Indeed, a single laugh can expel a hundred depressions. In this world, however, there is nothing novel in recounting the same ordinary facts. Tosa Shōgen provoked laughter by painting a farting battle. Inspired by his example, I now record the battles of the beggars and the paupers, titling my account Hinin Taiheiki. Naturally, the characters are but warriors astride their own two legs—bare as a bare dapple-grey horse, yet worth one hundred kan. They carry iron hooks, though rusted, and wear armor of straw mats, though torn. May they be a source of laughter for all those who observe them.

On January 28, 2016, US Army base Fort Hood, in Texas, broke ground on the Army's largest-ever hybrid solar and wind-power project. The USD 100 million project's 63,000 solar panels and 20 massive wind turbines will supply half the base's electricity needs “at a lower price than the power generated by fossil fuels,” saving USD 168 million. A week before, the US Navy, well along in its goal of 50% renewable energy by 2020, first used biofuels in its Great Green Fleet. These milestones came in the same month that the Pentagon, on January 14, released a new directive on “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.”

“Those of you from Fukushima, please stand. Hello, everyone! I came here from Fukushima. I came today with many busloads of companions from Fukushima Prefecture and from the places where we've evacuated.”

These unassuming words begin the speech that electrified the 60,000-some gathered under an intense autumn sun for an anti-nuke rally in Meiji Park on September 19, 2011. Six months had passed since the triple disaster. The rally was dramatic evidence for a world that had forgotten the first postwar decades that Japanese people could, and indeed do, protest.

Ishimure Michiko (1927-) is one of Japan's leading literary writers and social critics. Her extensive work, comprising over 50 volumes, spans a wide range of genres including novels, poetry, plays, essays, children's stories, and autobiographical writing. Ishimure is the recipient of numerous literary awards, internationally and in Japan, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award from the Philippines in 1973 and the Asahi Prize for literature in 2001. A seventeen-volume critical edition of her collected works in Japanese was published in 2013.

This essay begins with three notable incidents of recent years, which are indicative of contemporary trends in the politics of war memory in Japan. The first is associated with the Abe administration's 2015 passage of the Collective Self Defense Bill: an interpretation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which allows the Japanese Self Defense Forces to engage in military affairs when an ally of Japan is deemed to be under threat. The second is a part of the controversies on the “comfort women,” the systematic sexual slavery conducted at military brothels, which was implemented and managed by the Japanese military and government during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The third concerns a municipal museum dedicated to the local experience of the Asia-Pacific War.

Mitsuhashi Toshio (1920-2001) joined a haiku group at age fifteen, and his haiku began to be accepted by magazines the following year. He was drawn to the Shinkō Haiku (Newly Rising Haiku) movement, particularly its advocacy of rejecting the required inclusion of seasonal words.

In 1937, when Japan expanded its war in China to distance themselves from “traditional haiku” started writing what they called senka sobo haiku—haiku “imagining and watching the fire of war from afar.” Mitsuhashi wrote many haiku in this genre.

On April 13, 2016, about one hundred elderly people assembled in front of a stone memorial plaque in a park in Tokyo's Toshima ward. Although their number has gradually diminished, they have been meeting on this day every year for more than two decades. Their purpose is to remember the victims of a massive firebombing raid that reduced three quarters of Toshima to ashes on the night of April 13-14, 1945. Most of them are now in their late eighties or early nineties, but they have vowed to continue to hold this meeting, the Nezuyama Small Memorial Service, for as long as they are able.

Introduction

Author Nagai Kafū (1879-1959; given name Nagai Sōkichi) is best known for his fictionalized personal travel accounts American Stories (Amerika monogatari, 1908) and French Stories (Furansu monogatari, 1915), short stories and novellas about Tokyo courtesans and low-ranking geisha, and an extensive illustrated diary, Dyspepsia House Diary (Danchōtei nichijō, 1917-59). Kafū was fascinated with Edo-period (1603-1868) culture, especially that of the chōnin, or urban commoners. He prided himself on his resemblance to Edo literati, such as poet Ōta Nanpo (also known as Shokusanjin, discussed in the selection below), who used kyōka (playful, often satirical, poetry) as an elegant form of veiled social commentary. Kafū challenged authority throughout his career, as evidenced in his professed dislike of Meiji-period (1868-1912) leaders, his opposition to the war and Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s, and conflicts with censors and publishers.

