Michael T. Klare, professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, and Joseph Gerson, president of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, have announced the launch of a new organization, the Committee for a SANE U.S.-China policy, that seeks to counter the U.S. drive to war with China that went into high gear with the Trump administration and threatens to continue under the Biden administration.

Japan in late 2021 faces two important elections - in September for presidency of the Liberal-Democratic Party (and de facto Prime Minister) and in October for Lower House of the Diet. This paper argues that Kishida Fumio, victorious in the former and to contest the latter on 31 October, offers little prospect of change. His government includes the same key figures as the Abe and Suga governments of 2012-2021 and is likely to continue the same US-led anti-China policies, marked by substantial military expansion and multi-national military exercises drawing to the East China Sea warships of major countries including not only the United States but also Great Britain, France, Australia, even Germany. This paper considers current trends and, while suggesting that significant change is not probable, nevertheless draws attention to a citizen-led challenge that could cause upset to the long-established LDP-dominated order.

In March 2020, we wrote this paper in response to discussion paper No.964, “On The Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcaste in Japan”, June 20, 2018, written by J. Mark Ramseyer (JMR), which was released on the website of Harvard’s John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business.

We understand that after that a new version was published in the Review of Law and Economics, Volume 16 Issue 2, 2020, with the same title, However, we regard these two as essentially similar, so we are releasing this report critical of the former version.

The articles re-examines the March First Movement of 1919 in light of the “Candlelight Revolution” of 2016-2017 and situates the latter as part of the incremental unfolding of a long revolution that started with the former. To do so, it turns attention to the East Asian configuration in which three nations—Imperial Japan, semi-colonial China, and colonized Korea—were all connected to the world order and interacted with one another while occupying their respective positions in the world hierarchy. The March First can be regarded as a beginning of a national revolution that sought a kaebyŏk ((開闢, a great opening of a new heaven and earth), not only to adapt to modernity but also to overcome it, and the subsequent history is characterized by “incremental unfolding” of the revolution -through April Nineteenth (1960), May Eighteenth (1980), and lately, the Candlelight revolution (2016). These revolutionary transformations have been forwarded by the Korean people who remain inspired by the light of the March First. Their longing for a kaebyŏk that involves more than a mere reform of political institutions/systems connects the years of 1919 and 2019.

Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo left office with Japan's “Womenomics” policy having fallen far short of its 2020 targets, and with its greatest achievement, the increase in female non-regular employment, largely reversed by the COVID-19 recession. Although significant initiatives have been undertaken in the provision of childcare, tax reform, and parental leave policy, elite opinions within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the government bureaucracy and the corporate sector militate against the mandatory regulations and political and social reforms that are still needed. These reforms are required because of the severity of Japan's demographic and economic challenges, the limited political feasibility of mass immigration, and the deep structural inertia built into Japan's employment system.

Edible wild plants occupy an important place in Japanese culture and cuisine. They symbolize the seasons, motivate conservation of nature, and in the past provided an escape from starvation. Focusing on wild plants offers a different perspective on Japanese relationships with the land than does agriculture. The nuts of the wild Japanese horse chestnut tree (Aesculus turbinata, tochino-ki) were especially vital to mountain-dwelling Japanese from the Jomon period (14,000-300 BCE) through the mid-twentieth century, both as a famine food and a celebratory one. This article, excerpted and adapted from the book Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes, describes the changing uses and meanings of this traditional food.

This essay suggests that the renewed politicization and militarization of the maritime sphere is a product of the increasing need to re-legitimise the current state-based political order. Order can be understood as particular configurations of boundaries as they define political communities through various practices of inclusion and exclusion: East Asian seas have become one of the final frontiers for sustaining national developmental projects, they mark the boundaries between the Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean nation-states, and are also borderlands in the global order as they separate ‘East’ from ‘West’ and thereby differentiate the ‘civilized’ self from the ‘barbarian’ other.

This article assesses the evidence for claims that the dropping of the atomic bombs were essential for securing Japan's surrender and offers an alternative interpretation.

The 26th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, meeting in Glasgow in November 2021, attracted a high level of global attention because it was, in effect, a meeting uniquely tasked with finding a formula for human survival. This paper considers the proposals from Japan and Australia. Both accepted the need to achieve zero carbon emission by 2050, but neither offered realistic proposals for how that would be done, and the Japanese formula tied the move towards zero carbon to drastic expansion of its nuclear energy sector. This paper discusses the most recent Japanese government energy policy paper, with particular attention to the way that carbon and nuclear objectives are coordinated, and locates Japan and Australia in the context of the global division between pro- and anti-nuclear energy countries.

Jiang Shigong (b. 1967) is a professor of law at Peking University and a prominent member of China's New Left, as well as a talented apologist for Xi Jiping Thought. This text, originally published in August, 2019, was republished online on September 26, 2020, following Meng Wanzhou's return to China. Jiang, who writes frequently about empire, and particularly the American empire, penned this text to explain to Chinese readers the legal mechanisms by which the “long arm of justice” of the United States works its mischief throughout the world on behalf of the financial and legal interests of the American empire.

