture of denial that makes it difficult for police, prosecutors, and judges to acknowledge their own mistakes.

US censorship of public discussion of the bombings during the Allied Occupation of Japan ensured that the Japanese public knew little about the human consequences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When hibakusha poets seek a public audience for their poetry, their experiences make them potentially powerful public intellectuals. As Noam Chomsky has observed, the most effective public intellectuals are dissidents who act from the margins. Tōge Sankichi and Kurihara Sadako became activists and their poetry offers a powerful and rousing response to the atomic bombing and lobbies for nuclear disarmament. The simplicity and accessibility of these poems is essential to the public dissemination of their message and Kurihara's and Tōge's identification as public intellectuals. This article examines the ways in which hibakusha poets can be recognised as public intellectuals when they seek public audiences for their work. Discussion hinges on a number of considerations centred on public intellectualism, trauma and the uses of language.

“Sacred is not necessarily a place. It is a relationship, a deep visceral relationship: beyond reason, beyond law, beyond rationality.”

These words were recently spoken by William B.C. Chang, a University of Hawaii Law Professor, in his impassioned testimony to the UH Board of Regents, about the current conflict on Mauna Kea here in Hawaii.

The original title of my proposed book about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, “The Last Train to Nagasaki.” I believed the title conveyed how I would bridge the story of the two cities via the people who had survived both atomic bombings – the double hibakusha. In this manner, I thought I could correct the problem of how history all but forgot the second and even more powerful atomic bomb and its victims. As one survivor expressed the forgetting: “It is never good to be the second of anything.” I did not know how extreme the forgetfulness had become. In 2009, my editor discovered that almost no one at the publishing house knew what the name, Nagasaki, referred to – and thus the title change, to a name familiar to everyone: “The Last Train from Hiroshima.”

In the waning days of 2014, by far the hottest year humans have ever measured, Bloomberg News warned that the foreign investors who control roughly 70% of volume traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange “have had just about enough of Abenomics.” Decrying that there is no Japanese Facebook or Google, and that the “Japanese have lost their place as global leaders,” punters slashed their 2014 investment in Japanese stocks a stunning 94% compared to the previous year. There are certainly ample grounds to criticize Abenomics. But these speculative investors overlook Japan's climate-resilient spending programmes and accompanying structural reforms. Japan exhibits an emergent, implicit recognition that confronting endogenous shocks, especially natural disasters, is core to sustainable growth. So Japan may have no Facebook, but it is advantaged by something that appears more important: an expanding alliance of politicians, bureaucrats and specialists who are reshaping Abenomics and making the country a global leader in building resilience.

Since his war legislation has failed to gain public support, Prime Minister Abe has suddenly brought up the China Threat as a last resort. However, a rational analysis of reality reveals that the theory is unfounded.

On July 21, 2015 a defence white paper was published. Unusually, it contained an addenda with a statement inserted at the end of a section on China: “China has been building new offshore platforms and other facilities on the Chinese side of the Japan-China median line in the East China Sea since June 2013. Japan has repeatedly lodged protests against China's unilateral development and demanded the termination of such works.”

While the role of Yasukuni Shrine in both commemorating and eulogizing Japan's wartime aggression is well known (and controversial), little to no attention has been paid to a similar role played by a number of Buddhist temples in contemporary Japan. For example, Kōa Kannon (Kannon for a Prosperous Asia) temple (興亜観音寺) located in Atami, a hot-springs resort south of Tokyo, is one such war-eulogizing Buddhist temple. This temple was initially established in the late 1930s at the initiative of Imperial Army General Matsui Iwane, supreme commander of the Japanese attack on Nanjing in December 1937, better known as the “Rape of Nanjing.”