This essay reveals the vital role of transnational learning in structuring air defense in Japan, Germany, and Britain in World War II, while comparing how each regime shaped the contours of home-front mobilization. In the decades between the two world wars, states increasingly recognized the new threat of aerial bombardment of cities, and they actively investigated other nations' efforts at “civilian defense” and “total war.” Learning continued during World War II. In countries experiencing bombing, civil defense programs did more to mobilize daily life than any other wartime imperative. Remarkably, civil defense operations in Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and democratic Britain resembled each other—recruiting or conscripting millions of men, women, and youths to serve as neighborhood-based air raid wardens, “fire watchers,” first-aid workers, and members of civil defense associations. At the same time, differences in regimes and circumstances affected the degree of compulsion in each case.

Japanese mainstream media have stereotyped Japanese Hallyu fans as “middle-aged,” asexual and unhappy women. A right-wing backlash since 2012 further made them targets of xenophobic as well as sexist attacks. After socio-historically contextualizing this constructed fan image, this article probes Kitahara Minori's Good-bye Hallyu to ask, “if Hallyu has empowered the audience, how has it done so?”

On October 27, 2015 China hawks got what they had long demanded: a US Navy Freedom of Navigation operation (aka FONOP) within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, one of China's manmade islands in the South China Sea.

Like Brett Walker's article, this article also indicates how Japanese colonization of the farther north proceeded spatially. After Mamiya Rinzō's mapping, other spatial transfigurations led to the de-culturing and subjugation of the Ainu during the Meiji period. While the Matsumae domain controlled Ezo trade and subjugated the Ainu in the earlier two centuries, from 1868 the new Meiji government attempted a thorough absorption of the Ainu after annexing Ezo and renaming it Hokkaido. This article discusses first the designing and building of the city of Sapporo, the largest city in Hokkaido, in which Japanese administrators such as Shima Yoshitake (1822-1874) and Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840-1900) played a vital part. The Japanese built Sapporo to be like major cities in Honshū (the largest island in Japan) as part of their efforts to Japanize the northern island. Vivian Blaxell, a historian, then goes on to show how the Japanese brought wet-rice farming into the north and thus remade the whole landscape of Hokkaido. This was achieved largely by Nakayama Kyuzō (1828-1919), who developed a variety of rice that was resistant to the cold. Introduction of modern, uniform farming to Hokkaido destroyed Ainu hunting grounds and played a crucial role in damaging the Ainu communities, their economy, and their culture.

In 2013 Sejong University Professor Park Yu-ha published a widely criticized book titled “Comfort Women of the Empire.” In her thesis, Park calls for a more complex and nuanced understanding of Korean involvement in the recruitment of comfort women and their varied experiences that challenges the prevailing victim's narrative about this system operated by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s (Park 2013). Leaving aside judgments as to the accuracy, or not, of Park's research and assertions, the response was highly predictable, with massive grassroots and national-level condemnation quickly emerging given its direct challenge to the generally accepted conventional wisdom in South Korea regarding Japan's colonial and war-time transgressions. Widespread, vocal disapproval was followed by a court order to pay 10 million won (roughly $8,262) to each of the remaining survivors for defamation of character (Choe 2016).

Okinawa: NGO Appeal to the United Nations and to US Military and Government over Base Matters, December 2015 and December 2016

1 Introduction, by Hideki Yoshikawa

2 Document 1. Okinawan Citizens' Groups, “Joint Submission to United Nations,” December 2015

The two chapters presented here are taken from The Stories Clothes Tell, a translation of the Japanese book Nuno no Inochi: Hito no Kokoro, Kurashi Tsutaete by Horikiri Tatsuichi published in 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield.