In the wake of the explosion of the “comfort women” issue, with the help of lawyers and activists, Chinese comfort women instigated four class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government. However, how the lawyers represented the history of comfort women and what happened in the courtroom have remained obscure. Unlike the conventional verdict-centered approach to civilian trials involving comfort women, this research adopts a procedural approach by delving into the court transcripts, legal briefs, and other evidentiary materials tendered to the court. It argues that although the plaintiffs lost every case, through the court proceedings the victims and their lawyers managed to carve out an official space for knowledge transmission and recognition. These proceedings have the potential to serve as an exemplary model for future civil trials adjudicating injustices (historical or otherwise) involving sexual and gender-based violence.

How do we imagine and actualize the space of neutrality in the radically bipolarizing environment of modern politics such as those that prevailed in the early Cold War? We can pursue this question in the context of the Non-Aligned Movement, or the politics of the Third World more broadly, the early initiative of which took shape at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and in the precarious time in Asia immediately after the Korean War. Alternatively, we may explore the same question more squarely within the 1950–1953 crisis in the Korean peninsula; in particular, in relation to the intervention of the politics of neutrality into the resolution of the Korean conflict, a formative episode in the early Cold War international politics. This essay looks at the latter aspect of alternative space-making to the global bipolar politics of the mid-twentieth century, with reference to the idea of neutrality that was embedded in the grassroots experience of Korea's civil-and-international war.

Speak, Okinawa is a book I needed to write for a long time, long before I knew I needed to write it. The book is essentially about healing the relationship between me and my mother, me and my heritage. Both felt very strange and foreign to me, distant from me, for most of my life.

My mother was born and raised in Okinawa. She was born in 1948, three years after the Battle of Okinawa, which destroyed and devastated the entire island, killing one third of the population and leaving those who survived to wander and scavenge amidst the ash and wreckage. My mother was born into poverty and chaos and grief. As she grew up, she witnessed the militarization of the island, the countless crimes that were committed, the injustice. She became a waitress at a nightclub where soldiers, marines, and sailors came from nearby bases to drink, flirt, and forget about the war. She met and married my father, who was a U.S. soldier stationed on the island after fighting in Vietnam.

When taking up the unlearned lessons of Fukushima, one of the biggest may have been the need for more robust oversight of the nuclear industry. In Japan, the failure of the major national news media to scrutinize the industry and hold it accountable was particularly glaring. Despite their own claims to serve as watchdogs on officialdom, the major media have instead covered Japan’s powerful nuclear industry with a mix of silent complicity and outright boosterism. This is true both before and after the Fukushima disaster. In the decades after World War II, when the nuclear industry was established, media played an active role in overcoming public resistance to atomic energy and winning at least passive acceptance of it as a science-based means for Japan to secure energy autonomy.

Between 1894 and 1936, Imperial Japan fought several “small wars” against Tonghak Rebels, Taiwanese millenarians, Korean Righteous Armies, Germans in Shandong, Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, and “bandits” in Manchuria. Authoritative accounts of Japanese history ignore these wars, or sanitize them as “seizures,” “cessions,” or occasions for diplomatic maneuvers. The consigning the empire's “small wars” to footnotes (at best) has in turn promoted a view that Japanese history consists of alternating periods of “peacetime” (constitutionalism) and “wartime” (militarism), in accord with the canons of liberal political theory. However, the co-existence of “small wars” with imperial Japan's iconic wars indicates that Japan was a nation at war from 1894 through 1945. Therefore, the concept “Forever War” recommends itself for thinking about militarism and democracy as complementary formations, rather than as opposed forces. The Forever-War approach emphasizes lines of continuity that connect “limited wars” (that mobilized relatively few Japanese soldiers and civilians, but were nonetheless catastrophic for the colonized and occupied populations on the ground) with “total wars” (that mobilized the whole Japanese nation against the Qing, imperial Russia, nationalist China, and the United States). The steady if unspectacular operations of Forever War– armed occupations, settler colonialism, military honor-conferral events, and annual ceremonies at Yasukuni Shrine–continued with little interruption even during Japan's golden age of democracy and pacifism in the 1920s. This article argues that Forever War laid the infrastructural groundwork for “total war” in China from 1937 onwards, while it produced a nation of decorated, honored, and mourned veterans, in whose names the existing empire was defended at all costs against the United States in the 1940s. In Forever War—whether in imperial Japan or elsewhere–soldiering and military service become ends in themselves, and “supporting the troops” becomes part of unthinking, common sense.

Recent surveys have shown that over 90% of Japanese have a negative view of China and the Chinese people. This tendency appears to have become more pronounced since the beginning of Abe Shinzō's second term as prime minister in December 2012. It also coincides with greater and greater numbers of Chinese visiting Japan as tourists and consumers. This paper investigates portrayals of the Chinese people in Japanese media to identify positive and negative representations and to see if these correlate with the results of surveys of attitudes among the general population.

Ever since the thwarted bid by T. Boone Pickens to obtain seats on the board of Koito Manufacturing, the activities of foreign investors in Japan, and of foreign CEOs of Japanese companies, have generated controversy. Foreign assertions of noble intentions are often distrusted by Japanese, while frustrations voiced by Pickens in 1989 are still keenly felt today.

This article explores how the models of medical risk from radiation established in the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are insufficient for understanding the risks faced by people in contaminated environments like Fukushima. These models focus exclusively on levels of external radiation, while the risk faced by people in areas affected by radioactive fallout comes from internalizing fallout particles. These models have helped to obscure the health impacts over the last 76 years of those exposed to fallout, from the people who experienced the Black Rain in Hiroshima, to the global hibakusha exposed through nuclear testing, production and accidents, and now to those living where the plumes deposited radiation in Fukushima.