This article uses same-sex marriage litigation currently before the courts in Japan as a vehicle for showing how a particular form of lawsuit—the claim for damages against the state for tortious legislative inaction—has become one of the leading tools for constitutional litigation in Japan.

August 15 remains an important day in Korean and Japanese cultures for the two peoples, the former commemorating their liberation from colonial rule and the latter lamenting the end of the tragedy that had befallen their nation. On this day in 1945, the emperor declared his country's intention to accept the Allied forces' surrender terms. This date, however, is a myth of sorts as the Koreans were soon after forced into division and further subjugation at the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, who divided postwar occupation responsibilities. For the Japanese, the emperor's unprecedented broadcast may have ended the bombing of Japanese cities, but it did not bring about a general return of Japanese soldiers from Pacific War battlefields. These days, however, the day is marked for concluding two tragic periods of their histories, but with very different sentiments. In this article the author traces his observations on how the Japanese and Koreans observe August 15 in contemporary times.

This article assesses local tensions that plague the U.S.-centered hub-and-spokes security framework in the Western Pacific region, which finds its most concrete expression in increasingly vulnerable legacy installations. I start by considering how people living outside the fence in places like Guam and Okinawa have tended to see the U.S. military, while summarizing global trends in U.S. base expansion and contraction outside of the continental United States (OCONUS). I tie this past to the most common dilemmas of global basing manifesting today, explain how these dilemmas have been understood, and highlight core concerns undergirding most base protest cultures. In the absence of sweeping policy changes to legal structures that disenfranchise militarized civilians in the most heavily fortified islands in the U.S. global base network, changing the way recent history is represented at U.S. controlled public sites could catalyze meaningful change within perennially troubled relationships between the U.S. military and overburdened host communities.

In this article Izumikawa Yuki, an international relations expert, dispels two core misconceptions undergirding the notion that China is a particularly belligerent state that unilaterally engages in aggressive behavior threatening the national security of Japan. The first is that the Senkaku Islands, or Diaoyu Islands as they are known in China, are Japan's territory, on which China has been illegally or unfairly encroaching. The other misconception is that if and when China violently grabs Taiwan for itself, preventing Taiwan from gaining independence in some kind of “Taiwan contingency,” Japan will have the duty and the right to defend Taiwan's independence. Even only equipped with a simple map of Taiwan showing the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands close by, and having the knowledge that Taiwan was originally taken away from China by the Empire of Japan during the war of aggression known as the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), would make one suspicious of the “China threat theory,” but Izumikawa provides readers with some neglected facts concerning international law and history, and pokes holes in the narrative that is broadcasted daily by the mass media.

This article studies the narratives of counter-urbanization as presented in contemporary South Korean documentaries. In recent decades, there has been a surge of ethnographic media productions with a return-to-nature theme, highlighting urban-to-rural migration. What appears as a Thoreauesque pursuit of pastoral life in the woods reveals the traumatic aftereffects of the 1960s-80s rapid industrialization as well as the 1990s Asian Financial Crisis that resulted in layoffs, bankruptcies, homelessness, and migration. This article analyzes a selection of counter-urbanist documentaries through the dual lens of social class and masculinity, especially considering South Korea's hypermasculine industrialization and neoliberal ethos of survivalist individualism. It also examines cross-generational perspectives on counter-urbanization to recover human agency.

This article explores the evolving rhetoric of commercial whaling advocates in Japan and Norway, who frame whaling as essential for global, national, and personal health. I show that proponents leverage sustainability discourse and health narratives to present whaling as beneficial for marine ecosystems, national food security, and individual well-being. By coopting the language of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and casting whaling as “healthy,” the whaling industry and its backers challenge the anti-whaling hegemony, portraying it as irrational and unscientific. While the alleged environmental benefits of whaling have been significant to the rhetorical arsenal of the industry since at least the 1990s, a growing emphasis on the personal health benefits of whalemeat suggests the opening of a new front in struggles to influence public opinion.

With the embers of the Johnny Kitagawa scandal still glowing, more victims of sexual abuse have come forward with disturbing claims about a major figure in Japan's entertainment industry. One of them talks to David McNeill.

