On a sunny September day, last year, I tumbled from a diving boat into the bright clear blue sea of Henoko's Oura Bay, feeling both fear and hope. Would the corals living there still be fine, as they had been during my previous visits in years past? Or would they and other marine life here be suffering and dying from various negative impacts of human behavior (toxic runoff, sedimentation, garbage, ocean acidification, global warming, overfishing, etc.) which are steadily and inexorably killing coral reefs all around the world?

The proposed 2nd Anglo-Japanese civilian exchange, originally planned for October 1942, never eventuated partly due to differences in the interpretations of what constitutes a merchant seaman and views on whether the Hague Convention should apply. The failure of the exchange meant that over 3,000 Japanese and British civilian internees as well as another 2,000 or so Japanese and American civilian internees remained in internment camps until at least August 1945. At the heart of the negotiations were 331 Japanese pilots and pearl divers who had been employed in the pearling industry until the outbreak of war. The impasse would impact attempts at civilian exchange involving multiple powers throughout the Asia-Pacific War.

When U.S. occupation forces liberated Allied POW camps in the Akita area in northern Japan in the early fall 1945, they came across piles of unburied dead bodies, mass graves, and a labor camp of emaciated Chinese men living in appalling conditions.

Thank you all for coming to this press conference today in spite of your busy schedules. Today, I have decided to bring a libel suit in order to defend my human rights, the rights of my family and friends, and to protect the safety of my employer, Hokusei Gakuen University. The defendants are two, the Bungei Shunju Company, which publishes the Shukan Bunshun, and Mr. Tsutomu Nishioka, professor at the Tokyo Christian University, who has, without justification, labeled my articles “fabrications.”

Part 3 of a 3 part series

Henoko: The Experts Report and the Future of Okinawa

1. Gavan McCormack, Introduction: The Experts Report and the Future of Okinawa

2. The Okinawa Third Party (Experts) Committee, translated by Sandi Aritza, Report of Okinawa Prefecture's “Third Party Investigation into the Reclamation of Oura Bay” (Main Points)

3. Sakurai Kunitoshi, translated by Gavan McCormack, “To Whom does the Sea Belong? Questions Posed by the Henoko Assessment”

Preface

The environmental assessment system is a public good indispensable for the sustainable development of Japanese society. The environmental assessment on the Futenma Airfield Replacement Facility Works (hereafter: Henoko assessment) was an illegal assessment that negated the value of this public good and to allow it to stand would be to endanger Japan's future. Many assessment specialists, chief among them being former head of the Environmental Assessment Society, Shimazu Yasuo, have said that, whether in terms of procedure or of substance, the Henoko assessment was the worst in the history of assessment in Japan. This study is intended to evaluate Okinawa Defense Bureau's environmental assessment and the approval for reclamation it subsequently issued under the Public Waters Reclamation Act and to raise the question of “To whom does the sea belong?” for the consideration of this Nago meeting of the National Conference on the Japanese Water Environment.

In this essay I explore the way the internet has facilitated people's participation in anti-nuclear activism in Japan. After contextualising the use of the internet in the anti-nuclear movement which developed after the compound disaster of “3/11”, I present a case study focused on the tweet messages of one twitter user. By undertaking content analysis, tracing tweets over time, and tracing the connections between particular vocabulary items, and an interview, we gain a picture of how one participant in the anti-nuclear movement developed a political consciousness through participating in internet-facilitated activism.

Some Japanese studies scholars recently published an “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan,” to counter the revisionist atmosphere surrounding the “comfort women” issue in Japan. While the author agrees that historical revisionism should be criticized, he takes issue with some elements in the Letter. First, it distorts the history of post-1945 Japan by listing factually incorrect “achievements.” Second, its treatment of nationalism in Japan and other countries is problematic. The Letter seems to be the result of a compromise among people with divergent views, and the author argues that what should not be compromised has been compromised.

In this essay I provide an account of a series of commemorative events held in Eastern Australia since the compound disaster of March 2011 occurred in Fukushima in Northeastern Japan. Individuals expressed transnational solidarity through the embodied experience of attending and participating in local events. Reflecting on these events reminds us of the entangled and mutually imbricated histories of Japan and Australia, and the ways in which various individuals and groups are positioned in the global networks of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry.

Naha, Okinawa, 17 January. Yesterday I took a bus up to Henoko from Naha, where I live. There is a new organisation called Shimagurumi Kaigi, formed to support the newly elected Governor in his “all Okinawa anti-base” campaign. Since “all-Okinawa” includes progressives, pacifists, business people, and politicians who recently broke away from the pro-base Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), they will, I hear, need to do a whole lot of talking among themselves before they agree on much more than a few simple issues. But they have agreed on at least one project: to set up a daily bus service to carry people to the main gate of the US Marine Corps' Camp Schwab, at Henoko, where construction of the new Marine Corps Air Facility has resumed after a break of a month or so. At the main gate a 24-hour sit-in is aiming to block the big trucks that are bringing in equipment and building materials. The buses leave at 10:00AM, one from Naha, one from Okinawa City and one from Uruma City.

