Over the last decade or so, China has seen an unprecedented building boom of museums and memorials. One curious new genre is the museums for Mao-era “Cultural Revolution” youth “sent down” to the countryside by Mao during the 1960s and 1970s. After Mao's death, they struggled to return to the cities. Surviving returnees have recently established several museums commemorating their suffering and sacrifice, even though the topic is politically fraught and the period's history is strictly censored in official museums and histories. One museum, the Shanghai Educated Youth Museum, doubles as a memorial site and a collective cemetery for former sent-down youth who wish to be buried together. This paper locates these memorials and burial grounds in their historical and political context. It also reflects the Shanghai institutions' copying of the design and architecture of the Korea and Vietnam war memorials in Washington D.C.

As revelations of sexual assaults and harassment roil the worlds of politics, sports and entertainment, one institution has largely escaped media and public scrutiny: the U.S. military.

According to the Department of Defense's most recent report, in 2016 approximately 40 service members were sexually assaulted every day. The Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military estimates 14,900 service members -8,600 women and 6,300 men - experienced sexual assaults in 2016.

This essay accompanies Katsuya Hirano's Interview with Kamanaka Hitomi, “Fukushima, Media, Democracy: The Promise of Documentary Film”

Documentary filmmaker Kamanaka Hitomi's interview with historian Katsuya Hirano takes the post-Fukushima debate in a number of fresh directions.

At the level of facts, Kamanaka draws from her vast knowledge of Japanese nuclear politics and the global nuclear industry to share developments that may startle even those who have tried to keep up with the unfolding crisis.

This article examines the background to Japan's Dowa-related affirmative action programs which, based on postwar constitutional guarantees, set about relieving the material and psychological expressions of majority discrimination against Buraku residents. It shows the generally beneficial consequences of these programs, and highlights the overall weakening of discrimination, the improvement of living conditions, and a high level of mixed living and intermarriage. Finally, it considers how the resulting erosion of Buraku-based identities remains contested both by those displaying a continued will to discriminate, and by activists who desire to maintain a Buraku-based identity into the future.

An unofficial translation by C. Douglas Lummis of excerpts from Chapter 5 of Henoko ni kichi wa tsukurenai (A Base Cannot Be Built at Henoko) by Yamashiro Hiroji and Kitaueda Tsuyoshi (Iwanami Booklet No. 987, 2018). Comments and words added by the translator are placed in square brackets. Three dots indicate sections left out. The purpose of translating just this section is to show that the engineering difficulties faced by the Henoko base project are not the inventions/exaggerations of anti-base activists, but are based on hard scientific data. The data concerning the probable earthquake fault is the result of research carried out by seismologists; the data indicating height limit violations comes from the Okinawa Defense Bureau and has been supported by surveys carried out by skilled surveyors; the tests that produced the N-zero result for part of the sea bottom were also carried out by the Defense Bureau. CDL

In the decade after the end of the Cold War, triumphalist U.S. public intellectuals, liberal and conservative alike, were trying on the mantle of ‘empire’ for size. For many at the time, while ‘US imperialism’ denoted kneejerk leftism, ‘the American empire’ might just be an appropriate acknowledgement of achievement on a global scale, an accolade about reality rather than a matter of opprobrium.

Taiwan was surrendered to Imperial Japan by China's Qing dynasty in 1895, fifteen years prior to Japan's annexation of Korea. Like Korea, Taiwan's women and girls were subsequently conscripted into Japan's military “comfort women” (ianfu) system. The author notes significant differences between the treatment of the women in the two colonies and in the remembrance of the comfort woman systems. In Korea, dozens of comfort women statues and memorials commemorate the system's victims while not one such statue exists in Taiwan. In December 2016, eighteen years after Korea opened its first of two comfort women museums, the Ama (Grandmother) Museum was opened in Taipei. While the museum in Taipei chronicles the Taiwanese comfort women's plight, its message represents more than an indictment of Japan or a pursuit of redress for the system's victims. The museum and its sponsors find ways to apply the lessons of this tragedy to the ongoing challenges of human trafficking and domestic violence.