Shanghai in the early 1930s was a city teeming with intrigue and decadence. Amidst this backdrop, Doctor B, a flamboyant physician, invites writer Shimura Yōhei on a late-night excursion to the mysterious Fortune Club. Promising an experience unlike any other, Doctor B leads Shimura through the shadowy streets to a lavish dance hall, a sanctuary for Shanghai's international elite. As the night unfolds, Shimura is mesmerized by the club's opulence and the eclectic mix of patrons. However, a chance encounter with a Portuguese dancer named Kate unveils a sinister secret lurking beneath the surface. Guided by a cryptic hint, Shimura ventures into the dark and eerie basement, where he discovers a hidden world of unimaginable horror—a prison for women ensnared in a web of exploitation and despair. Itō's work critiques capitalist exploitation and the underclass's struggles, challenging the superficial and exoticized depictions of Shanghai by his contemporaries. Through gripping narratives that reveal the exploitation beneath Shanghai's glamorous surface, Itō aimed to counter the prevailing bourgeois narratives and expose the harsh realities of life in Shanghai, presenting a nuanced critique of social inequalities and the revolutionary potential of the city's conflicts.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court of Japan has dealt the conservative right another blow in the comfort women issue. In this article, David McNeill places the court's decision to uphold an order forcing the city of Nagoya to pay its promised share of the budget for the 2019 Aichi Triennale — despite the controversial artworks displayed there — in the context of a broader campaign by the right to realign history in accordance with Japanese government objectives.

China's consistent message to the U.S. since Donald Trump 's election is the need for deeper cooperation. But Trump and his hawkish advisers and Congressmembers seem bent on a trade war and closer ties to Taiwan. His strategy is that once the Middle East and Ukraine are “solved,” he will be positioned to force Xi Jinping's hand. But the Chinese have options for dealing with U.S. economic pressure. Still, Trump might bargain on U.S. security ties if he can get a deal on trade. The most likely outcome is more tension in U.S.-China relations and a further drift toward Cold War-era competition.

On November 23, 2023, the Seoul High Court issued a ruling excluding Japan's state immunity and fully accepting the claims of Japanese military ‘comfort women’ victims, following the one made by the Seoul Central District Court to the same effect on January 8, 2021. The rulings of the Korean courts are groundbreaking, contributing to the establishment of customary international law by clearly declaring that state immunity does not apply when a sovereign act of the state constitutes a serious violation of human rights, and furthermore, when it constitutes a tort. The Korean courts' rulings in turn reflect the international community's legal judgment regarding Japanese military ‘comfort women’ over the past 30 years. The Japanese government did not respond to the lawsuits at all and condemned the rulings as violating international law, claiming state immunity. However, the Japanese government's condemnation is just a self-contradiction, as it enacted an act embodying the customary international law that foreign countries are not exempt from jurisdiction over court proceedings in case of torts.

China's international position is quite strong: it has leverage over Russia, which is increasingly dependent on China for economic and military aid; and it is in a strong bargaining position with the European Union, which relies on Chinese trade and investment. These circumstances might not seem conducive to improvement in China-U.S. relations, especially since many longstanding issues, such as on Taiwan and trade, remain unresolved. But progress in some areas, notably military-to-military talks, have (as Chinese officials see it) “stabilized” relations. This article argues that if the U.S. develops a China policy that emphasizes finding common ground rather than, as at present, devising ways to contain and deter China, some elements of China's foreign policy might change and serious tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea islands could be calmed. Furthermore, it addresses incentives–in particular, U.S. acceptance of the Chinese principle of partnership, not rivalry– to wean

Artist Tetsu Takeda left Japan for America in 1986 and returned to Japan in 2011. Shortly after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Takeda started identifying himself as a “professional artist” and only doing “high art” by rethinking life and our role as human beings interfering with nature. Takeda is an eccentric collector of ocean rubbish flushed ashore by waves. In his tiny home studio, he creates various big-eyed rubbish creatures in diverse forms, shapes, dimensions, and colors in his unorthodox way reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein in this lab. For him, doing new artistic endeavors is a ritual of giving life—to “vitalize” rubbish—and inhabiting a reformulated society of nature, whether privately (in his home) or publicly (in galleries).

Critical media studies have long understood the role of the media in not just illuminating disputes between nations but in inflaming them. The media can be used to inform or distort the background and causes of conflict and arouse public opinion. This article surveys the potentially calamitous decline of public perceptions in China and Japan toward the other and asks if the media is a monitor of this decline or a party to it.

