Faubion Bowers (1917-99), a graduate of Columbia University and Juilliard Graduate School of Music, was on his way to Java to explore the music there when he stopped in Japan and accidentally found kabuki. That was in the late 1930s, a few years before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The war over, Bowers served Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Gen. Douglas MacArthur as his aide-decamp and personal interpreter during the early years of the Occupation of Japan (1945-52). When he resigned his military commission with the rank of major he stayed on as a civilian and proponent of uncensored kabuki banned by the Occupation. For this, he was later called “the savior of kabuki” and decorated by the Japanese government.

Helen McCullough translated and published the first twelve chapters of the medieval military chronicle Taiheiki, The Chronicle of Great Peace, in 1979. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kyoko Selden and I, then colleagues on the faculty of Cornell University, began meeting weekly to read, discuss, and translate a broad range of Japanese historical texts, including sections of the Taiheiki through Chapter 19 (out of forty). Our short-term objective was to develop materials for an interdisciplinary seminar that would introduce more of the Taiheiki to English readers. In this special issue, two selections from the Taiheiki—the dramatic and tragic death of Go-Daigo's cast-off son Prince Moriyoshi (alt. Morinaga, 1308-35) from Chapter 13 and an account of the critical battle at Hakone Takenoshita from Chapter 14, both events of 1335—are paired with linked verse by the basara (flamboyant) warrior Sasaki Dōyo, and the Edo-period Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers' Chronicle of Peace. All were originally translated and annotated for our Taiheiki course, first taught in 1992, a class that I continue to teach at the University of Southern California.

This article investigates the history and contemporary development of the local antinuclear experience in Gongliao district, Taiwan. It traces villagers' intricate relations with political parties, their frustration with the decision making process, and efforts to sustain local anti-nuclear momentum at a time when the anti-nuclear movement was in decline. By exploring local villagers' three decades of antinuclear efforts, this article focuses on their change of tactics, networks and ideologies, and explains how these changes had happened. It argues that local anti-nuclear activists played an important role in transforming an antinuclear movement from a party-led activity to an issue-based protest independent of party control. The transformation was facilitated by the deepening of a place-based consciousness among local activists.

Ikeda Hiroshi wrote an important opinion piece for the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper on February 26, 2016. Ikeda is a Kyoto University emeritus professor of German literature who has devoted his career to researching fascism. His numerous books include The Weimar Constitution and Hitler. Ikeda published this Tokyo Shimbun article at a tumultuous time in Japanese society: the government had shortly before pushed through state secrets and national security laws, and overridden the constitution to allow overseas military deployment. In response, mass rallies were staged outside the Diet building. In this climate, Ikeda's article is an unusual example in the Japanese press of criticism of a reigning government through direct historical comparison with a fascist regime of another country. At the request of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Ikeda provided an original, expanded article on this theme. This article is particularly significant now that both houses of the Japanese Diet have two-thirds of their members supporting constitutional revision after the July 10 Upper House election, and Abe talks about starting debate this fall, with priority given to a emergency decree clause. CN

Koide Hiroaki has dedicated his career to preventing a nuclear disaster in Japan. That disaster has now happened. As we learn in this wide-ranging and important interview, the accident often referred to as 3/11 was enormous and in many ways unprecedented. The full scope of the disaster is still unknown, but is clearly on the scale of Chernobyl, placing the amount of radioactive material released into the atmosphere possibly up to 1,000 times the Hiroshima bombing of 1945. Professor Koide's reporting in his many books, interviews, and radio programs is essential reading for anyone wishing to learn the nature and extent of the radiological event of March 2011 and beyond. But early in the interview we learn something else. For while in ways unprecedented, 3/11 is also a part of a historical series of nuclear exposures from the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, to the Castle-Bravo Lucky Dragon Incident of 1954, to Semipalatinsk, to Chernobyl, and to the next sure-to-happen event. In fact, while it is clear that the urgent social, political, and medical task right now is the acute contamination of land, air, sea, and bodies by the Fukushima dai-ichi meltdowns, as Prof. Koide says, as bad as Fukushima is, “a much greater event has already taken place.” His immediate reference is the enormous amount radioactive material released in the atmospheric testing from 1945 to 1980.

John Junkerman (JJ): I want to hear your thoughts about the history and policies that lie behind the present situation of the US bases on Okinawa, but first, could you tell us what you thought of our film? You watched the Japanese version, Okinawa: Urizun no Ame, and we included an interview with you in the American version.

