The Asian Studies Department of Cornell University is proud to announce the recipients of the 2017 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize competition, concluded on November 1. The prize for a published translator has been awarded to Nina Cornyetz, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Gallatin School of New York University, for her translation of Izumi Kyōka's “Tale of the Enchanted Sword” (妖剣記聞, Yōken Kibun, 1920). Writings by Kyōka (1873-1939), renowned for his tales of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the supernatural, have been known to pose challenges to modern Japanese readers and scholars because of their densely allusive imagery and use of archaic phrases and orthography. Cornyetz's translation, the first into English of this Kyōka text that combines features of both Edo-style and modernist writing, has been particularly successful in capturing the dazzling visual effects of its language.

In 2018, a number of events in Japan and Europe have reassessed the legacy of the 1968 student movement and related phenomena. Generally speaking, “1968”—still considered a symbol of a critique of capitalism, imperialism, and the Cold War world order—is usually associated with left-wing forces. Only in recent years has attention been paid to student organizations opposed to the 1968 left-wing movement. This facet of “1968” is particularly important in Japan, where student groups that rejected the left-wing agenda of organizations such as Zengakuren (Zen Nihon gakusei jichikai sō rengō, All-Japan League of Student Governments) have made political inroads, while the representatives of the left-wing student movement eventually failed to do so.

The Japanese mass media has been reporting a rising number of foreign workers in Japan based on data published by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. The Ministry's data, however, is neither derived from a comprehensive database of foreign workers, nor is it a credible source of information about the foreign workforce. This paper explains how the ministry arrives at its figures, why the reported rapid increase over the past decade is incorrect, and pinpoints flaws in its data collection process. Finally, we suggest a new approach for estimating the total number of foreign workers in Japan at a time when the Japanese government has proposed a significant increase in the number of foreign workers.

In June this year VFP-ROCK (Veterans for Peace Ryukyu-Okinawa Chapter International) drafted a formal letter – military style – based on research by ROCK member Makishi Yoshikazu, pointing out that Marine Corps Air Station Futenma (MCAS Futenma), by having no actual clear zones at either end of its airstrip, is in violation of US Military safety regulations and, for the safety of both the residents living and working around the base and the Marines flying aircraft in and out of the base, ought to be shut down immediately. We mailed signed copies of this letter to eleven US government officials, beginningwith Secretary of Defense James Mattis. We then rewrote the letter in the style of news commentary and published it in The Diplomat in its March 30, 2018 edition. A slightly revised version of that article is, with The Diplomat's permission, printed here.

The article by Onozawa Akane below is adapted from Chapter 3 (Comfort Women and State Prostitution) in Denying the Comfort Women: The Japanese State's Assault on Historical Truth (London: Routledge, 2018). Originally published in Japanese by Ōtsuki Shoten in 2013, the volume was written by prominent Japanese and Korean scholars—several of them contributors to The Asia-Pacific Journal—and edited by Nishino Rumiko, Kim Puja, and Onozawa for the Violence Against Women in War Research Action Center (VAWW RAC) in Tokyo. To place Onozawa's essay in a broader context, we introduce the book as a whole before commenting briefly on the significance of her contribution.

Recent moves by the Abe administration to change the Japanese constitution may result in the most fundamental change to Japanese political life since the 1940s. Although there has been widespread debate on the possible revision of Article 9 – the constitution's Peace Clause – other profound implications of the push for constitutional change have received scant attention. This special issue edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Shinnosuke Takahashi aims to take a broad view of constitutional debates in Japan today by posing two key questions: “What is the purpose of the constitution?” and “What does the constitution mean for a culturally plural and diverse society?”

Dedication: This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Arasaki Moriteru, Professor of Politics at Okinawa University who passed away on March 31, 2018.

For many years in Okinawa, Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma in the heart of Ginowan City has been synonymous with danger. In 2003, when surveying the controversial installation from the air, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld remarked that this, “base is the most dangerous in the world.” On this occasion, Rumsfeld's vantage point was that of someone in flight, such as a U.S. pilot or other flight personnel operating from the base rather than that of nearby residents in Ginowan City, then over 90,000. On the ground, the local people experience danger daily in intensely visceral ways.

