When the famously nationalistic Japanese author Hyakuta Naoki published his best-selling novel A Man Called Pirate (Kaizoku to yobareta otoko) in 2012, which subsequently became both a manga and a major film, he renewed interest in the midcentury oil baron Idemitsu Sazō, using him as the model for the novel's lead character. Hyakuta claims to have aimed to inspire the country, reeling from decades of slow growth as well as the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, by featuring a visionary Japanese leader motivated primarily by love for his employees and his country. This article traces the efforts across these media to render Idemitsu as a credible character, particularly in dealing with his real-life family as well as his “family” of employees. It argues that the partial disappearance of the “real” Idemitsu in these versions of Hyakuta's novel allowed the production of a more believable one—made believable in part because of the essential Japanese values that he ostensibly represents, even as the constraints on these representations hint at fissures and tensions in contemporary political use of biographical fiction and film.

Japan provides a fascinating case for studying economic development. With her real GNP rising at an annual rate of 4 percent during the period 1878–1942, Japan was the only Asian country that emerged from a backward agrarian society to become a modern industrial power. Her postwar economic performance has been even more phenomenal; the average growth rate of real GNP in 1955–1964 was 10.4 percent—the highest in the world. Her investment rate reached an astonishingly high level of over 40 percent in several years in early nineteen sixties. Believing that there is no miracle in economic affairs, economists began to search the secrets of Japan's extraordinary achievements in economic development. To offer possible explanations, they usually stress the active role played by the Japanese government in economic modernization, the vigor of the country's response to new stimuli, and a strong national consciousness. These factors, while undoubtedly important, do not reveal the whole story. There are in Japan a number of institutional traits which, in my opinion, are highly conducive to economic growth. However, the contribution of these institutions to Japan's economic development has not been fully recognized because, in part, they were not designed for that purpose. Their growth-stimulating effects are accidental and unexpected. As a matter of fact, some of these institutions may even appear as economically irrational or socially unjust. Consequently, when students of the Japanese economy study these institutional factors, attention is usually directed to the negative side.

A disproportionate amount of scholarly attention has already been lavished upon the provision for communal electorates in the 1909 Morley-Minto reform scheme, imparting to it a significance which it lacked during both John Morley's secretaryship of state for India and his lifetime. Most recently, M. N. Das has stretched the elastic material in the Morley and Minto collections—his only sources—over a prefabricated ideological structure; he portrays Lord Minto as a Machiavellian schemer, who introduced communal electorates in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the forces of Indian nationalism and thereby perpetuate the British Raj, and he assumes that Morley—who chose the Florentine statesman as the subject of his 1897 Romanes Lectures—was unable to recognize a twentieth-century facsimile. Without attempting to absolve two centuries of British rule in India of its Divide and Rule stigma, one may confidently assert that during the first decade of the twentieth century, neither the Viceroy nor the Secretary of State consciously implemented the pernicious theories which allegedly produced two warring nations within the bosom of Mother India.

The purpose of this JAS roundtable is to reflect on the Cold War in Asia. Even to frame the issue in such terms is to confront the “formidable semantic contradiction that is inherent in the idea” of the Cold War (Kwon 2010, 7). For the very notion of the Cold War—as a “long peace” in which bipolar tensions did not lead to hot war—sits uneasily with the reality that in Asia bipolar tensions were imbricated in horrific conflicts that left millions of human casualties. On the other hand, to use the term “Cold War” simply as a label for a historical period, or “epoch” in Alfred McCoy's terms, is to invite imprecision. Moreover, even as a label for a historical period, the term still effaces the experience of much of the world, since the end date of the period is defined by the experience of Europe and the superpowers.

The Korean Communists face a troublesome problem in recording their hiswtory. The first years of the Korean Communist movement are now regarded as a gigantic skeleton in the closet. Official party publications brush over them in a few paragraphs. Individual Communist leaders are almost all identified as petty bourgeois intellectuals, sectarians, deviationists, or factional wreckers. The Communist movement itself is recorded as a “failure” and a “disgrace” by contemporary Kim Il-sŏngists. When praise is meted out, it generally goes to the broader nationalist movement, and the only truly “good guys” turn out to be “the people.” Only when the omniscient Kim arrives on the scene in 1931, do Korean Communist historians begin to panegyrize their past.

The outbreak of hostilities between Chinese and Japanese troops at Liutiaohu in the vicinity of Mukden on the night of September 18, 1931, unleashed a chain of events leading to a disasterous war for Japan and the collapse of the Kuomintang government in China. The causes and course of the Manchurian incident which began on that date are well known and have been abundantly published in recent years. Although the significance of the Nakamura incident as a prelude to the Manchurian affair has also been generally recognized, the details of the Nakamura case and the manner in which the conflicting organs of Japanese policy-making handled it have remained obscure. The attempt here is to supply these details and analyze the affair with particular reference to the role of the Japanese Foreign Office and the growing civil-military conflict over the control of foreign policy.

Most periodization schemes of Chinese history would note the significance of a “great divide.” It may be placed before the T'ang period, considering from ethnological as well as cultural standpoints such factors as the first major influx of non-Han conquering groups, the march toward the sub-tropics, the penetration of Buddhism, and so forth. It may be placed much later, around 800 A. D. or after, roughly from the late T'ang to the early Sung, noting the general characteristics of the society and fundamental changes that shaped die political and socio-economic structures of subsequent centuries. Even the Marxist view or revisionist interpretations thereof would not dispute the importance of such changes.

Nationalism is an explosive topic at any time, but it is peculiarly explosive at this moment when the restraints of war have been lifted, when peace settlements are in prospect, and when national movements everywhere are again in full flower. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of nationalism in as uncontroversial and non-political a manner as the subject itself allows, and to compare its development in Southeast Asia with similar movements in other parts of the world. What is involved is an objective sociological investigation, and not an effort to arrive at value judgments which would answer such questions as whether this or that nationalist movement is good or evil or whether particular nationalist demands should be granted or opposed.