This study investigates how former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) tried to reproduce and reinforce their conservative and nationalist ideologies from 2012 to 2020. Conducting critical discourse analysis on official statements, speeches, and remarks at press conferences highlights the strategies that Abe and his sympathizers used to promote and legitimize the idea of “Take back Japan (Nippon wo torimodosu).” This study also elucidates the implications of the party's efforts to reproduce and disseminate its campaign slogan in official narratives.

On July 28, 2021, Okinawa Prefecture's governor authorised coral transplantation at the construction site of the controversial Futenma Replacement Facility (FRF) in Henoko. Two days later, he revoked this authorisation. The coral have become a contested political issue, linked to the larger conflict between the Japanese government and Okinawa Prefecture. Diving into the waters of Ōura Bay and the history of the base issue, this article explores how Japanese authorities have ignored Okinawan protest, science, and the life of other species during the construction. This political strategy of ignorance aims at frustrating opposition and framing the FRF as inevitable.

This article examines human experimentation under Japanese colonial rule, highlighting the practices by Japanese medical doctors at medical educational institutions in Manchuria in the years 1911-45. Although it proclaimed a civilizing mission in the colonies, colonial medicine exploited the bodies of the colonized for medical research and education. This article details unethical civilian practices which began well before the well-known, systematic atrocities of the Kwantung Army's Unit 731 in Manchuria. Bodies in the service of empire were long a part of the violent everyday life under colonial rule. The medical practices, experiments, and dissections carried out on the Chinese were more ethically problematic than those conducted in the home country. Over the period of colonial subjugation, such practices became steadily more radical. Colonial medicine, associated with physical experimentation, expropriated and endangered Chinese bodies. More importantly, the practices in medical colleges became the basis for Unit 731's human experimentation on Chinese using bacteriological and chemical weapons. The use of the human body is deeply intertwined with the interests of the power relations that governed the colony. This research shows how colonized bodies became material for the Japanese Empire.

The 26th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, meeting in Glasgow in November 2021, attracted a high level of global attention because it was, in effect, a meeting uniquely tasked with finding a formula for human survival. This paper considers the proposals from Japan and Australia. Both accepted the need to achieve zero carbon emission by 2050, but neither offered realistic proposals for how that would be done, and the Japanese formula tied the move towards zero carbon to drastic expansion of its nuclear energy sector. This paper discusses the most recent Japanese government energy policy paper, with particular attention to the way that carbon and nuclear objectives are coordinated, and locates Japan and Australia in the context of the global division between pro- and anti-nuclear energy countries.

This article is the second in a two part-series. Part 1 introduced Katō Kōko as the pivotal figure behind the World Heritage inscription process and the controversial historical narratives of “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Using Hashima Island as an example, part 1 criticised Katō's omission of the history of Korean and other forced labor, and discussed the significance of Katō's historical revisionism in the Industrial Heritage Information Centre in Tokyo. Part 2 explores Katō's leading roles in several heritage related bodies in Japan. This allowed her to present historical evidence selectively and to interpret it to support her celebratory narrative of the Japanese industrial revolution while denying the relevant history of foreign forced labor. Her official roles were critical in creating platforms for neo-nationalism that legitimate radical historical revisionism. Katō's cooperation with UNESCO is demonstrably dishonest and she should be removed from her heritage related roles in order for Japan to honour its commitment at the time of World Heritage inscription to acknowledge the history of Koreans and others who were forced to work at these sites during wartime.