This story was first published in the February 1976 issue of the literary magazine Gunzō and later anthologized in the Collected Works of Hayashi Kyōko (Hayashi Kyōko zenshū) (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2005). The original title, Nanja monja no men, draws on the Kantō area dialectal expression “nanja monja,” a contracted form of “najō iu mono ja” (What sort of thing is this?), referring to a large, legendary tree.

Emperor Akihito and empress Michiko of Japan visited the Philippines from January 26 to 30, 2016. It was the first visit to the country by a Japanese emperor since the end of the Asia-Pacific War. The pair's first visit was in 1962 when they were crown prince and princess.

In the Edo period, famines occurred frequently, imposing disaster. Major famines occurred in roughly thirty to forty or fifty to sixty year cycles, with minor famines interspersed. Typically in Kansai (western Japan), the direct cause was drought, while in Tōhoku (northeastern Japan) it was cold, but floods could also wreak havoc in many areas. Famine was also the product of the political and social system.

‘Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire – an empire of bases.’

This article explores effects of the Korean Wave in Japan in the areas of gender relations, tourism, and Korea-Japan relations. It first looks at Korean Wave fandom among “middle-aged” women in Japan and maintains that the popularity of Korean male stars reflects women's discontent with hegemonic gender relations in Japan. It then explores tourism's role in building cultural contact between Koreans and Japanese. Finally, it discusses how the Korean Wave created communicative venues for Korean and Japanese despite long-standing historical tensions between Korea and Japan such as the Dokdo-Takeshima conflict.

The articles included in this special issue on the bombing of civilians from World War II to the present represent a selection drawn from a December 2015 Paris workshop held on the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The workshop was organized by the Mass Violence & Resistance online journal (CERI-Sciences Po and the Center for History at Sciences Po) in partnership with the Asia-Pacific Journal and is being published simultaneously at both sites.

Having written recently of the prospect for the three upcoming elections (Ginowan mayor on January 24, Okinawan Prefectural Assembly in June, and Upper House of National Diet in July), what follows is a comment on the outcome of the first of these, on which some misconceptions circulate widely.

What are the characteristics of contemporary Japanese nationalism? And is there a “surge of nationalism in Japan,” as so often claimed (Kitaoka 2001; Sasaki 2001; Hasegawa and Togo 2008; NYT 2013), or even a “drift to the right” in the country (Kato 2014; Nakano 2015)? Distinguishing between elite maneuverings and popular attitudes, in this article I first identify what I consider to be the major topics of current nationalist discourse, and then introduce the chief proponents of strengthening of nationalist attitudes in society. In the final section, I discuss some recent attempts to instill nationalist attitudes in young people through middle-school education, especially the teaching of history and civics, but also through moral education. I conclude that in light of a political establishment tarnished by never-ending scandals, attempts to force moral education into the curriculum as a way of fostering nationalist and patriotic attitudes among young people is a particularly duplicitous undertaking, discrediting the very notions so highly praised by its advocates.

North Korea has now been sanctioned five times by the United Nations Security Council for its nuclear and missile tests: resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013) and 2270 (2016). UNSC Resolution 2270 is the strongest one yet, spelling out in great detail the proscribed goods and requiring that all parties neither import them from nor export them to North Korea. Each resolution obliges the members to carry out the terms of the sanctions and (as the April 15 press statement of the UNSC says) “facilitate a peaceful and comprehensive solution through dialogue.” This is a case of mission impossible for two fundamental reasons: the sanctions will not work, and the fact of them impedes any chance for a “peaceful and comprehensive solution.” The way forward, which I discuss at the end of this article, is to address North Korea's legitimate security concerns and economic needs while also considering how to build trust and reduce tensions in Northeast Asia as a whole.

Asia's water woes are worsening. Already the world's driest continent inper capita terms, Asia now faces a severe drought that has parched a vast region extending from southern Vietnam to central India. This has exacerbated political tensions, because it has highlighted the impact of China's dam-building policy on the environment and on water flows to the dozen countries located downstream.

The Asia Pacific Journal is proud to offer its readers a preview of John W. Dower's new book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (New York: Norton 2010). In the first days after the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prominent American news sources reacted by invoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the event as an act of “infamy.” That analogy caught the attention of many people, but Dower has thought more deeply than most about the underlying issues. The resonances between the past and the present are profound and disturbing.

An oblique tooth is viewed in the United States as requiring straightening, but in Japan it may be thought of as emblematic of a young woman's charm. While a slim body is a prerequisite for beauty today East and West, plump women were considered beautiful in Tang dynasty (618-907) China and Heian (794-1185) Japan. Starting from around the twelfth century in China, bound feet symbolized the attractiveness of women. But Japan, which received sundry influences from China, never adopted foot binding. Instead, shaving eyebrows and blackening teeth became markers of feminine beauty. Before modern times, neither Japanese nor Chinese paid much attention to double eyelids, but in the course of the long twentieth century, they became a standard for distinguishing beautiful from plain women. Thus criteria of beauty greatly differ by era and culture, and therein lies many riddles.