In an interview held in August 2017, Tsuneno Yujiro, an activist and writer who experienced futōkō (school non-attendance) and the author of “To Hell with Happy Endings! An Anti-School Manifesto,” said:

The domestic violence (DV) movement in Japan demonstrates one way civil society can influence national policy. The leadership of the DV movement built a large and diverse coalition representing more than 50 DV-related organizations all over Japan, which generated expertise on the ground, autonomy to focus on the issue, and an electoral opportunity for DV law reformers. DV leaders also developed an effective alliance with bipartisan female politicians. By turning their demands into 179 questions addressed to government bureaucrats, they generated responses that enabled women in politics to exercise effective pressure in favor of change. Analyzing this new type of activism, which I call “civic lawmaking,” offers a close look at a fresh form of legislative advocacy and deepens our understanding of the state-society relationship in Japan.

Few personalities in world history have had a more compelling personal story or a greater impact on the world than Temüjin, who rose from destitute circumstances to be crowned as Chinggis Khan in 1206 and became the founder of the world's greatest contiguous land empire. Today, eight and a half centuries after his birth, Chinggis Khan remains an object of personal and collective fascination, and his image and life story are appropriated for the purposes of constructing national identity and commercial profit.

This is a slightly expanded version of the talk delivered by the author upon the occasion of the launch of his The State of the Japanese State at Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ), Tokyo, on 17 October 2018. It traces the evolution of Japan, especially under Abe Shinzo, as a “client state” (defined by Wikipedia as “a state that is economically, politically, or militarily subordinate to another, more powerful state”) of the United States. It considers what I now refer to as Mark One and Mark Two versions of that “client state” in the post-Cold War era, and discusses the persistent challenge to the clientelist frame arising from the Okinawan refusal to submit to it. It raises finally the possibility of either a Mark Three or of Japan's future sloughing off client state status altogether. Taking off from the book, it goes beyond it.

The following interview of Byung-ho Chung Professor at Hanyang University and President of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology, was conducted by American Association of Anthropology Executive Director Ed Liebow prior to the DPRK-US summit. It is revised and updated here with an epilogue reflecting on the summit.

This study applies a governance perspective to examine how China's national ecological civilization framework is implemented at the city level. With Hangzhou, one of China's leading green cities, as a case, the study focuses on how the city's party-state authorities respond to various pressures from the central leadership and from society to improve environmental governance. Hangzhou's government applies a new public management approach with public sector performance contracts, performance reviews, and associated results management procedures that are integrated with a battery of social participation instruments. The city government aims to mitigate contradictory goals relating to the need for continued economic growth and for simultaneous environmental improvements based on plans for ecological civilization development and protection of ‘red’ ecological bottom lines. It is argued that Hangzhou's authorities are testing a novel approach that could contribute to narrowing the ‘implementation gap’ in China's local green politics by enhancing the local party-state's ability to handle new instruments of governance in environmental politics. Available, but rather fragmented data suggest that environmental improvements are occurring, but the link between the new governance framework and these improvements is difficult to establish.

This article examines the systems for designating and containing both the contamination from the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant (NPP) accident and the fear of radiation. This discourse of containment appears in the cinematic images of two fiction films: Land of Hope (Kibō no kuni, 2012) and The Tranquil Everyday (Odayaka na nichijō, 2012). I look at the films' portrayals of the female characters who struggle to confirm and assess radiological danger in so-called “safe” zones. When they voice their fears and challenge the illusion of safety, they themselves are contained and made invisible by the diagnoses of radiophobia, hysteria, and paralyzing fatalism.