Communism – along with socialism and kindred progressive, egalitarian ideals – dominated the intellectual life of much of the world from the mid nineteenth century to the late twentieth century: the long Eurocentric period of modernity. Never mind that much of the non-European world was colonized by European empires and Europe-influenced powers of the United States and Japan: the early counter-colonial and national independence movements and ideologies were almost always inspired by figures and ideals from the west that dominated the rest. It is therefore not surprising that there is more than a family resemblance among the wide variety of anti-colonial, nationalist discourses and parties, west or east, south or north.

Although health care in North Korea has remained a major area of humanitarian concern for outside observers, important aspects of the health-care system have gone unnoticed. Reports (Amnesty International 2010; Huffington Post 2013; Watts 2003) have focused on the population's nutritional status and the dire condition of health-care facilities. In assessing a nation's health status, the World Health Organization (2009) pays attention to certain indicators and the specific areas for improvement that it has targeted. In contrast, there has been little discussion of daily healthcare practices in North Korea, which remain largely hidden because they take place outside of the formal system. Where do people turn first when their children fall ill?

On July 3, 1945 the Japanese occupation government of the East Indies executed by sword the prominent Professor Achmad Mochtar. Until his arrest by the Kenpeitai in October 1944 he directed the Eijkman Institute in Jakarta, a prestigious Nobel Prize-winning medical research laboratory. Mochtar was not only an internationally known scientist physician, but he was also closely connected to powerful Indonesian nationalist elites. The complex swirl of violent military and political currents, together with the complex technical elements of the events impelling Mochtar's execution, composes what the scholar of Indonesian history Theodore Friend referred to as “the Mochtar affair”. The defining event of this affair was the murder of 900 conscripted Javanese laborers (called romusha, a Japanese word meaning unskilled laborer but adopted in Indonesian language to mean slave laborer) at a transit camp on the outskirts of Jakarta in August 1944. They all died of acute tetanus within three days of receiving vaccinations against typhus, cholera and dysentery.

Recent decades have seen a rise in religious nationalism around the world, and Japan is no exception. Over the past two decades there has been a significant rightward shift in Japanese politics and this trend is closely related to organized religion and its affiliated political efforts to “recover” or “restore” what had been destroyed during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-52). Our focus here is on the close connection between the Association of Shintō Shrines (Jinja Honchō) and many politicians belonging to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). This Association, which was organized in 1946, has some 80,000 affiliated shrines throughout the country and has been the base institution for Shintō nationalism throughout the postwar period.

Three years ago, we published an article in Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on Taiwan's energy debates and an accompanying article in Taipei Times with the title ‘China key to Taiwan energy crisis’. At the time, Taiwan was embroiled in endless debates over its commitment to nuclear power, a commitment that precluded a shift to more secure renewable energy sources. We argued that Taiwan's obsession with nuclear power as the way forward in energy policy obscured other options. In particular, the country could extend its great successes in IT, semiconductors and flat panel displays to the next great technological challenge, namely renewable energy. We pointed to the example of China and its green energy strategy which is gradually replacing its black, fossil fuelled strategy, thereby improving China's energy security as well as building renewable energy industries as export platforms for the future.

If the doctrine of strategic bombing has been the object of much attention in the military history and international relations literature (Biddle 2002, Pape 2011), few studies have focused on the means deployed to achieve the bombings. Yet, these means are crucial to understand three decisive aspects of the doctrine and practice of strategic bombing: (1) how they have been defined; (2) how they have changed; and (3) how they have been perceived and used by different actors (militaries, international institutions and public opinion) over time (3). This article highlights these issues through the analysis of napalm utilization by the US military. It demonstrates that the massive use of this weapon, from its creation in 1942 to the Vietnam War, is at the core of a shift in the doctrine and practice of American strategic bombing. The article demonstrates that analysis of the weapons deployed for ‘strategic bombing’ enriches the historiography – and the understanding - of the doctrine and practice of strategic bombing itself.

Many old tombs in Okinawa were built facing the sea. This is because of the belief that the spirits of the dead would go back [after death] to their original ancestral village [Nirai Kanai] from which also come the gods that bring blessings and fruits.