In late September 2013, Australian news media reported on two very different events related to journeys across the ocean straits that separate Australia from Indonesia. On the evening of September 26th, an Indonesian fishing boat carrying eighty refugees from northern Lebanon who intended to seek asylum in Australia foundered off a West Java beach. The boat sank the following day. Thirty-one people who had been onboard drowned. Some of those who survived claimed that when the boat's engine failed, passengers had contacted Australian authorities, but according to official reports, the Border Protection Command aircraft that was dispatched could not locate the vessel. Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison subsequently issued a statement emphasizing that the vessel sank in Indonesian waters, implicitly absolving Australia of responsibility for its rescue. Three days later, on September 30th, the freshly elected conservative Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott flew to Jakarta. He was accompanied by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb, and a delegation of twenty senior Australian business leaders. Abbott had promised to be an “Asia-first prime minister,” and on this visit used more than one opportunity to assert that Australia's relationship with Indonesia is the nation's most important. The two top issues for Abbott in his discussions with Indonesia's then-President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, were first, Australia's problem with asylum seekers; and second, bilateral trade and investment.

On August 6 “The Advisory Panel on the History of the 20th Century and on Japan's Role and World Order in the 21st Century” submitted its report to Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Abe established this panel in February to provide input for his forthcoming statement commemorating the 70th anniversary of Japan's wartime defeat. At the Advisory Panel press conference, members insisted that it is entirely up to Abe whether or not to apologize as his predecessors did in 1995 and 2005. All signs are that Abe will not say what needs to be said because he seeks to end what revisionists deride as Japan's apology diplomacy and masochistic history.

Much is riding on what Abe says, and doesn't say, as South Korea and China are especially sensitive to any perceived backsliding on Japan's war responsibility and contrition. Japan finds itself isolated in East Asia over this history of colonial rule and imperial aggression and there are concerns among Japan's neighbors that Abe's rigid revisionist agenda will lead him to downplay Japan's misdeeds.

This article reviews the Abe administration's moves to crush opposition to nuclear power and restart the first nuclear reactors since the closure of all 54 nuclear power plants following the triple meltdown of March 11, 2011. The author punctures official claims of an economic crisis resulting from post-3.11 import of fossil fuels, the basis for the Abe restart program. Likewise, claims that preserving a share of the energy mix to nuclear power is essential and inescapable in order to avert or alleviate climate crisis. Finally, the author considers the implications of government policies for the possible creation of a Japanese nuclear weapons arsenal.

NYU is at its origin a community-oriented university, and there was never any question that Mr. Uemura's talk should be a public event. The central themes, furthermore, include not only the wartime history of Japan, but also the role of women in history, the idea of a free press, and the nature of politics now—matters which are immediately relevant to everyone. Although the talk was scheduled in the last week of classes and publicized less than a week beforehand, it drew a standing room only crowd. The audience was diverse, and included students and faculty from NYU, Columbia, and nearby universities; artists; a filmmaker; journalists from Japan and Korea, Asahi Television New York, CNBC, and the New York Times. Carol Gluck provided a clear, sweeping history of the role of the comfort woman issue in public discourse, including its transformation into a global topic after Kim Hak Sun's public testimonies in 1991; Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono's statement in 1993 acknowledging the government's role in the forced prostitution of women during the war; the 1995 apologies of Prime Minister Murayama; and the contestations of these statements that have since developed. One could see in Prof. Gluck's overview an increasing attention given to the comfort women, particularly by those groups who tend to argue against their importance. Yukiko Hanawa then offered additional thoughts and provocations after Mr. Uemura's talk. For Prof. Hanawa, the comfort woman issue becomes global at the point when women become able to define the problem in their own terms. She also warned against becoming caught either in the boundlessness of emotional appeals or arguing over the details of a positivist history in ways that sometimes miss the larger picture.

The debate on Japan's history of wartime sexual for political purposes.“ slavery (the ”Comfort Women“ issue) has heated up again, with the Japanese government extending its efforts to revise school textbooks to overseas publishers.

Last November, McGraw-Hill, publisher of a world history textbook, “Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past” Volume Two, by history professors Herbert Ziegler and Jerry Bentley, was contacted by Japan's New York Consulate General. The request: that two paragraphs (i.e., the entire entry) on the “Comfort Women” be deleted. On January 15, McGraw-Hill met with Japanese diplomats and refused to comply with the request, stating that the scholars had properly established the historical facts. Later that month, PM Abe Shinzo directly targeted the textbook in a parliamentary session, stating that he was “shocked” to learn that his government had “failed to correct the things it should have.”

The UCLA event featuring Uemura Takashi was held on May 8th. Over 120 people attended. It was filled with tension, due largely to the fact that Los Angeles has become the primary site for Japanese right-wing activism on the west coast, especially since July 2013, when a memorial to the “Comfort Women” was erected in Glendale Park. Shin-issei (new immigrants arriving from Japan over the past quarter-century) have been organizing meetings and study groups to promote a revisionist history in the greater LA area, and one group, the Global Alliance of Historical Truth (GAHT), led by Koichi Mera, filed a lawsuit seeking the removal of the Glendale statue (this lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge in the summer of 2014). As anticipated, nearly two-dozen Japanese (-American) nationalists showed up for the event. Some of them clustered at the center of the lecture hall and caused tension by chattering among themselves during the lecture, abruptly raising their voices during the question-and-answer session, and distributing their pamphlets entitled “Comfort Women Not Sex-Slaves” to the audience.

Takamine Tadasu's Fukushima Esperanto (2012) is an immersive project that responds to the unfolding tragedies of the March 2011 Tōhoku disaster. Connecting the experiences of Tōhoku with the devastating floods experienced across Queensland, Australia in the same year, Fukushima Esperanto invites reflection on trauma by a transnational audience. The artist's assemblage of obsolete technologies and objects of childhood play expresses Takamine's opposition to, and Japan's conflicted relationship with, nuclear energy.