Horrified by the sight of the lynching of African Americans, Abel Meeropol wrote a poem called Strange Fruit that is perhaps better known in the form of the 1939 rendition by Billie Holiday. African Americans continued to suffer lynching for many decades after the American Civil War—mostly in the South, but also in many other states all around the country. Being black meant risking being turned into a strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, giving off the smell of burnt flesh as it swung in the southern breeze. Being black meant close proximity to death—by accidentally stumbling into a white person, by not adhering to prescribed etiquette, by not addressing a white person properly, or simply by making eye contact with a white woman. In a word, lynching could and did take place at the whim of certain white people. Hardly any explanation, let alone justification, was required. In some states, a lynching would be announced in advance in the local newspaper so that white people could gather and enjoy a picnic while watching it. Men and women, old and young, and boys and girls participated, eager and curious witnesses to the spectacle of black bodies being beaten, severed, carved, sliced, burned, and mutilated. Today, half a century after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, great numbers of black Americans die at the hands of police or while in police custody, reminding us that to erase a belief and the system that it is founded upon takes more than the declaration of a new law.

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.

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).

This story was first published in the February 1976 issue of the literary magazine Gunzō and later anthologized in the Collected Works of Hayashi Kyōko (Hayashi Kyōko zenshū) (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2005). The original title, Nanja monja no men, draws on the Kantō area dialectal expression “nanja monja,” a contracted form of “najō iu mono ja” (What sort of thing is this?), referring to a large, legendary tree.

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.

Chiri Yukie (1903-22) was born in Noboribetsu, Hokkaido to Chiri Takakichi and Nami. Nami was the daughter of a Hokkaido Ainu grandsire, Kan'nari. Yukie was the older sister of the linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-61). When she was five and six years old, she lived in Horobetsu with her grandmother, the great bard Monashinouku. Yukie grew up listening to recitations in the oral tradition as narrated by Monashinouku and later also by her adoptive mother Kan'nari Matsu (1875-1961), Nami's sister. Starting in 1909, she and Monashinouku lived with Matsu at the Episcopal Church compound in Chikabumi in the suburbs of Asahikawa in Hokkaido. After a total of seven years of normal and higher normal school education, she attended Asahikawa Girls Vocational School for three years, graduating in 1910.

Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was an inheritor and preserver of Ainu culture. He was a collector of Ainu folk utensils, teacher of the prominent Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke, and recorder and transcriber of epics, songs, and tales from the last of the bards. In addition, Kayano was the compiler of an authoritative Ainu-Japanese dictionary, a chanter of old epics, and the founder of a museum of Ainu material culture as well as of an Ainu language school and a radio station. He was the first (and so far the only) National Diet member to address the assembly in Ainu. He was also a fierce fighter against the construction of a dam in his village that meant destruction of a sacred ritual site as well as of nature. Finally, Kayano was an inspiration behind today's appreciation of Ainu culture, in which young people, Ainu, and non-Ainu of various nationalities, join to celebrate and explore aboriginal cultures and their contemporary development. This movement includes youthful attempts to create new forms that combine traditional Ainu oral performances with contemporary music and dance. Ainu Rebels, a creative song and dance troupe that formed in 2006, for example, is constituted mostly of Ainu youth but also includes Japanese and foreigners. The group draws on Ainu oral tradition adapted to hip hop and other forms and also engages in artistic activities that combine traditional Ainu art with contemporary artistic elements.

Sakiyama Tami (1954-), real name Taira Kuniko, was born on Iriomote Island, the largest of the Yaeyama island group in Okinawa Prefecture, where she lived until age fourteen when her family moved to Koza (present-day Okinawa City). Sakiyama graduated from the Department of Law, Economics, and Literature at the University of the Ryukyus. She began publishing in Okinawan periodicals in 1979 and in mainland Japanese literary magazines, a conventional means of launching a literary career, starting in 1988.

Stocks of Pacific Bluefin tuna continue to decline to dangerous levels, with figures published in an International Scientific Committee report in April estimating that spawning stock levels are now less than three percent of their unfished levels. In line with international recommendations, Japan, which consumes 80 percent of the world's tuna, has implemented measures to counter the trend. However, some experts question their efficacy, and warn that, if current catch levels continue, Bluefin may well be a leading topic of discussion at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) when members meet in Johannesburg later this year,.

Energy is the master resource, the sine qua non for all resource extraction, material production, mobility, and every other sphere of economic activity. Mounting empirical evidence and expert interdisciplinary analyses show that the present energy economy poses unparalleled positive and negative externalities. In response to these crises and opportunities, the global system is undergoing multiple energy revolutions. The general trend is towards convergence on disaster-resilient, low-carbon infrastructure, including distributed heat and power systems and other new networks. And post 3-11 Japan is emerging as a leader in this movement.

While the high drama of the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election has grabbed international headlines, Japan has quietly completed an election that may also have far-reaching implications. In the elections for the Upper House of the Diet (Japan's parliament) on July 10, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partners won 162 seats, which, together with Diet seats not up for election and the seats of sympathetic but unaffiliated members, give the coalition a two-thirds majority in the Upper House. It already had a two-thirds majority in the Lower House.