In the postwar era, Kannon Bodhisattva, the Buddhist personification of compassion enshrined at Kōa Kannon, has gone on to become one of the main Buddhist figures employed throughout the country to comfort the “heroic spirits” (eirei) of all Japanese soldiers who died in the war while, at the same time, valorizing and eulogizing the war they fought in. In addition to Kannon-centric temples, the major Shingon sect-affiliated monastic complex on Mt. Kōya now plays a major role in the remembrance of the war dead, including an effort to transform convicted “war criminals” into national “martyrs” (junnan-sha), an effort backed by the current Japanese government.

An article in the Hankyoreh a few months back caught my attention. The story is about Ko Kang-ho and Ri Mi-oh, a married couple of Zainichi Koreans living in Kyoto. Recently Mr. Ko had filed a lawsuit in Seoul City Court requesting that his South Korean nationality be annulled. Ko had become a South Korean national upon his parents' acquiring that nationality after the 1965 normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and the ROK. Now he has chosen to become stateless, the option which in theory is available to Zainichi, who were completely stateless between the years 1945 and 1965. Thereafter, only those who acquired South Korean nationality (including Mr. Ko's family) obtained permanent residence in Japan, leaving a large number of Zainichi continuing to be stateless, the situation only to be addressed in the 1990s. In 2012 this unprecedented request was denied in the Supreme Court of South Korea. Mr. Ko's action was inspired by his wife, Ms. Ri, who has lived all her life stateless: she has no nationality, retaining only the Chōsen identification in her Japanese alien registration.

“A Body in Fukushima” is an ongoing project that consists of still photographs shot by William Johnston of Eiko Otake performing in the area surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor and of video interpretations of those still photographs made by Eiko. Representative images and videos are embedded in the text below.

In September 2015, several hundred mainly foreign academics and journalists received unsolicited copies of two poorly written books from Japan, accompanied by a signed letter from politician Inoguchi Kuniko. “In East Asia, the regional history of the 20th century has been incorrectly distorted (sic) by some individuals due to their current domestic political ambitions,” said the letter. “I believe it is important for you, as a highly esteemed member of the academic and policy circles (sic), to look into the books which I am enclosing with this letter.”

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō's stunning return to power in the December 2012 landslide election victory, and the consolidation of his leadership in a repeat victory in December 2014, has heralded the resurgence for Japan of a more assertive, high-profile, and high-risk, foreign and security policy. However, as Japan's Foreign and Security Policy Under the ‘Abe Doctrine’ suggests, Abe's status as an arch-‘revisionist’ ideologue, combined with the track record of his first administration in 2006-2007, made clear that he would move aggressively to shift Japan towards a more radical external agenda—characterized by a defense posture less fettered by past anti-militaristic constraints, a more fully integrated US-Japan alliance, and an emphasis on ‘value-oriented’ diplomacy with East Asian states and beyond. Indeed, Abe's diplomatic agenda has been so distinctive and forcefully articulated in past years that it might be labeled as a doctrine capable of rivaling, and even of displacing, the doctrine of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru that has famously charted Japan's entire postwar international trajectory. In contrast to Abe's more muscular international agenda, the so-called ‘Yoshida Doctrine’, forged in the aftermath of total defeat in the Pacific War, has long emphasized for Japan the need for a pragmatic and low-profile foreign policy, a highly constrained defense posture, reliance but not over-dependence on the US-Japan security treaty, and the expedient rebuilding of economic and diplomatic ties with East Asian neighbors.

A grand, and massively unequal, struggle over the future of Japan is underway. At sea, a miniscule flotilla of canoes and kayaks confronts a solid wall of National Coastguard ships and on land a few hundred protesters face off 24 hours a day against riot police outside Camp Schwab Marine Corps base, trying in vain to halt the delivery of materials for the construction of a new Marine Corps base on Oura Bay.

Director John Junkerman’s “0kinawa: The Afterburn” is an extremely rational documentary film. This is a virtue shared by the director’s “Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times” (2002) and “Japan’s Peace Constitution” (2005), in which, via the maker’s level-headed processing, viewers are able to face many problems and encounter many clues they are given to think through on their own. At 148 minutes, this is a long film. But it is carefully arranged in four, roughly chronological parts—1) The Battle of Okinawa; 2) Occupation; 3) Violation; and 4) To the Future—that sustain interest and can be watched through without ever feeling long. I would like to explore those four parts with particular attention to aspects of the film that deliver a strong impact.

