This paper examines the little-known and long forgotten overseas deployment of Japanese minesweepers to North Korea in 1950 and the events that led to postwar Japan's only known deployment to a combat zone that led to the loss of Japanese life.

In the year since the United States, United Kingdom, and Australian governments announced the formation of AUKUS, a new alliance whose centrepiece is to be the supply of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, a robust critique of the nuclear weapons expansion has emerged in Australia, China, and the International Atomic Energy Association among others.

The historical experiences of Hawai'i‘s Okinawan American (Uchinanchu) community in connection with Okinawa after World War II helped to shape an understanding of their own cultural and ethnic distinctiveness, which was influenced by U.S. policies in Okinawa. In the aftermath of the war, Hawai'i‘s Uchinanchu community worked to provide relief for their brethren in the devastated islands of their homeland. Their efforts were supported and indeed encouraged by the U.S. military. As the U.S. military transformed and rebuilt Okinawa, the U.S. sought to justify the occupation of Okinawa and its concentration of military bases on the islands. One means of doing this was referring to the Uchinanchu contributions to the rebuilding of their homeland as part of the expansion of US soft power. It can be argued that the emergence of a unique Okinawa American identity in Hawai'i in the post-World War II period reflected America's Cold War “public diplomacy” within a liberal multicultural discourse.

The book presents personal accounts by veterans of an Army nuclear weapons storage base in Henoko Village, Okinawa during the 1960's in the context of nuclear weapons history, Cold War tensions, and the proposal to use them in Vietnam. They describe their entrances into the Army, training, leave times, re-entry into civilian life, and illnesses associated with radiation exposure three of them later suffered, one of whom died in 2015.

How did Japan’s border restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic affect Japanese studies? To answer this question, this essay discusses the results of a survey conducted in August 2022.

Seiji Shirane's Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 (forthcoming with Cornell University Press in December 2022) explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Here's the unabridged introduction to the volume.

In the course of his September Central Asia tour, Xi Jinping met with Vladimir Putin for what many expected would be a reprise of their “no limits” declaration, issued when Putin was in Beijing just prior to launching his war on Ukraine. In fact, there were major limits to Xi's support of Putin's war then, and that became even more evident this time around. Putin acknowledged as much. “We highly appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin said. In plain English, Putin was expressing disappointment that China had failed to deliver as expected on their “friendship.” This article examines China's position on Central Asia and Taiwan in a time of crisis.

Coined in 2013, the year the Belt and Road Initiative was first announced, the slogan ‘Amity, Sincerity, Mutual Benefit, and Inclusiveness’ has become ever more present in the speeches of Chinese officials and diplomats. While the use of such phrases is often equated with earlier Japanese discourse to indicate China's alleged imperialist ambitions, this essay calls for nuance in such comparisons through a reconsideration of the history of ‘Asianist’ diplomatic slogans in twentieth-century China.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Euro-American colonialism remade the lives of thousands of Samoan, Melanesian, and Chinese workers on coconut plantations in Samoa. Since plantation discipline was strict, workers resisted the heavy demands on their bodies through a broad arsenal of behaviors, ranging from keeping crops for themselves to making appeals to the state to waging violent attacks on overseers. Resistance against colonial subjection turned workers in Samoa into subjects of their own lives and allowed them to forge bonds of solidarity beyond the spatial, social, and racial boundaries maintained by colonial administrations. In doing so, Samoa's workers shaped their own version of Oceanian globality.

The killing of Abe Shinzo sparked a backlash in Japan against the Unification Church, after the assassin blamed it for his family's destitution and linked the former prime minister to the Korean cult. This has led to a government investigation of the Unification Church, popularly known as the Moonies, that may result in its disbandment in Japan. The scandal has focused attention on the vital role played by Japan in financing the sect founded by Moon Sun Myung, and the strange history that spawned a global empire swaddled in taboo.