Chiu Chin-po, or Chō Chin-bo (周金波) as he was known in Japan, was born in Keelung, Taiwan, in January 1920—twenty-five years after Japan acquired the island as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-1895. His mother took him to Tokyo when he was three, in 1923, to join her husband who was studying dentistry at Nihon University. In September that year, Tokyo was hit by the Great Kanto Earthquake that killed 100,000 people. The Chiu family was among those affected, and returned to Taiwan. Chiu attended “public school,” the elementary school for Taiwanese children, in Keelung and a few other cities. He recalled being bullied because he did not understand Taiwanese.

For more than two decades, the Asia-Pacific Journal has paid close attention to the “Okinawa problem.” However, today that “problem” becomes increasingly complex and difficult to grasp, even as it enters a major, possibly decisive, moment. The more the crisis deepens, the less it is covered by mainstream national and global media. This essay resumes the situation as of August 2018, and reflects on the significance of the 27 July move by Okinawa prefecture towards halting base construction works at Henoko-Oura Bay.

The all-pervasive PR blitz surrounding China's strategic campaign to resurrect and expand ancient Eurasian trade routes — by land and sea — known as “One Belt, One Road,” is a hot topic among eager foreign businesspeople, as well as those who view it with a more sceptical eye, such as diplomats, military strategists and China watchers worldwide.

The definition of “silk road” is broad, including both the original land-based caravan routes from Xi'an through Central and West Asia, the Middle East and Europe, as well as the so-called Maritime Silk Road that linked the South China Sea, South Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

Donald Trump's plan for a more muscular US nuclear posture got a ringing endorsement from the increasingly right-wing government of Japan. Not long after the Trump administration released its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in early February, Foreign Minister Taro Kono said he “highly appreciates” the new approach to US nuclear weapons policy, including the emphasis on low-yield nuclear options the United States and Japan can rely on to respond to non-nuclear threats.

On September 5, Nishioka Tsutomu, a former professor at Tokyo Christian University, took the stand for the first time at Tokyo District Court. Former Asahi reporter Uemura Takashi had filed a libel lawsuit against Nishioka and Bungei Shunjū in January 2015.

For many people outside the South Korean popular music (K-pop) world, the December 2017 death of pop star Kim Jonghyun was a sad, but abstract event. Jonghyun, and dozens more like him, is a type of Korean celebrity known as an “idol.” In addition to being popular within Korea, idols are the public face of K-pop, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. This has made idols into incarnations of Korea and Korean culture, and brought the public's powerful disciplining gaze to bear on these young performers. In this paper, we explore how characteristics of life in contemporary Korea—including a high suicide rate, and intense pressures in education and employment—compound with idols' years of intense training in singing and dancing without adequate attention to physical, much less mental, health. Although this is the first incident of an A-list K-pop idol committing suicide, we propose that the nature of contemporary Korean celebrity, together with specific factors defining the lives of Korean youth, create an environment where suicide may become even more prevalent, escalating Korea's suicide rate, which is already among the world's highest. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of Jonghyun's suicide on K-pop fans.

A series of incidents — including the theft of an M16 in 2014 and numerous attempts to board civilian aircraft carrying live ammunition last year — has raised concerns that the U.S. military on Okinawa is failing to manage securely its weapons in Japan.

Documents obtained from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) under the Freedom of Information Act reveal how a marine, believed to be a Chief Warrant Officer 3, stole an automatic rifle and bullets, barricaded himself within his home and threatened to kill himself and possibly a fellow service member.