Horikiri was born in 1925 in Kagoshima, Japan. Trained as a civil engineer, he was sent to work in northern China, and within a year was conscripted and sent to the front. He returned to Japan in 1946 to a career in construction. During these years, Horikiri traveled throughout Japan, collecting vast quantities of used clothing and furnishings, all the while recording their stories to illuminate and contextualize them. Horikiri is a respected authority on the history of everyday clothing in the Meiji (1868–1912), Taisho (1912–1926), and Showa (1926–1989) periods, having published nine books and museum catalogues as well as articles on the items in his collection.

Late last month, the Asia Pacific hosted two very important and starkly contrasting international conferences on the region's energy and climate choices. A very high level, invitation-only summit in Singapore declared that the region's energy options are limited to choosing from a mix of coal, gas and nuclear, with renewable energy's role merely marginal. But a far more diverse and innovative conference in Honolulu, one that included the US military, demonstrated that renewable energy is the region's economically and environmentally rational choice. As we shall see, there was one key difference between these polarized positions on what is perhaps the single most important issue of our era. The Singapore event focused on the supply side of energy whereas the Hawaii summit examined the energy system in its entirety. The Hawaii event paid particular attention to the increasingly crucial role of microgrids and other enabling infrastructures that reshape the demand side as well as the supply side. This short article reviews both events and asks why the Singapore summit ignored the role of smart networks. We then conclude by showing how smart infrastructures are becoming central to climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

Many Japanese and others today understand Hokkaido as an ancient part of Japan, and do not know that the island was only formally absorbed in the mid-19th century. This article explains the process by which the island of Ezo was annexed by the Japanese in 1868 and renamed Hokkaido (“the path to the northern seas”). The Japanese also began transforming Ezo, now Hokkaido, in order to thoroughly incorporate the island into the new central polity. This transformation had dire consequences for the indigenous Ainu population. This article also introduces two Japanese laws that were ratified in the late 19th century: the Emigrant Protection Law of 1896 and the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law of 1899. “Enacted like bookends on the (First) Sino-Japanese War,” the latter was to have an especially serious effect on the livelihoods of the Ainu. Komori argues that Japan sought through those two laws to protect its territorial interest vis-à-vis the major Western colonial powers in two different places and ways. The Emigrant Protection law was legislated to encourage and also protect Japanese migrants who were rapidly moving into Hawai'i and other areas internationally while the Hokkaido law encouraged migration to Hokkaido by suppressing the Ainu.

Who could fail to be deeply moved on watching the recent events at Standing Rock, North Dakota, when on December 4 the Army Corps of Engineers ordered a halt to the planned construction of an oil pipeline beneath the waters and soil of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe following months of confrontation and attempts by the American state, bolstered by private security firms, to evict the “water protectors” encampment by force and to crush the resistance?

Five years after Japan's natural and nuclear disasters of March 11, 2011 (3-11), few observers can find a positive legacy among the irradiated ruins. Fukushima rightly remains an icon of the folly of building fragile large-scale power and other lifeline systems in the face of patent threats. Indeed, Japan has become a byword for failure, whether at Fukushima or in its “Abenomics” growth strategy. But in point of fact, 3-11 has made Japan a world leader in building resilience - in critical energy, water, transport and other lifeline infrastructures -against increasingly frequent disasters confronting Japan, the Asia-Pacific and the world. Though little known, even in specialist circles, Japan's deeply institutionalized and well-funded programme of “National Resilience” (kokudo kyoujinka) is far more advanced than its counterpart initiatives in North America, the EU and elsewhere. As we shall see below, Japan's resilience programme, including both public and private sector spending, totaled over JPY 24 trillion (USD 210 billion) in 2013 and is projected to grow dramatically by 2020. Moreover, Japan's disaster resilience centres on renewable energy, storage and efficiency, and has become a core element of Abenomics.