Japan’s pursuit of counterstrike capability exposes tensions between the self-defense limits in Article 9 of its constitution, the evolution of an exclusively defensive defense posture, and international legal standards. Expanding self-defense to include counterstrike requires reconciling constitutional constraints, strategic necessity, and strict tests of necessity and proportionality under Article 51 of the UN Charter. These pressures show that counterstrike is not a technical upgrade but a fundamental challenge to Japan’s legal identity, strategic doctrine, and credibility in the Indo-Pacific.

This article reconsiders nihonga (Japanese-style painting) through the case of Okinawa. While often framed as the bearer of “Japanese tradition,” nihonga emerged as a modern institutional category shaped by state policy and art education. In Okinawa, its transmission followed a discontinuous trajectory marked by annexation, war, and delayed institutionalization. Through an analysis of works by Taira Yūki (b. 1989), Nizoe Marina (b. 1993), and Kyan Chie (b. 1969), this article demonstrates how contemporary artists engage and reconfigure nihonga from within. Their practices reveal the genre not as a stable inheritance, but as a historically mediated framework shaped by uneven transmission and institutional structures.

The film Godzilla Minus One has sparked debates over whether it is an anti- or pro-war film, whether it rejects the kamikaze or rewrites history to enable Japan to win World War II. This article evaluates these arguments by relating the film to other works by director Yamazaki Takeshi, especially his kamikaze film The Eternal Zero. It argues that these films share an attempt to solve contradictions about war and memory through emotional affect and technology, using the gaze of characters to mark a magical futurity and suggest an implied multiverse where Japan can be both pro- and anti-war.

This article re-examines parental rights to religious education in contemporary Japan in light of post-2022 debates over “religious abuse” and shūkyō nisei, or people raised in religious families. Drawing on Japanese law and comparative constitutional perspectives, it argues that parental religious education should be recognized under Article 20 of the Constitution of Japan, but only as a relational and child-centered right. This article further contends that legal intervention should focus on harmful methods and effects rather than on religious doctrine as such. Such a framework would better protect both children’s rights and religious pluralism.

Imperial Army General and wartime Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki is widely reviled today as a dictator or a war criminal. But in the early years of his premiership (1941–1944), he was a media darling, praised as a decisive leader and a warmhearted human being. This article spotlights wartime storytelling about Tōjō’s past and family life. It shows how media used biographical stories to champion an emotional politics of hope and unite the public behind Japan’s wartime leadership. Lionizing Tōjō represented a cry of hope that a strong, compassionate, and dutiful leader could help Japan escape its wartime crisis unscathed.

The 1945 Battle of Manila, one of the Asia-Pacific War’s deadliest urban battles, remains marginalized in scholarly and commemorative memory even as it circulates widely online. This article examines how YouTube videos represent the battle through spatial narratives: military operations, architectural destruction, and marginalized civilian experiences. By analyzing 17 videos, the article interrogates how content creators transform urban catastrophe into abstract space, shaped by archival constraints and YouTube’s platform affordances. The article finds that readily available U.S. military footage and algorithms favoring visual engagement produce representations that sever built environments from lived experience. Thus, multifaceted human tragedy is converted into a single, consumable narrative.

This article examines Japanese colonial rhetoric of Cheju Island through three publications: Saishūtō Annai (1905), Nansen Hōkutsu Saishūtō (1912), and Mikai no Hōko Saishūtō (1924). In so doing, this article reveals three interlocking observations through which Japan constructed Cheju as a colonial site. The first centers on discourses of cultural affinity and difference, the second includes the rhetoric of the treasure trove (hōko), and the third entails a discourse of development. A close reading of these texts reveals Japanese imperialism as a contingent practice, shaped by local conditions and the ambitions of the metropole.

Recently, a form of media production known as korabo has become vital to success in Japan’s popular media industries. Korabo’s swift systematization stems from its integration into the media mix production system that already dominated Japan’s media environment. Through a close analysis of the Bungo Stray Dogs media mix franchise and its evolution over time, this article examines the effects of the korabo system on the physical environment of an Earth threatened by manmade climate change. In the process, it identifies the role that said environment plays in systemic theories of contemporary Japanese media.

This article examines how Berlin’s Statue of Peace, created through transnational feminist civil society, became entangled with South Korean Minjung nationalism during the 2024 removal controversy. Installed in 2020, the statue connected Japanese military sexual slavery to wider struggles against wartime sexual violence, racism, migration, and colonial violence, yet remained vulnerable to nationalist reframing. The article argues that this vulnerability was activated not only by Japanese diplomatic pressure and Berlin-Mitte’s administrative logic, but also from the Korean side, as opposition lawmakers and first-generation migrants reinterpreted the statue through Minjung nationalism, revealing how resistant nationalism can re-nationalize transnational feminist memory.

How was the Expo 2025 in Osaka spun and marketed to the public vis-à-vis the news media discourse? We focus on the issues of power play, politics, scandals, imaginaries, nostalgia, and sustainability, adding a comparative angle with the Tokyo 2020/2021 Olympics. While mega-events globally have similar features, some are particular to Japanese mega-events: in the ways they become a crystallization of utopian cosmopolitan imaginaries of a peaceful global society with Japan as its benevolent retainer, and in how they serve as an arena for domestic nostalgia-politics that attempts to relive the postwar glory days for the aging political-industrial elites.