From a political perspective, a constitution can be seen not only as a promulgation of basic law, but also as a political act: a seizure of power. Most modern constitutions in the tradition of the Magna Carta (though not those promulgated by dictators) aim to seize power from kings and/or aristocrats and place it under the limits of law. The Constitution of Japan was also such a power seizure, carried out by a short-lived alliance between The US Occupation forces and (a part of) the Japanese people. Thus it should not be surprising that the Japanese political class sees it as having been “forced on” them. That's what good constitutions do. Almost from the time it was ratified, Japanese conservatives have been trying to promote constitutional revision that would return the country to something closer to the authoritarian condition it was under during the reign of the Meiji Constitution. This is going on as this is being written, so one can only speculate how it will turn out…

In June 2018, the BBC broadcast a documentary called Japan's Secret Shame, a distressing tale of sexual violence toward women pegged to the experience of Ito Shiori. The documentary, by one of the world's most respected broadcasters, was the climax so far of Ito's struggle to win recognition and justice for rape victims in Japan, but it inadvertently served to highlight how little impact she has made in her home country.

We present this dossier on fiction-writer Tsushima Yūko (1947~2016) just as two new volumes of her writings have appeared in print. Two stories came out in Of Dogs and Walls in February 2018 in Penguin Classics, followed by Territory of Light (光の領分, 1979) in April 2018. Both by Geraldine Harcourt, these new translations build on works originally translated in the 1980s, Child of Fortune (寵児, 1982) and The Shooting Gallery (1988). These stories, like the works in this dossier, offer different points of entry into Tsushima's constellation of writings than earlier texts. New translations not only amplify our view of Tsushima's range. They also commemorate her work two years after her 2016 death, and join an exciting array of new translations into English of works by other female writers including Mizumura Minae, Shibasaki Tomoko, Tawada Yōko and Murata Sayaka—works that Tsushima's writing helped create an audience for in the 1970s. Our title, recalling Tsushima's use of classical languages, is meant to suggest the constant connection of memory to textuality that we see in her work: in remembering, reading.

In the wake of the recognition of the lack of relief measures and medical support for atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) residing in South Korea, some Japanese dedicated themselves to assuring that Korean victims received subsidized medical treatment. This study assesses the significance of Japanese civil society-based medical support implemented by an anti-nuclear and relief organization, Kakkin Kaigi, and a Hiroshima-based doctor, Dr. Kawamura Toratarō. It also analyzes Japanese – South Korean citizen cooperation and the Japanese governmental relief program for hibakusha. In particular, it explains how Japanese grassroots movements succeeded in providing long-term medical support and eventually assuring that the Japanese government extend relief to long-neglected Korean victims.

“When journalism is silent, literature must speak,” in the words of Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma, whose reporting on the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Timor-Leste (East Timor) broke the silence about the killings in Indonesia.

In 1965-66, as many as a million Indonesians, and perhaps more, died in a wave of violence following the seizure of power by General Suharto. The events are now well covered in scholarly work in English. Army officers spurred on killings of suspected leftists and many more were arrested for their political views, becoming “tapol” (political prisoners, from the Indonesian phrase tahanan politik). Several scholars have also pointed to the role of the United States government in encouraging the Indonesian army to carry out the mass killings, a complicity highlighted decades ago and confirmed by recently-declassified US government documents.

Contemporary Australia is a case of dependent, high-technology liberal militarization, but with distinctive characteristics pointing to a model that must look beyond standard concerns with increasing national defense budgets, more and better weapons systems, an “exceptionalist” approach to immigration security and a predilection for use of military force in international affairs.

In a world and time where militarization is a global norm embedded in globe-spanning military alliances and world-wide networks of foreign military bases, discerning the lineaments of one particular national instance can be both difficult and potentially misleading. In liberal democracies, national self-conceptions resist identification with the harsh implications of reliance on, or valorization of, military force, unless it can be viably represented as defense of freedom, just war, or wars against unspeakable Others. And in the case of liberal democracies originating in a settler state with ongoing unrecognized conquest of indigenous peoples – think Australia, the United States, Canada and Israel – the racially inflected violence at the foundations of state-formation and national identity continues to ramify through the default settings of contemporary foreign policy. All three qualities distinguish the contemporary pattern of Australian militarization from the standard versions of either exceptionalist or liberal militarization.

This is an excerpt from “Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925-2015”. The book, which was published in May 2018, is based on a series of interviews with a Japanese man who was born in 1925 and served in the Japanese army before being interned in Siberia following Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. This excerpt describes his experience as a soldier in Manchuria and his journey to Siberia after being conscripted into the army in November 1944.

