In December 2015, Urasoe City pledged to conduct a survey of former base employees to ascertain the extent of contamination at Camp Kinser, a 2.7 square kilometer US Marine Corps supply base located in the city. Urasoe's director of planning, Shimoji Setsuo, announced that the municipality would work with prefectural authorities to carry out the investigation and he would also request funding from the national government. This is believed to be the first time that such a large-scale survey of former base workers has been launched in Japan.

There are mounting hopes that Barack Obama will use the occasion of the Group of 7 meeting in Japan in May to visit Hiroshima, and become the first American president to do so. It is remarkable that it required a wait of over 60 years until John Kerry became the first high American official to make such a visit, which he termed ‘gut-wrenching,‘ while at the same time purposely refraining from offering any kind of apology to the Japanese people for one of the worse acts of state terror against a defenseless population in all of human history. Let's hope that Obama goes, and displays more remorse than Kerry who at least deserves some credit for paving the way. The contrast between the many pilgrimages of homage by Western leaders, including those of Germany, to Auschwitz and other notorious death camps, and the absence of comparable pilgrimages to Hiroshima and Nagasaki underscores the difference between winning and losing a major war. This contrast cannot be properly accounted for by insisting on a hierarchy of evils that the Holocaust dominates.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik committed one of the most devastating acts of mass murder by an individual in history. Over the course of one day, he killed 77 people in and around Oslo, Norway, through a combination of a car bomb and shootings. The latter took place on the island of Utøya, where 69 people died, most of them teenagers attending an event sponsored by the Workers' Youth League. During his subsequent trial, Breivik remained outwardly unemotional as he clearly recounted the events of the day, including the dozens of methodical execution-style shootings on the island. His calmness both on the day of the murders and during the trial, shocked many observers. It was also an important factor in an attempt to declare Breivik insane, a move that he successfully resisted. Breivik himself addressed this subject at some length, crediting his supposed ability to suppress anxiety and the fear of death through concentrated practice of what he called “bushido meditation.” He claimed to have begun this practice in 2006 to “deemotionalize” himself in preparation for a suicide attack. According to Breivik, his meditation was based on a combination of “Christian prayer” and the “bushido warrior codex.” Bushido, or “the way of the warrior,” is often portrayed as an ancient moral code followed by the Japanese samurai, although the historical evidence shows that it is largely a twentieth-century construct.

This article examines how legacies of bounded collectivism in Southwest China play out in the form of land rights sharing involving the current administrative village and its constituent villagers’ groups, as well as in the form of political differentiation between administrative village cadres and leaders of villagers’ groups. It also documents the ways in which land markets change as the two levels of village administration compete to develop rural land.

To many, the 2015 Japan-South Korea agreement to finally settle the Korean “comfort women” issue came as a surprise. For over two decades Japan's wartime military sexual slavery remained the single most contentious issue dividing Japan and South Korea, severely affecting the bilateral relations and even becoming a concern for the US, which saw the tension between two of its allies in the Asia Pacific as troublesome. The 2015 comfort women agreement has promised that, with Japan's one billion yen funding to assist the survivors together with a sincere apology, the “comfort women” issue will be “finally and irrevocably” resolved. While some media hailed this as a landmark resolution and an opening of a new, more positive era for Japan-Korea relations, it has also provoked a deep sense of dissatisfaction and anger among “comfort women” advocacy groups, feminists and the former Korean “comfort women” themselves. It seems clear that the state-state “agreement” (made without any consultation with the survivors) will not restore “dignity and honour” to the victims. After all, one of the origins of current antagonisms surrounding the “comfort women” issue is another state-state deal, the 1965 Japan-ROK Basic Relations Treaty, which failed to address the “comfort women” and closed the door on individual redress claims. The recent agreement is not the end of the “comfort women” issue – especially for the survivors.

The year 2016 might turn out to be a decisive one in the long-running contest between the Japanese state and Okinawa prefecture over the construction of a new base for the US Marine Corps at Henoko on Oura Bay, although it seems that this is far from being the first time on which I have written of a prospective year of crisis and change in what has become known as the “Okinawa problem,” only to find as the year wore on that the crisis steadily deepened without resolution. It is clear anyway that this will be a year of elections and court proceedings, and that it will also almost certainly be one of deepening confrontation between the popular Okinawan resistance on one side and the forces of the Abe state with their monopoly of violence and growing readiness to use it on the other.