One hundred years have passed since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It's surely one of the signal events of the modern era, a project whose significance for humanity is hardly exhausted by its history, including the disastrous, tragic history of Stalinism. A scholarly and curatorial boom in works and exhibits in the centenary reflecting on the impact of the revolution suggests it is not forgotten, even in the former first world, but its legacy remains clouded behind a veil of Cold War hysteria. What complicates matters is that the emotions, and even some of the apparatuses, of that half-remembered, misremembered history are being mobilized in the prosecution of the War on Terror. It may also be that the mad fury of our present makes us too impatient to open ourselves to the aspirations driving that massive transformation of a society still in the midst of war, its population mostly illiterate, desperately cold and hungry, in the throes of awakening to what was their due as human beings. But it's precisely because of the misery and dread produced by unbridled neoliberalism and reckless militarism, along with unmistakable signs of ecological devastation that we, in fact, need to learn about a historic effort to pursue a different vision of modernity—one that insisted on universal literacy and health care, gender and racial equality, and the reimagining of society such that it would both enable and express those goals.

This paper examines the suffrage rights of mukosekisha: Japanese who are not listed in a household registration (koseki). It explains that Japanese who are not listed in a household registration do not enjoy the right to vote unless they are recorded in a resident record (jūmin hyō), which differs from the household registration. Moreover, a provision in the Public Offices Election Act enacted soon after World War II may prevent some Japanese who are not listed in a household registration from exercising their right to vote even if they are recorded in a resident record. This out-dated provision should be amended to allow the right to vote of Japanese who are not listed in a household registration but are recorded in a resident record.

Precis: A translation of an oral autobiography of the life of Usami Osamu (1926-2018), the human rights activist and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit brought, and won in 2001, by men and women whose lives were taken away under Japan's Hansen's Disease (leprosy) absolute lifetime quarantine policy, in effect until 1996, who passed away on April 10th. A portion of his ashes will remain at Nagashima Aiseien National Hansen's Disease Sanatorium in Okayama Prefecture where he lived for almost seventy years and another portion will be placed in his family grave in Aichi prefecture, the reunion with the parents he struggled for throughout his life.

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History, a concise introduction to Japanese history between the middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth, was published in late 2017. In preparing the work, the editors were fortunate to obtain the cooperation of 30 historians from Japan, Europe, Australia and the U.S., who provided succinct yet comprehensive overviews of their field of expertise.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Japan had a New Left protest cycle that paralleled those in western Europe and the United States. The Japanese New Left was separate from the parliamentary Japan Communist Party and drew many of its ideas from Japanese translations of the latest revolutionary New Left literature including works by Regis De Bray (1967), Che Guevara (1968, 1969), Rudi Dutschke (1968), Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1968), Howard Zinn (1968), Stokely Carmichael (1968), Eldridge Cleaver (1969), Alberto Bayo (1969), and Carlos Marighella (1970). Japanese New Left groups identified with student movements in the west and protested about similar issues, including opposition to the Vietnam War and American military bases in Japan, as well as tuition increases, overcrowding, and authoritarian regulations at universities. Frustrated by the Japanese government's intransigence in the face of huge protest demonstrations, they despaired of change through either electoral or street politics, and instead saw revolution as the only alternative. New Left street demonstrations steadily escalated into violent clashes resembling medieval battles. The students wore color-coded crash helmets emblazoned with names of their organizations, carried long fighting poles, and threw paving stones or firebombs at the police. They confronted squads of riot police wearing medieval style helmets, who battled the students with tall aluminum body shields and police batons, supported by water cannon trucks that sprayed fire hoses of water laced with tear gas at the students. At the peak of the protest cycle in 1968-69, Japanese authorities suddenly cracked down with mass arrests and prolonged incarcerations of thousands of students. This turned the tide, in part by producing splits within New Left groups.

This paper analyses the present (2018) state of the struggle between the government of Japan and the government and people of the prefecture of Okinawa, focussing on its most recent phase, since the Okinawan prefectural complaint was dismissed by the Supreme Court in December 2016. Governor Onaga then revoked his 2015 cancellation of the 2013 license to reclaim parts of Oura Bay as site for the base construction and works resumed in April 2017 after one year in suspension. Since then, Governor Onaga has repeatedly declared that he will rescind the license under which those works are being carried out, but has given no indication as to when. Work now continues, at an accelerating pace, and the Governor has recently issued permits allowing ports in Northern Okinawa to be used for transport of construction materials. This paper analyses the apparent contradictions in the Governor's stance and the way they are understood within the protest movement.