Among the two million and more young men who went to Vietnam as soldiers, those dozens who came home to write about the Vietnam War evolved a poetry which deserves to be better known—allied to, but distinctively different from other anti-war poetry of the time. This piece considers the fact that American soldier poetry was not merely dedicated to battle and battlefield fraternity, but was emblematic of a frequently ambivalent engagement with the enemy and with the Vietnamese civilian population. Because the poems are their own best witness, I quote freely from combat veterans Doug Anderson, W.D. Ehrhart, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, and others, choosing to look more at those with recognizable literary merit and at those for whom the flow of poetry did not dry up after one or two books. I also include the category-defying poetry of John Balaban–a conscientious objector who went straight to the heart of conflict for a term of engagement equal in exposure and intensity to that of the other poets I discuss. I will be looking at Vietnam War poetry both before and after 2003, narrowing my focus to a small group of poets whose war experience, full of guilt and regret, led them to a post-war body of work expressing an extraordinary subsequent interest in the country of their former enemy, and in its art, culture, and people. This move was new, and not duplicated by other generations of war poets.

In the next 30 to 50 years, rising sea levels caused by global warming will subsume low-lying islands in the Pacific Ocean. Inhabitants will have to relocate, but there are few choices. Among nations (with the exception of Fiji and New Zealand) there is little preparation for the inevitable migration of Pacific Islanders. Which nations should commit to the processes of equitable relocation? The following article will address this question through historical context and colonial occupation; current legal debates surrounding climate change and maritime migration; and the potential rights of “deterritorialized” states, such as retention of exclusive economic zones. Historical context includes an examination of U.S. insular territories in the Pacific and the continued exercise of presidential authority over island possessions.

Plagued by congestion and pollution, China's cities are exploring models of transportation that are more sustainable in their social, environmental and climate impacts. Some have emerged as global leaders, such as Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai, which in 2017 won an international award for its municipal bike-sharing scheme. More recently Shenzhen, a major city north of Hong Kong, electrified its entire fleet of public buses, gaining worldwide recognition.

On 14 May 2018 the Japanese government's Council for Ainu Policy Promotion accepted a report sketching the core features of a much-awaited new Ainu law which the Abe government hopes to put in place by 2020. The law is the outcome of a long process of debate, protest and legislative change that has taken place as global approaches to indigenous rights have been transformed. In 2007, Japan was among the 144 countries whose vote secured the adoption of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: a declaration which (amongst other things) confirms the rights of indigenous peoples to the land they traditionally occupied and the resources they traditionally used, and to restitution for past dispossession. As a response to this declaration, in 2008 both houses of the Japanese parliament voted unanimously (if rather belatedly) to recognize the Ainu people as an indigenous people, and the government embarked on a ten-year process of deliberation about the future of Ainu policy. The main fruit of those deliberations is the impending new law. But how far will this law go in fulfilling Japan's commitment to the UN Declaration? Will it, in fact, be a step forward on the path of indigenous people from colonial dispossession towards equality, dignity and ‘the right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests‘? Will it take account of the vigorous debates that are occurring within the Ainu community about key aspects of indigenous rights, including the voices of those whose demands are at odds with the aspirations of the Japanese government? To answer those questions, it is necessary to look a little more closely at the way in which the pursuit of indigenous rights has played out in Japan over the past three decades or so.

In the midst of an ever-escalating tariff war, I do not share the view that Sino-American tensions are all about trade imbalances. The real battle is a strategic clash over innovation and technology — the Holy Grail of any nation's prosperity.

Since the death of Okinawan Governor Onaga Takeshi on 8 August, the Henoko base construction plan has been in flux. With the issues coming to a head, the media in Japan and the world shows ever less interest, easing the way for the Abe government to have its way. Crucial phases in the long-running contest between state and prefecture have been noted many times, but perhaps none is comparable to today as the commencement of works to reclaim the base site on Oura Bay is imminent.