The Spanish community in the Philippines was able to define its own collective memory for decades during the first decades of the 20th century, much like in Latin American counterparts. However, from the beginning of the Commonwealth (1935), the long transitional period to the end of the colonial period, its capacity to transmit and define its collective memory crumbled, triggered by external events. This article attempts to explain the interplay of the memories, identities, and traumas of Spaniards in the milieu of postwar Philippines vis a vis the American, the Philippine, and the Spanish government remembrances.

Since its first installation in December 2011 in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, the P’yŏnghwaŭi Sonyŏsang—widely known as the Statue of a Girl for Peace or “Comfort Women” Statue—has been replicated and installed around the world. These memorials have consistently faced intense opposition from the Japanese government. In Japan, the statue was displayed as part of the Non-Freedom of Expression Exhibition, alongside other works censored by Japanese authorities. This article focuses on the statue’s exhibition in Kyoto in August 2022, tracing its transnational journey and arguing that it has become a symbol of transcultural memory through local reinterpretation and cross-border activism.

Since the 2010s, the Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai) has emerged as the third force in Japanese politics. It has been especially dominant in Osaka. I extract two features of it from existent studies, namely populism and regionalism. This article focuses on the regionalist features. This party’s trick is to appeal to Osaka’s pride, which is epitomized by the reform of local governments and Expo 2025 there. Unless this party finds attractive policies after the euphoria about Expo 2025, it may lose momentum. This expo may become a watershed for the party.

How constitutionally constrained civilian powers sustain strategic agency while engaging non-recognized pariah regimes remains an unresolved theoretical problem in International Relations. Existing literature inadequately integrates civilian-power theory, hedging frameworks, and pariah-regime engagement into a unified model, leaving Japan’s post-2021 Afghanistan policy undertheorized. This study examines Japan’s principled pragmatism toward the Afghan Taliban between 2021–2025, through qualitative process-tracing and thematic discourse analysis of institutional sources. Findings demonstrate that Japan pursued hedging through normative conditionality, humanitarian engagement, and geostrategic positioning without recognizing the Taliban regime. Japan’s civilian-power identity enabled access and legitimacy but constrained coercive leverage for behavioral change. This reveals a paradox.

This article examines Peque Gallaga’s film Oro, Plata, Mata as a case study, through Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (“memory spaces”) to explore how the Asia-Pacific War is inscribed in Filipino domestic spaces. Set in Negros Island, the film follows upper-class families displaced across the mansion, the hacienda manor, and the forest lodge. Gallaga’s domestic spaces operate as ideological theaters that privilege upper-class nostalgia while rendering working-class experiences invisible. This view situates Oro, Plata, Mata within the broader context of Asia-Pacific War cinema, offering how cinematic memory-making reflects the class-bound nature of historical consciousness in postcolonial Philippines.

This paper analyzes the evolution of kyūdan (denunciation campaigns) in Japan’s Buraku liberation movement from the 1920s to the present. Initially a grassroots tactic of moral confrontation in the absence of legal remedies, kyūdan enabled Burakumin to challenge discriminatory acts, combat institutional complicity, and assert dignity. Over time, the practice shifted from targeting individuals to confronting state agencies and institutions, becoming central to mid-century struggles and helping secure political gains. Its expansion, however, generated conflict, controversy, and criticism. Since the 1990s, kyūdan has ceded prominence to legal strategies and international human rights advocacy, but continues to serve as a tactic to fight discrimination.

This article revisits the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong through the lens of trauma. It argues that both the pro-democracy and pro-government camps framed themselves as victims and engaged in dehumanizing and infra-humanizing narratives, intensifying conflict and emotional harm. Although the movement ended with the National Security Law and the COVID-19 outbreak, the trauma remains unresolved. Post-movement policies, especially in education, have often exacerbated rather than healed the divisions. This study calls for government-led reconciliation efforts to move beyond mutual victimhood and foster genuine recovery for Hong Kong society.

This article examines the online media strategy of the religious group “Kōfuku no Kagaku” (Happy Science) and its political arm “Kōfuku Jitsugentō” (Happiness Realization Party) through two analyses: a quantitative analysis of the group’s news outlets and a qualitative analysis of a YouTube channel. Combining large data analysis with close reading we examine the group’s use of right-wing discourse, conspiracy narratives, pro-Russian disinformation, and anti-media rhetoric to position themselves within viral discursive networks. We argue that their media mission should be understood from historical and strategic perspectives, and discuss the compatibility of their ideology within the global right-wing media sphere.

This study examines the representation of aging hikikomori in Japanese language media through qualitative content analysis of 188 sources (2019–2024), including news articles and personal blogs. Using deductive and inductive coding, the research reveals disparities between institutional media portrayals and personal narratives. Findings demonstrate that Japanese media frames aging hikikomori through medical and social welfare lenses, emphasizing social burden and family crisis narratives, while self-authored blogs reveal intersectional identities encompassing disability, sexuality, and regional marginalization. This paper provides the first English-language empirical analysis of Japanese media representations of aging hikikomori, demonstrating how blogosphere self-representation functions as counter-discourse to medicalized framings.

This paper examines the reasons behind the sudden emergence of anti-foreigner populism in the mainstream during the July 2025 House of Councilors election. Starting with a comparative analysis of the right-wing organizations Zaitokukai (in the 2010s) and Sanseito (now), the paper argues that, against the background of exclusionist sentiment fostered during the pandemic and rising populism causing elites to lose control of the narrative on migration, the visibility of foreigners in everyday life in Japan has reached a psychological tipping point, a symbolic perceived threat to a homogenous identity that manifests itself in feelings of anxiety, injustice, and ultimately overt xenophobia.