Cornell's Asian Studies Department has awarded the 2015 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize to Andrew Murakami-Smith for his translation of the 1977 short story “Muddy River” (“Doro no kawa”) by contemporary author Miyamoto Teru. Set in the city of Osaka in the late 1950's, the story won the Dazai Osamu literary award the year it was published in Japan. In 1981, it became the basis for the well-known film of the same name, directed by Oguri Kōhei. Another of Miyamoto's works, Phantom Lights, has been made into the acclaimed Maborosi, directed by Koreeda Hirokazu in 1995. Professor Murakami-Smith teaches at the Graduate School of Language and Culture at Osaka University and is a specialist in the language, literature, and culture of the Osaka area. He is a previous winner of the William F. Sibley Prize offered by the University of Chicago.

In November, 2015, with the world's eyes focused on the latest terrorist threats to Europe and Africa, two dozen activists from the Japanese island of Okinawa came to Washington to demand justice for a region that the U.S. military has dominated since World War II.

Between 15 and 21 November 2015, the “All-Okinawa Council” (shimagurumi kaigi) – an Okinawan mass organization set up in July 2014 representing local communities, civil society groups, local assemblies, and business establishments – dispatched a 26-member delegation to San Francisco and Washington D.C, to present the Okinawan stance of unshakable opposition to any new base construction in Okinawa. Prominent Okinawan businessman, and chair of the Kanehide industrial and property group, Goya Morimasa, led the delegation, and the paper that follows is the document in which All Okinawa presented its case.

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.