In discussions on Japanese whaling, a common question is why Japan appears indifferent to international pressure (gaiatsu) on the issue, that is, why it continues to flout the international anti-whaling “norm” despite widespread criticism and condemnation. The key to answering this question is to examine why the anti-whaling “norm” resonates so poorly in the domestic sphere. This paper argues that the impotence of international pressure to curb Japanese whaling can only be understood by examining how whaling has come to be reactively defined in the domestic debate not as an issue of conservation and environmental protection but as a symbol of national identity and pride. The paper concludes that because whaling is framed as a key marker of “Japanese-ness”, international pressure is counter-productive as it merely serves to stoke the fires of nationalism, creating an atmosphere in which anti-whaling opinion is seen as “anti-Japanese”.

On June 26, 1999, the Asahi, a major Japanese newspaper, published a very short story by Okinawa's most critically acclaimed writer of recent years, Medoruma Shun. The brevity of this piece belies its impact on readers. Unsettling in both form and content, the story depicts the constraints of everyday life in Okinawa, a small island on which nearly 75 percent of Japan's United States military bases sit on less than one percent of Japanese soil. It is here where, owing to the terms of the United States-Japan Security Treaty, Okinawans have since the end of the Pacific War lived with violent crimes and deadly accidents endemic to the vast U.S. military presence. In this story, the infamous 1995 rape by three U.S. military servicemen of a 12-year old Okinawan schoolgirl serves as a backdrop. It is a fictional expression of the powerlessness many Okinawans feel, long oppressed by the governments of Japan and the United States, and of the extreme action one individual takes in response to this lack of power.

In the summer of 2012, following an accident at the Fukushima power plant in March 2011, 200,000 people filled the streets outside the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo. This new movement had much in common with contemporaneous movements around the world, such as Occupy Wall Street. These included its use of the internet and the central role played by a highly educated precariat. In this essay, I analyze the results of the research I conducted on this movement, including the characteristics displayed by its main actors and participants, the structure of the organizing group and its methods of mobilization. Furthermore, I analyze Japan's political structure to show why the movement has not directly affected electoral outcomes. While this article analyzes Japanese society, it also contributes to understanding a more universal problem: What is the relationship between twenty-first century social movements and political systems that took shape during the twentieth century?

Introduction

Maeda Akira is a law professor at Tokyo Zokei University. He recently edited a volume of writing on theories of ‘hate speech’, and has been an active participant in the activist and scholarly ‘justice for comfort women’ movement since its inception in Japan in the early 1990s. In December 2015, Maeda published a series of blog posts criticising a public statement issued, initially, by 54 mostly Japanese and American academics in November 2015. This public statement was introduced at a press conference on the 26th, and published in the Asahi Shimbun on the 27th. Among its signatories were Oe Kenzaburo, Kono Yohei, Andrew Gordon, Peter Duus, and Ueno Chizuko. The group maintains a multilingual website as a show of ongoing protest.

As a fellow Tokyoite once observed, Hokkaido people have a knack for interesting self-introductions. It's surely in part because everyone other than the indigenous Ainu came rather recently from elsewhere, and even people in late youth and early middle age are apt to be in touch with that history of migration: of the adventures and misadventures of grandparents and great-grandparents in the throes of rapid settlement (often with corresponding displacement), industrializing agriculture and fishery, global trade, imperial expansion (“Karafuto” still coming up more often in conversation than “Sakhalin”), accompanied by requisite academic investments in fields such as agronomy, foreign language, economics, and cultural production as well as, of course, movements of resistance to the same.

Documents released via MuckRock under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that lax safety standards at the largest USAF base in the Pacific may be to blame for recent contamination of drinking water sources on Okinawa.

The internal reports expose a spate of accidents at Kadena Air Base during the past 15 years which have leaked at least 21,000 liters of fire extinguishing agents - some of them toxic.

Benedict Anderson reminds us that modernity has been characterized by the emergence of nation-states that can mobilize the passion of young men to “die for the country” on a mass scale. Once mobilized, nationalist passion allows a soldier to believe “he is dying for something greater than himself, for something that will outlast his individual, perishable life in place of a greater, eternal vitality.” But after demobilization, this patriotic fervor withers, no longer fed or needed for everyday combat. In peacetime, the fervor that enabled death and destruction for national purpose no longer even has any social or moral legitimacy.