Borrowing from Judith Butler's notion of the ethics of plural and heterogeneous cohabitation, this essay reads two of Tsushima Yūko's novels in light of how they negotiate proximity and distance in forging ethical connections that constitutes such cohabitation; the first is her autobiographical work of mourning, On Grieving (2017). The second is the historical time-travel novel, Laughing Wolf (2000), crowded with humans and animals both spectral and real. The essay argues that reading these two modes of writing together can enhance the felt connection between the personal and the historical by turning thin relations into thick ones through the act of remembering.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō‘s anticipated trip to St Petersburg and Moscow at the end of May 2018 represents the culmination of his “new approach” to Russia. Unveiled two years earlier, this policy seeks to achieve a breakthrough in the countries’ long-standing territorial dispute by reducing Japan's initial demands and offering incentives in the form of enhanced political and economic engagement. Having stuck resolutely with this policy despite criticism from the West, Abe now needs it to deliver, not least to boost his flagging approval ratings. This article highlights exactly what the Japanese leader hopes to achieve and assesses his prospects of success. Particular emphasis is placed on the proposed joint economic activities on the disputed islands and the specific legal obstacles that need to be overcome.

Through a historical analysis of Japanese constitutions and key constitutional drafts from the Meiji Era to the present day, this article examines the relationship between the constitution of Japan and the rights of indigenous peoples. In recent decades, the constitutions of a number of countries have introduced clauses recognizing the culture or rights of indigenous people, but this still remains a lacuna in Japanese constitutional debates. After examining the continuing social problems which result from this lack of constitutional recognition, particularly from the perspective of the Ainu and Ryūkyū peoples, the article concludes with a call to oppose current government schemes for constitutional change by putting forward a radical alternative proposal to revise the constitution in a way that would recognize and celebrate Japan's ethnic, historical and cultural pluralism.

In January 1941, with the prospect looming of US involvement in another European war, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke of America's purpose in the world: to protect and promote “four freedoms.” FDR drew a clear link between US security and the fulfillment of human rights at home. “Just as our national policy in internal affairs has been based upon a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all of our fellow men within our gates, so our national policy in foreign affairs has been based on a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all nations, large and small.”

In 1830 a group of pioneers from Hawaii settled the uninhabited Bonin Islands (Ogasawara Guntō), located about 1,000 km south of Edo (present-day Tokyo) where their descendants formed their own cultural identity. This article explores some of the challenges the Bonin Islanders have faced since the Japanese takeover in the late 1870s. An emphasis is placed on their struggles with a fabricated history that continues to define their relationship with the Japanese state.

Stories of kamikaze pilots thinking about their loved ones while flying their last mission, or of wrecked toys and their missing owners in Hiroshima, elicit an emotional response. This essay analyses and provides examples of war-themed fan-produced videos, defining their conservatism in relation to Japanese war history, and showing how it relates to the kandō experience of fan viewing practices.

With her 2004 novel Nara Report, Tsushima Yūko has presented us with a “report” through which memories borne by the dead come alive. This essay traces the ways in which the novel makes present day Nara emerge as a topos resounding with the voices of those subjected to Buddhist marginalization in pre-modern Nara— women, minorities, outcasts and animals— and considers how it creates space for reimagining this densely overdetermined place.

Did the movements of “1968” change societies fundamentally worldwide? This article examines “1968” from the perspective of Japanese history. Japan's “1968” shared such common elements with “1968” in other countries, as the social background, development of visual media, and progress of modernization. This article investigates Japan's “1968” in light of the common background and characteristics of the movements in Japan and globally. I conclude that “1968” was a product of the resonance of unrelated phenomena throughout the world, and many evaluations of “1968” confuse the general trend of modernization with the specific influences of the movements.

1. The Constitution, Human Rights and Pluralism in Japan: Alternative Visions of Constitutions Past and Future - Tessa Morris-Suzuki

2. We, the Japanese People: Rethinking the Meaning of the Peace Constitution - C. Douglas Lummis

3. Prime Minster Abe's Constitutional Campaign and the Assault on Individual Rights - Okano Yayo

4. Affirmative Action Policies Under the Postwar Japanese Constitution: On the Effects of the Dōwa Special Measures Policy - Noah McCormack

5. Rethinking Japan's Constitution from the Perspective of the Ainu and Ryūkyū Peoples - Uemura Hideaki and Jeffry Gayman

This article focuses on three of Tsushima Yūko's later works. It examines Tsushima's criticism of Japanese ruling policy, especially aboriginal policies in colonial Taiwan, in All Too Barbarian. The second, Reed Boat, Flying, exposes the repressed history of how, just after Japan's defeat in the Second World War, Japanese women returning from Manchuria who were raped by Russian or other foreign soldiers were forced into having abortions. Wildcat Dome, written after the 3.11 disasters, discloses how the inter-racial children born between Japanese women and American soldiers were discriminated against in postwar Japan.