Disaster is an ever-present, and ever-timely, issue both in Japan and around the world. The triple disaster of 3.11 and its extensive media coverage are a vivid reminder not only of disaster's critical and catalytic role in history, but the dynamic agency of images in mediating our experiences of natural or man-made events to produce that history. The 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures, was one of the world's worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan's worst national disaster. Having marked the 91th anniversary of the quake on September 1st, we have an opportunity to learn anew from the media scale of this catastrophe, how different media produce modes of seeing, understanding, and, eventually, remembering. Only by analyzing contending visual responses within disaster communities and how they are codified into collective memory to form a national narrative can we ultimately understand how major events like the Great Kantō Earthquake-or 3.11-become history.

David Palmer's timely opinion piece in The Melbourne Age on 6 August 2015 draws attention to the little remembered history of scores of Australian and other allied POWs who were held as slave labourers in Japanese war industries in Nagasaki before and at the time of the atom bombing. Aspects of this neglected history also form a major component of my recent multi-screen, hyper-visualisation exhibition “Fading Lights: Australian POW and BCOF Troops in Japan 1945-52”, co-curated with Stuart Bender (Curtin University).

Last April, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee selected for contention Japanese citizens working to conserve Article 9, Japan's longstanding constitutional prohibition against waging war.

Although trite, at certain moments original definitions are helpful. In his final will, dated November 27, 1895, the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel stipulated that the bulk of his wealth should be used for five prizes - and, without explanation, one for “peace.” Award of the prize since to individuals such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger, whom many equate with war, has raised eyebrows about its virtue. Notwithstanding, Nobel's initial terms that the award go to someone who has “done the most or the best work for the fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses” continues to make it synonymous with hope - as in the case of 2014's worthy winners, Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, and such earlier recipients as Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Schweitzer.

I first visited Okinawa in 1961 as a junior officer aboard the USS Pollux (AKS 4), a part of the service squadron of the Seventh Fleet. When it sailed into “Buckner” (Nakagusuku) Bay, on the southern part of the island, I had not begun the study of Japanese language, and had no chance to meet local residents. Several years later while in graduate school I came to realize the importance of the relationship between secret U.S. military base construction on Okinawa and the tumultuous events that had occurred on the Korean peninsula a decade earlier. The more I learned the clearer became the connection between the disastrous American policy of perpetuating Korea's division ever since 1945 and the pivotal military role the Pentagon consigned to Okinawa.

As this Asia-Pacific Journal site (and its associated publications) has repeatedly demonstrated, Okinawa is a unique joint US- Japanese colony, that has endured 70 years of lying, deception, manipulation, discrimination, abuse and contempt from the Tokyo-based nation state. But it has also generated an opposition movement of world-historical significance on the part of the Okinawan people. That movement remains little understood internationally. The accompanying “position paper” by the “All Okinawa Council” is one recent initiative to try to remedy the situation.

The two great poets of Iwate, Ishikawa Takuboku and Miyazawa Kenji, were born 50 kilometers and 10 years apart (1886 and 1896) and went to the same middle school in Morioka. They both died young of tuberculosis: Takuboku at 26 in 1912 and Kenji at 37 in 1933.

The following is a series of reflections upon Integrity of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ in Focus, which took place on 1 May 2015 at Marquette University. Readers will find out, first, what motivated me – neither historian nor East Asianist – but someone in philosophy - to take up this project. Secondly, I will report on how the symposium proceeded and was received by the Marquette community. Subsequently, I will talk about the phenomenology of the “apology contention.” Lastly, I will share how I came to incorporate the “comfort woman” issue into my ethics and epistemology course as a case study.