This article interrogates the ways in which two political books written by elites in the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) take different tacks to represent their party as trustworthy, responsible, and competent against the background of the liberal opposition's political difficulties since 2012. Focusing on two books published in the lead-up to the 2021 general election by former Prime Minister Kan Naoto and then-leader of the CDP Edano Yukio, it argues that the liberal opposition parties in Japan are, on top of the more commonly understood institutional pressures, constrained by demands that the narrative is a conventionally satisfying one when crafting claims about their viability as an alternative to government.

IM.G. Sheftall's oral history of the dawn of the nuclear age, Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses, is published this month. The book is based on interviews Sheftall, a historian and professor at Shizuoka History, conducted over eight years with dozens of hibakusha survivors and others in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Sheftall, who previously wrote an acclaimed oral history of wartime kamikaze pilots, said he was prompted to take on his latest project after an epiphany during U.S. President Barack Obama's historic visit to Hiroshima in 2016. Over 545 pages, the book plunges into the horrors of the bomb, its victims and its occasional ironies, among them that a Japanese scientist, Hideki Yukawa, had indirectly helped the development of the bomb by being the first to mathematically show the existence of strong nuclear forces in the universe.

Sheftall notes that while Hiroshima was considered a military target, most of its residents were too young or too old to evacuate; the population had fallen from 420,000 in 1942 to 245,000 in 1945, leaving mostly children, caregivers, adults in war work, government employees and 40,000 soldiers. The book makes no pretense at being ‘objective’ on the subject of nuclear weapons, describing bodies carbonized and blown apart by their impact. “If you are going to defend these weapons’ use, it is morally imperative that you own that image,” Sheftall says, after dismissing antiseptic alternatives such as ‘vaporized.’

“Turn it around in your head a bit. Imagine it happening to ten thousand children or even a single child. Imagine it happening to your child.”

The following contains edited extracts from an interview with David McNeill.

On 3 December 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, the first time such an order had been given since the country democratized in 1987. Koreans and international observers alike are puzzled as to why Yoon would take such a drastic measure. This article argues that competing visions of the history of South Korea 's military dictatorship era, in which the Korean right views the left as pro-North Korea and the left views the right as Japanese collaborators and an obstacle to democratization, contributed to an atmosphere in which cooperation among the two major political parties is near impossible. Within this setting, Yoon in particular worked closely with New Right academics who seek to justify previous military dictators and seemingly became taken with contemporary far-right election fraud conspiracies. As a result, Yoon came to see martial law as a legitimate means to advance his agenda.

Who is allowed to practice medicine? This question recurred in different forms throughout Japan's modern era, reflecting fundamental changes in how people provided and received medical care. This article explores one key issue that underlined this question: a persistent doctor shortage, whose causes and form changed over time—from the late wartime era, through the immediate postwar rehabilitation years, to the era of rapid economic growth. Rather than focusing on issues of policy, the article examines personal histories, revealing how shortages led to various doctor substitutes, some legitimate and some not, in a process whereby doctor care came to be seen as a basic right.

Despite being a party to the Refugee Convention since 1981, Japan has historically admitted very few asylum seekers. However, recently the country's total protection rate has increased, from 2.3% in 2020 to 52% in 2022. This article explores this seemingly dramatic shift in Japan's refugee policy, tying the increased rate of asylum admissions to the country's broader foreign policy in the face of recent geopolitical challenges in Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, while outlining the diverging pathways of admission utilized in each case.

This paper critically investigates the photographic representation of the US military presence in 1960s-80s Korea by Kuwabara Shisei (1936-), one of the most eminent Japanese photojournalists who has worked in Korea since 1964. The paper specifically discusses a collection of images of the United States Forces Korea (USFK) in his 1986 photobook Kankoku gen'ei (Korea 1964-86) which features the most comprehensive work he produced in Korea. Through close visual analysis and examination of the pictorial narrative that Kuwabara presents throughout the collection of USFK images in the photobook, the paper explores how Kuwabara's images tap into the different kinds of Cold War imaginaries from the existing visual iteration of the USFK in more widely circulating mass media, novels, and movies in Korea at the time. In addition, it underscores USFK images of Kuwabara as his staunch statement against the global presence of the US military. Kuwabara crafts his argument with the hindsight of a Japanese veteran photojournalist who had gained keen insight into the global American military base network through his experiences in Japan, Vietnam, and Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s. Overall, through close analysis of Kuwabara's photographs, the paper sheds light on the value of looking at photographic representations of the US military for building an understanding of cultural implication of the US military presence in Cold War Korea.