The geographic center for the Ainu people, an ethnic group, has for the last four hundred years been the Japanese island of Hokkaido and farther north. Their ancestors, in the ancient time period of Jōmon (15,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.), were the original inhabitants of the Japanese main islands. The arrival of migrants from the Asian continent during the Yayoi period (300 B.C. to 250 A.D.) pushed them to the north. There were still many Ainu on the northeastern third of the main island of Honshu for the next millennium but by the early modern era, they mainly lived on the northern island—slightly smaller than the state of Maine—which was then called Ezo by the Japanese. Ezo in Chinese characters can also be read as Emishi, a name not only for an area but also for a group of people. Emishi meant to Japanese people “the barbarians,” which is how they thought of the Ainu ancestors who had earlier lived in a larger portion of Japan. The Ainu people themselves called their northern island Ainu Mosir, which means “the peaceful land for people.” Then, when the other three main Japanese islands were unified under a Shogunal government in 1600, the samurai leaders of the Matsumae domain monopolized trade with the Ainu, which they exploitatively conducted. Many Ainu men were forced to labor under brutal conditions and many women became sex slaves to the Japanese. When a merchant working for the domain was suspected of murdering an Ainu chief in 1789, the Ainu carried out an uprising against the domain that came to be called the Menashi-Kunashir Rebellion. The rebellion was swiftly put down and the Ainu leaders were executed.

Germany and Japan took the lead in the terror bombing of cities during World War II, acts that sparked outrage from President Roosevelt and many others. U.S. bombing, by contrast, hewed to strategic targets, prioritizing military installations and factories until 1944, when it supported Britain in the wholesale bombing of German cities. But the critical moment in US bombing and napalming of cities came with the firebombing and nuclear attacks that obliterated large areas of Japanese cities between February and August 1945, leaving an indelible imprint not only on the urban landscape but also on subsequent U.S. war making. This paper reflects on the meaning of the atomic age and the nature of U.S. strategic principles, in light of U.S. fire bombing in the final months of the war.

Koide Hiroaki (66) has emerged as an influential voice and a central figure in the anti-nuclear movement since the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi of March 11, 2011. He spent his entire career as a nuclear engineer working towards the abolition of nuclear power plants. His powerful critique of the “nuclear village” and active involvement in anti-nuclear movements “earned him an honorable form of purgatory as a permanent assistant professor at Kyoto University.” Koide retired from Kyoto University in the spring of 2015, but continues to write and act as an important voice of conscience for many who share his vision of the future free from nuclear energy and weapons. He has authored 20 books on the subject. Professor Kasai Hirotaka and I visited his office at Kyoto University's Research Reactor Institute in Kumatori, Osaka, on December 26th, 2014 for this interview. We believe that the contents of the interview, which offer new information about the degree of radioactive contamination and invaluable insight into Koide's ethical and political stance as a scientist, remain crucial for our critical reflection on ecological destruction, the violation of human rights, and individual responsibility. Professor Robert Stolz, the translator of this interview and the author of Bad Water (Duke University Press, 2015), provides a historical perspective on the interview in a separate article.

As the sixth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster approaches, the area around the hulking corpse of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant continues to exude a horrible fascination. Arkadiusz Podniesinski is one of thousands of photographers and journalists drawn there since the crisis began in March 2011. In 2015 his first photo report from the area attracted millions of views around the world.

In November 1968, the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Kobe found itself at the center of a major controversy. At the beginning of the month, it had joined with Mitsukoshi stores in Osaka and Tokyo in exhibiting and offering for sale reproductions of a selection of historical maps as part of a special event to mark the centenary of the Meiji Restoration. The idea was to give interested members of the public a chance to imagine, through the maps, what different areas of the country had been like at the time of the Restoration—at that moment, in other words, when Japan as a whole stood at the threshold of modernity.

I would like to approach “Instability, the Crisis of Politics, and Social Movements” from the standpoint of political theory, Japanese history, and the present situation. This is not a topic specific to Japan, but one that is universal. I will begin by offering reflections from the standpoint of thought. Given that even what is universal will find different expression depending on place and era, I will also address the history and present-day circumstances of Japanese society. But by history, I shall be referring to developments since the 1970s.