This article discusses Mamiya Rinzō (1775-1844), a Japanese cartographer during the Edo period (1603-1868); Mamiya was a Shogunate official who, for the first time in history, succeeded in scientifically mapping the Japanese north and also documenting the original inhabitants in Sakhalin. The article explains that the growing rivalry between Japan and Russia at the time was a main motivation for the Japanese in their exploration of Ezo and Sakhalin. At that time the Russians named the island “Sakhalin,” as it is known today. The name comes from the island's Manchu name “Sahaliyan” which signifies the “black (soil).” “Karafuto,” the Japanese name for Sakhalin, derives from its Ainu name “Kara Put.” It meant “(the island that the deity) made at the mouth of the river.”

As this 4th year of the second Abe (Shinzo) government draws to a close, how are we to understand the Abe agenda? The Abe government describes itself as committed to the universal values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law. It lets fly policy “arrows” to revive and energize Japan's “hundred million people” and have Japanese women “shine.” It calls attention to Japan the beautiful. It preaches the gospel of what it calls “resilience,” and declares to the world a commitment to “positive pacifism.” To Okinawa it insists that it is making every effort to “reduce the burden” of the US military presence. Abe's government enjoys high levels of support (60.7 per cent as of November 2016) and Abe himself, having triumphed in four successive national elections, under party rules revised to clear the way for him to do so, now stands a strong chance of staying in office as Prime Minister for three terms (nine years), in addition to his earlier term between 2006 and 2007. By 2021 he might become both the longest serving of Japan's modern Prime Ministers, and (if he manages to accomplish his agenda) its most consequential.

Alongside even larger numbers of contingents drawn from France's colonial empire, including a large pool of workers sourced from China, successive contingents of “Indochinese” -Vietnamese in addition to Cambodians - were also pressed into both military and labor battalions in World War I battlefields. Besides explaining the battlefield experiences of the Indochinese battalions in the European war – a little studied area – this article seeks to expose the contradictions raised by France's patriotic appeal for “volunteers,” versus the domestic anti-colonial movement. On another level, the article examines the juncture between the worker-soldiers in France and the burgeoning socialist and communist underground in Paris, and back home in Vietnam, as best exemplified by the activities and writings of Ho Chi Minh in the run-up to his now-famous oration at the Versailles Conference.

Four decades of rapid economic growth in China has come at a huge price to the environment, from smog-ridden skies to contaminated rivers, toxic soils and “cancer villages”. These increasingly intolerable costs have emerged as a major source of social unrest in recent years. Premier Li Keqiang acknowledged this in his opening address to the National People's Congress (NPC) on 5 March 2015: “China's growing pollution problems are a blight on people's quality of life and a trouble that weighs on their hearts”.

Theorists of class have long predicted the end of the peasantry: Marx, Hobsbawm and Bernstein have all argued that in the transition to capitalism, peasants would be either transformed into individual specialized commodity producers (commercial farmers), or forced into wage-labour by fragmentation of their land holdings, and dispossession, debt and impoverishment. On the other hand, these theorists have been uncharacteristically ambivalent about whether or not the peasantry constitutes a class. Marx, for example, argued that although peasants' economic exploitation and political and social subordination placed them in an antagonistic relationship with other classes, they lacked any consciousness of, and capacity to articulate, their common class interests, much less organize politically. Pointing to the uneven, contradictory impacts of globalized agriculture and consequent differentiation among agriculturalists, Bernstein, too, cautions that ‘“the peasantry” is hardly a uniform or analytically helpful social category in contemporary capitalism… The same stricture necessarily applies to any views of peasants as a (single) “class” (“exploited” or otherwise)‘.

Introduction

China has made strategic choices favouring renewables over fossil fuels that are still not widely understood or appreciated. Hao Tan and I have been making these arguments for several years now, and in particular in our article in Nature in September 2014 we argued that China had overwhelming economic and energy security reasons for opting in favour of renewables, in addition to the obvious environmental benefits. In this article I wish to take these arguments further and update the picture to incorporate comprehensive 2015 data as well as fresh targets for 2017 and 2020. The context is China's continuing battle to scale back its use of coal; its imminent release of the country's 13th FYP for Energy, based on the overall 13th FYP for economic development over the five years 2016 to 2020, where new renewable energy targets will be announced or consolidated [See ChinaDialogue]; and China's hosting of the G20 meeting in Hangzhou in September, where it will be promoting an international drive for greening of finance – with China itself playing a key role in this process. China is becoming a major promoter of international infrastructure development, in Africa and across Central Asia through the One Belt-One Road strategy – and this too carries strong implications for other countries' energy choices.

America is learning that the South China Sea is called the South “China” Sea for a reason, despite patriotic efforts in various nations to rename it the “West Philippine Sea” or “East Vietnamese Sea”.

On January 28, 2016, US Army base Fort Hood, in Texas, broke ground on the Army's largest-ever hybrid solar and wind-power project. The USD 100 million project's 63,000 solar panels and 20 massive wind turbines will supply half the base's electricity needs “at a lower price than the power generated by fossil fuels,” saving USD 168 million. A week before, the US Navy, well along in its goal of 50% renewable energy by 2020, first used biofuels in its Great Green Fleet. These milestones came in the same month that the Pentagon, on January 14, released a new directive on “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.”