Compelling women's fiction in Japan hardly began with its two brightest contemporary stars, Kawakami Mieko and Murata Sayaka. Tawada Yoko won the Akutagawa Prize back in 1993 and her work is widely read outside Japan (Tawada has long lived in Germany and writes in German and Japanese). Ogawa Yoko won in 1990 for her novel Pregnancy Diary (Ninshin karendaa, 妊娠 カレンダー). In 2004 the Akutagawa went to two young women, Wataya Risa (19) and Kanehara Hitomi (20). There have been English translations of fiction by Japanese women for decades.

As long as U.S. military bases have existed in Okinawa, sex workers have served the troops. What has varied over the decades has been the women's backgrounds, their working conditions, and their degree of agency. During the Pacific War, the Japanese military notoriously set up a “comfort women” system in which they enslaved thousands of women from Japan's colonies and occupied territories to supply sex to Japanese soldiers. After the war, during the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa from 1945 until 1972, prostitution was legal, and thousands of Okinawan women were pushed into sex work around the U.S. bases in order to provide for themselves and their families. After the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, Filipina migrants replaced Okinawan women in the entertainment districts around the U.S. military bases. A common belief has been that these women were trafficking victims. But the story of Daisy, excerpted from Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, illustrates how the migrants also had agency.

The Japanese military was led throughout its history from the 1880s until the end of World War II in 1945 by a small group of elite officers who graduated from the Army War College and then served as staff officers and/or commanders in the Army Ministry, the General Staff headquarters, and in field armies in Manchuria, China proper, and elsewhere. These officers were trained to do careful research into the comparative militaries, economies and logistics of their own, their allies, and their potential enemies' strength for war. The point of this essay is to explore why highly-trained officers, who learned from their own observations and research about Japan's and its wartime allies' weaknesses vis-à-vis the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China, ignored what they learned and went to war between 1931 and 1945 with these larger and economically more advanced nations. That is, why did the brains of the Japanese army, with help from many staff officers in Japan's navy and civil bureaucracy, lead Japan into a war it could not win? Did they really believe, as they often said they did, that superior spirit could overcome superior technology and production, or were they motivated by the desire for advancement—wars brought promotions. Or what else may have motivated them? I believe that they knew they could not win the war, but went to war anyway.

In the context of transnational production, China remains the heart of Foxconn's global electronics empire and its profitability. For seventeen consecutive years between 2002 and 2018, Taiwanese-owned Foxconn ranked number one as China's largest exporter. Today it operates more than thirty industrial parks across coastal and interior China, creating a 24-hour, high-speed production network predicated on vertical integration and flexible coordination. Most of the world's TVs, desktop monitors and laptops are assembled in China. The United States remains by far its largest export market, as well as a major source of the US trade imbalance with China.

This essay focuses on the historical memory of Korean repatriation in postwar Japan, by examining the commemoration of the Ukishima-maru incident in which thousands of forced laborers died when their ship sank after striking a mine. We show how local memory activists in Maizuru and Shimokita mobilised to present an alternative narrative to that on display at the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum which overlooks Korean repatriation. It shows how despite limited means they were able to build a network of memory activists that transcends local and national borders.