Okinawa Prefecture comprises more than one hundred islands with a population of about 1,400,000. The islands reach to the southernmost tip of Japan where the climate is subtropical. In 1945, after the end of the Pacific War, the U.S. placed Okinawa under military occupation and constructed an extensive network of bases there. The American military seized many privately-owned lands for this purpose, violating basic human rights and igniting widespread protests. Relations between the American military and local residents were strained, to say the least. Yet, even under these circumstances, large numbers of American soldiers and Okinawan women fell in love, married, and moved to the United States. Okinawa's G.I. Brides: Their Lives in America explores this little-studied aspect of postwar history during the U. S. occupation period involving multiple confrontations between the U.S. military and local residents before Okinawa reverted to Japanese administration in 1972. The book presents interviews of women who discuss their lives in the U.S., their opinions of America, and their feelings about Okinawa. The original Japanese version, Okinawa: umi wo watatta Beihei hanayome-tachi, was published by Kōbunken in 2000. The English version based on it was completed in 2016 and published in 2017.

This essay describes a campaign by nationalist Japanese journalist Komori Yoshihisa against a public symposium and workshop on historical memory and reconciliation in East Asia held at George Washington University in 2003. When conservative politicians, led from behind the scenes by current prime minister Abe Shinzo, alleged anti-Japan bias in the Diet (parliament), the cosponsor and funder of the workshop, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, wilted under intense political pressure from the Right and withdrew support for the book project. A counterprotest in defense of academic freedom by senior American Japan specialists revived the workshop only to have the Foreign Ministry intervene. Funder interference—insistence on progovernment authors—undermined the project and the essay collection based on conference papers was never published. Fear of the Right led American and Japanese professors to reject a highly qualified fellowship applicant in 2015 and still haunts prominent bilateral intellectual exchange competitions. This essay's scrutiny of the Komori Affair leads to other contemporary concerns, such as the integrity of peer review in a context of funder intervention and the compromise of US academic partners dependent on intellectual exchange activities bankrolled by foreign governments.

2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the Korean March 1 independence movement. I never thought that in such an important year Japan would experience such a vicious explosion of hate not only towards the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), but also towards the Republic of Korea (ROK).

Ever since his debut as a politician when elected to the lower house of the Diet in 1993, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has stood in the vanguard within the Liberal Democratic Party of a faction championing denial of Japan's war of aggression and the history of the Japanese military's sex slavery and the Nanjing Massacre. Since Abe has been prime minister for a total of eight years, first in 2006-2007 and then from the end of 2012 to the present, the current situation may be the inevitable conclusion to his reign. Distortion and denial of the history of Japanese military sex slavery under Abe's administration has spread through the media to general Japanese society. It has now extended to denial of “forced mobilization” as a whole, and as hate speech intensifies on the streets and in public media including the Internet, right-wingers have even begun to propagate historical revisionism overseas in the name of “history wars.”