How did Japan’s border restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic affect Japanese studies? To answer this question, this essay discusses the results of a survey conducted in August 2022.

Seiji Shirane's Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 (forthcoming with Cornell University Press in December 2022) explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Here's the unabridged introduction to the volume.

This essay considers how insights into the dynamic, interconnected, and high-stakes nature of frontier markets resonate with current disruptions in global commodity networks. In the book Unsettled Frontiers (Cornell University Press, 2022), I argue that the tangled social and material networks that constitute frontier markets are prone to rupture—a characteristic that holds significant implications for frontier landscapes and communities. Such processes of rupture—consequential and unequal in their effects—are evident in the disruptions we now see in the wake of Covid-19 and the broader unfolding of our current nature–society crisis.

After the Asia-Pacific War, many former Japanese soldiers wrote of their wartime experiences in an attempt to assign meaning to defeat. So many of these accounts were published that they eventually came to form a literary genre in their own right: the “war tale (senkimono).” Previous scholarship has looked at such war tales as examples of soldier trauma or examined them from the perspective of war responsibility. This essay takes a different approach. It highlights two works by veteran authors Furukawa Shigemi and Kamiko Kiyoshi which probed the causes of Japan's defeat. The works blamed Japan's defeat entirely on material and technological differences between the Japanese and American armies, and specifically on what they perceived as the Imperial Japanese Army's (IJA) “backward” traditions and inability to properly “modernize.” This argument enabled such veterans to find meaning in defeat by aligning their narratives and memories with a dominant postwar discourse of modernization – a paradigm which did not disavow the underlying justifications of the war and militarism, and which simultaneously validated Japan's postwar model of development.

Ken MacLean's Crimes in Archival Form (University of California Press, 2022) explores the many ways in which human rights ‘facts’ are produced rather than found. Using Myanmar as a case study, the book examines the fact-finding practices of a human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an international law clinic, and a global campaign led by a nongovernmental organization. Foregrounding fact-finding in critical yet constructive ways prompts overdue conversations about the possibilities and limits of human rights documentation as a mode of truth-seeking. In raising these issues, the book calls on practitioners and scholars alike to be more transparent about how human rights ‘fact’ production works, why it is important, and when its use should prompt concern.

The current Hong Kong situation is the product of a long-term accumulation of crises and the consequences of the broader interplay of clashes among nations. Taiwan has long seen the PRC's treatment of Hong Kong as a barometer of its Taiwan policy. The “One Country, Two Systems” formula was proposed with an eye on Taiwan. In recent years, Beijing seemed to decouple the Hong Kong-Taiwan nexus as it began to turn the screws on Hong Kong. Taiwan has played a significant but often misunderstood role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese domination. This article explores the political impact of the Hong Kong-Taiwan civil society nexus from the early 2010s, through the Umbrella Movement (2014), to the Anti-Extradition Movement (2019) and the implementation of the National Security Law (2020). The ever-more repressive measures China imposed on both Hong Kong and Taiwan have given rise to close and lively exchanges between both civil societies. Taiwan may play a supporting role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese repression and subordination.

Upon its publication in 1969, a war memoir by a Japanese veteran, Ogawa Masatsugu (1917–2009), “The Island of Death,” New Guinea: Humans in Extremis (Shi-no-shima Nyūginia: Kyokugen no naka no ningen), rose to prominence for its portrayal of the raw realities of the author's combat experience in New Guinea. Although it secured its place in Japan's war memory of the Asia-Pacific War, what remains overlooked, and merits further exploration is Ogawa's efforts in grappling with his war trauma and psychological damage. This article argues that Ogawa's memoir marks the initial step in his long healing process through employing two narrative threads. First, he identified the initial traumatic episode as an incident in China, where he had fought before New Guinea. Second, Ogawa created a binary between the compassionate New Guineans and the callous Japanese officers. The two threads led him to frame himself as a victim and bystander but let him leave questions of violence, humanity, savagery, and civilization unaddressed. His capture as a prisoner of war and his repatriation to Japan dealt further blows to his already fragile self. It was this awareness of psychological damage that led Ogawa to write his memoir and to start his long road to recovery. Thus, Ogawa's memoir is not a mere personal story, but rather it reflects the inner struggle of many war veterans in Japan and elsewhere attempting to come to terms with and give meaning to their traumatic war experiences.

Dutch recognition of Indonesia's sovereignty in December 1949 ended the constraints of colonialism, invasion, and reoccupation. Unions were free to reorganize and workers were free to take collective action to improve their lot in life. A labor movement that had struggled against a repressive colonial regime now flourished. There was freedom of association, freedom of the press, electoral politics with universal suffrage, and above all, the right to engage in industrial action. Eight years later, hopes for a strong labor movement with deep roots in workplaces were dashed, first, by the imposition of military law and then, by the collapse of parliamentary democracy. It was not until Suharto's ‘New Order’ regime collapsed in 1998 that workers regained the freedom of association and to engage in collective action.

In the course of his September Central Asia tour, Xi Jinping met with Vladimir Putin for what many expected would be a reprise of their “no limits” declaration, issued when Putin was in Beijing just prior to launching his war on Ukraine. In fact, there were major limits to Xi's support of Putin's war then, and that became even more evident this time around. Putin acknowledged as much. “We highly appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin said. In plain English, Putin was expressing disappointment that China had failed to deliver as expected on their “friendship.” This article examines China's position on Central Asia and Taiwan in a time of crisis.