In May 2016 freelance journalist Horikawa Keiko received a special award from the Japan National Press Club for her book, “Genbaku Kuyoto,” which is about victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing whose remains have been identified but not claimed. Of the five books she has published, not counting one she co-authored, four are about capital punishment. As she explains during the following press conference for “Genbaku Kuyoto,” she feels capital punishment and the bombing of Hiroshima are thematically related. Though she worked for years as a TV journalist in Hiroshima and covered stories about the bombing many times, it wasn't until she researched Japan's death penalty that she made a connection and realized how little she knew about what happened on August 6, 1945.

One of the goals of her research was to find out how the number of official dead was determined. To her, the number is important, because each life has meaning. To lose track of that number is to lose the meaning of that event. The only way she can bring them back to life is to show how a few of them lived. MT

The struggle over reshaping postwar Japan entered a new phase on March 2, 2016, when Prime Minister Abe Shinzo declared at an Upper House Budget Committee hearing that he was committed to revising the constitution within his term of office, that is, by September 2018. Changing the postwar regime by fundamentally revising the present pacifist constitution has been Abe's goal since he returned to power in 2012, but for some time he had avoided clearly stating his plan, knowing that the majority of voters oppose constitutional revision.

I was born in October 1936, and my first clear recollections are those of the Nishi-Ōkubo neighborhood of Tokyo around 1939. Akira and I lived with our grandparents in their big house set in by a granite gate. I knew that my parents were in Paris but never missed them. Diagonally across from our house to the left were the homes of Yoshinobu-chan, Chika-chan, and Mitchan. A street stretched perpendicular to our house. On the right was the Kibōsha (a nice-looking building used by Korean rights activists) and then the home of Yatchan. Yatchan's older brother Sato-chan went to middle school. Yatchan's younger brother Yotchan was not yet school age. On the left, across the street from Yatchan's house, was the home of Sakudō Naoko-chan. She had a little brother nicknamed Kō-bō. Later, the Maebashis moved into the large house next to ours. They had three children: a fourth grader who might have been named Hidehiko, a girl my age called Reiko-chan, and a younger brother who was probably named Kunihiko. One day, my brother and I were in a second-floor room with a large desk. Hidehiko gave us a dictation test. Among other things, we had to write the characters for “bu-un chōkyū o inoru” (I pray for your good martial luck).

Portions of this essay were previously published in Japanese as 「アジア太平洋戦争のポリティックスと教育―アメリカ合衆国で日本史を教えて」『歴史学研究』942号、2016年3月 (by Jordan Sand and Franziska Seraphim)

In spring 2015, I participated in the drafting and distribution of the statement on the “comfort women” and Japanese war responsibility issued under the title “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan.” That letter took inspiration from a statement issued in Japan by the Historical Science Society (Rekishigaku Kenkyukai) in October 2014 and built on a letter published in March 2015 in the American Historical Association's magazine Perspectives condemning the Japanese government's effort to suppress passages about the comfort women in a US-published world history textbook.

On February 10, 2016, the South Korean government announced that it would close the Kaesŏng Industrial Zone (KIZ) in response to the North Korean nuclear test of January 6th and the launch of a satellite on February 7th. The zone, sometimes simply called by the name of the adjacent city of Kaesŏng, had been the last tangible outcome of the historic first inter-Korean summit of June 2000, which later that year had earned one of its two participants, the South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, the Nobel Peace Prize. His counterpart Kim Jong-il, who hosted the summit, received none. He was compensated generously by what has been rumored to be millions of dollars from South Korea. The payment was allegedly facilitated by Hyundai. That is the same company that managed the Mt. Kŭmgang tourism project in North Korea, another successful joint project that has been frozen since 2008. Through its subsidiary Asan, Hyundai also built the Kaesŏng industrial zone.

In Japan's public disillusionment following the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the Asahi Shimbun, the nation's second-largest daily and the “quality paper” favored by intellectuals, launched a bold experiment to regain readers' trust.

The Abe administration's aim to further weaken the parameters of Article 9 by seeking legal grounds to engage Japan's military in collective self-defense activities sent Tokyo-based Japanese of all ages to the streets in protest this past summer. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered repeatedly in front of the National Diet Building and prime minister's residence to voice their opposition to this to demand, as emphasized by Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALDs), a politics based on Japan's postwar Constitution. With media focus on events that took place in the nation's capital and at the level of the state, local interests and opinion is sometimes overlooked. This article introduces translations of two opinion pieces published in two local Japanese newspapers, the Okinawa Taimusu (Okinawa Times), out of Naha, Okinawa, and the Kahoku Shinpō published in Sendai.