This article uses the example of a children's manga from the early 1960s to investigate how the reconstructed heroism of kamikaze can be seen in the context of postmemory. In postwar Japan the tragic character of the kamikaze has been invoked in many movies, in television dramas, and in novels, manga, and biographies. The tragedy of kamikaze has also appeared in numerous privately run sites of war memory such as the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots and Yūshūkan, the museum of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Many such representations of kamikaze have portrayed the young pilots as pathetic but patriotic figures who generate strong empathy in readers/viewers that conform with the tropes associated with Marianne Hirsch's idea of postmemory. This essay suggests that postmemory with respect to kamikaze is illusionary, and that the comic in question, Robotto Tokkōtai, is a powerful example of ironic discourse that is in fact a counter postmemory reading of the role of kamikaze. Drawing on contemporary sources' readings of memory and postmemory, the article suggests that partial memorialization and partial amnesia go hand in hand within early twenty-first century Japan's nostalgia for the kamikaze.

Coined in 2013, the year the Belt and Road Initiative was first announced, the slogan ‘Amity, Sincerity, Mutual Benefit, and Inclusiveness’ has become ever more present in the speeches of Chinese officials and diplomats. While the use of such phrases is often equated with earlier Japanese discourse to indicate China's alleged imperialist ambitions, this essay calls for nuance in such comparisons through a reconsideration of the history of ‘Asianist’ diplomatic slogans in twentieth-century China.

An essay of mine, with the title “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club and the Kuomintang,” was sent by me in 1970 to Ramparts magazine. But it was impounded by the CIA, and retained in their archives until released in 2009, under three CIA cover slips (one almost fully redacted). It is now published here, under a 2022 Introduction I have written for it.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Euro-American colonialism remade the lives of thousands of Samoan, Melanesian, and Chinese workers on coconut plantations in Samoa. Since plantation discipline was strict, workers resisted the heavy demands on their bodies through a broad arsenal of behaviors, ranging from keeping crops for themselves to making appeals to the state to waging violent attacks on overseers. Resistance against colonial subjection turned workers in Samoa into subjects of their own lives and allowed them to forge bonds of solidarity beyond the spatial, social, and racial boundaries maintained by colonial administrations. In doing so, Samoa's workers shaped their own version of Oceanian globality.

Even South Korea's President Roh Moo-Hyun had to obtain permission from the United Nations Command (UNC) in order to cross the dividing line between the two Koreas on his way to the summit with his counterpart Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang. The UNC has used its authority to grant permission to cross the dividing line as a wedge in the inter-Korean Railway Projects, and the United States government, which commands the UNC, has been engaged in a tug-of-war to preserve the armistice regime and the Cold War order in Northeast Asia.

24 February is a date destined to be long remembered, the day on which Russia launched war on its neighbor Ukraine in the name of a “Special Military Operation.” Just over a week later the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted by overwhelming majority a special, emergency resolution (ES-11/1) deploring the Russian act as aggression and demanding it desist and withdraw. The invasion and the response by Ukrainian forces under President Zelenskyy, backed by US and NATO support in the form of advanced weaponry, economic, financial and diplomatic backing, has brought the world itself to the brink of World War Three.

The killing of Abe Shinzo sparked a backlash in Japan against the Unification Church, after the assassin blamed it for his family's destitution and linked the former prime minister to the Korean cult. This has led to a government investigation of the Unification Church, popularly known as the Moonies, that may result in its disbandment in Japan. The scandal has focused attention on the vital role played by Japan in financing the sect founded by Moon Sun Myung, and the strange history that spawned a global empire swaddled in taboo.

The year 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Okinawa's reversion to Japan. This article examines the Japan Civil Liberties Union's 1955 solidarity activism on occupied Okinawa, which generated Japanese civil society's first awakening to the “Okinawa problem.” The Asahi Shinbun's front-page article on the organization's publication “Human Rights Problems in Okinawa” and its follow-up coverage triggered public debate influencing Japan/U.S. official policies on Okinawa. Drawing on archival evidence, the article illuminates the contested nature of Japanese activism caught between Cold War Asia and decolonizing Asia. It argues that the 1955 activist movement shaped the subsequent trajectory of Japanese engagement with the “Okinawa problem.”

This article surveys the highlights of Japanese political assassination from 1909 to 2022 through the commemoration of the victims and photographs of the major sites in Tokyo.

On 8 July, Abe Shinzō was assassinated during a political rally in Nara. He was Japan's prime minister twice, first in 2006–2007 and then again from 2012 to 2020, when he resigned amid falling approval ratings and ill-health. While Abe's legacy is deeply disputed within Japan, abroad he has been widely praised as an unusually resolute, even transformative statesman who helped the country shake off the deadwood of the postwar era. In this compendium, David McNeill collects a series of short assessments of Abe's legacy in key areas by some of the journal's lead writers.

In understanding the authoritarian character of Rodrigo Duterte's rule followed by the return of the Marcoses to power, it is important to situate both within the context of ‘electoral dystopias’ in the Philippines: the colonial and postcolonial history of democratic institutions deployed by rulers to produce undemocratic social effects. Elections thus look two ways: they seek to mobilise popular expectations for change even as they become instruments for reproducing hierarchy and reinforcing the power of elites. It is within this paradoxical conjunction of popular desires for radical change and elite attempts at containing and channelling those desires for conservative ends that we can see the rise of authoritarian figures such as Duterte. This essay is based on the first chapter of the author's The Sovereign Trickster: Death ad Laughter in the Age of Duterte, published by Duke University Press in 2022.