This story is the product of a two-year collaboration between U.S. news website The Intercept and the Japanese broadcaster NHK. The project began in mid-2016, and was initially focused on investigating three U.S. military bases in Misawa, Okinawa, and Yokota. In April 2017, we revealed that the bases were an integral part of the global surveillance network controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency. With the help of a batch of leaked U.S. documents, we showed that the Japanese government had spent more than half a billion dollars to fund the facilities, and received in return powerful surveillance equipment for its own spies to use to eavesdrop on emails and phone calls.

After we published that information, sources in Japan came forward and provided us with new details about the inner workings of Japan's little-known spy agencies. That was an extraordinary development for us, because prying classified information out of the Japanese government is not an easy thing to do. I have reported on the activities of spies in countries across the world, and never before have I encountered a group that is more institutionally secretive than the Japanese. For decades, basic details about the structure, size, operations, and funding of Japan's intelligence community have been withheld from the public. Even within the Japanese government, only a select few officials at the highest echelons of power are provided with any information about the shadowy people in control of the country's surveillance systems.

While calls for constitutional amendment have frequently recurred since the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan in 1952, the current Abe government's proposals for constitutional change involve something fundamentally new. Rather than calling for amendment of specific clauses, most notably Article 9, the Abe government's approach is an attack on the very core of constitutionalism. Central to this attack is a process of undermining of individualism in favour of efforts to enforce morality, tradition, culture and military expansion: a process which is deeply connected to Abe's historical revisionism. This article explores how Abe's approach undermines constitutionalism itself, and assesses the political and social implications of this assault on Japan's constitution.

TBS's 2016 adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go elicits a particular irony of language in that the Japanese word teikyō means both ‘sponsorship’ and ‘donation’. In Ishiguro's unsettling dystopia, clones donate their organs to ailing humans, becoming the ultimate consumer items. But lead actress Ayase Haruka's appearances as various ‘clones’ of herself in the numerous advertisements punctuating the Japanese drama constitute a breach of the ‘fourth wall’ that not only undermines the anti-consumerist message of its literary progenitor but also exemplifies the burgeoning commercial intrusion into the fictive space of Japanese audiovisual media.

Since 2016 over one million Chinese civil servants have been ordered to spend a series of weeks visiting assigned Turkic Muslim “relatives.” These mostly Han urbanites have been tasked with instructing Uyghur and Kazakh farmers in political ideology and subjecting them to tests of Chinese nationalism and Han cultural assimilation. When they occupy the homes of their Turkic “relatives” they assess whether or not they should be sent into the mass “reeducation” camp system. Drawing on ethnographic field research, interviews and state documents, this essay argues that the systematic normalization of state-directed violent paternalism has produced a new kind of banality in Turkic minority experiences of unfreedom.

This interview is accompanied by Margherita R. Long's essay Japan's 3.11 Nuclear Disaster and the State of Exception: Notes on Kamanaka's Interview and Two Recent Films

Born in Toyama Prefecture, Kamanaka Hitomi entered Waseda University and joined her friends in a filmmaking club. Kamanaka won a scholarship from the Japanese government and spent time in Canada and the US between 1990 and 1995 studying at the National Film Board of Canada and working as a media activist at Paper Tiger in New York. Kamanaka then returned to Japan at the time of the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that caused over 6,000 deaths and displaced over 300,000 people in the greater Kobe area of Japan in 1995. While working as a volunteer for the victims of the earthquake, she began to produce documentaries for NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) as a freelance director. Kamanaka's first nuclear-related film, Hibakusha at the End of the World (Radiation: A Slow Death, 2003), won several awards, including one from Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs for excellence in documentary. The film shed light on the transnational links of nuclear policies and their fatal consequences by comparing radiation effects at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the State of Washington, the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqi citizens during and after the first Gulf War, and victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nago City (Population: 61,000) in northern Okinawa held its election for mayor on 4 February 2018. The incumbent, Inamine Susumu, stalwart of the anti-Henoko base movement bidding for a third term in office (following victory in 2010 and 2014) was defeated 20,389 to 16,921 by Toguchi Taketoyo, backed by the ruling national Liberal-Democratic Party and its Buddhist alliance partner, Komeito. The outcome was not so much a victory of one group from within the city over another, reflecting different political interests or ideology, as a victory of metropolitan, government and ruling party national forces from outside the city at the expense of the city. There had never been a local government election in Japan quite like this.

On December 14, 1937, the day after Japanese soldiers entered Nanjing, a crew led by producer Matsuzaki Keiji, under the guidance of the Military Special Affairs Department, entered the city. Its mission: to document the transition to Japanese rule in the Nationalist capital.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) on human security identifies “Critical infrastructure and state capacity” as a major concern. The report points out that “Climate change and extreme events are projected to damage a range of critical infrastructure, with water and sanitation, energy, and transportation infrastructure being particularly vulnerable. Climate change is expected to exacerbate water supply problems in some urban areas that in turn pose multiple risks to cities.”

This paper provides a contextualized reading of the South Korean 2016 hit drama ‘Descendants of the Sun’, the most prominent pop cultural manifestation of the Republic of Korea’s rising status as a global middle power. Through linking the fictional peacekeeping mission to a confidently nationalist conception of South Korean identity, the drama normalizes troop deployments by circumventing traditional narratives for legitimation. This argument rests on observations concerning the omission of any historical and UN context for the deployment, the Othering of the United States as main antagonist, and the unchallenged sense of righteousness and morality displayed by the main protagonists in an otherwise passive local setting.

Through an examination of Olympic-related art and the gendered, labored bodies that produce the Olympic spectacle, “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games” reveals continuities in the political and artistic stakes of the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964 and 2020.

Taiwan was surrendered to Imperial Japan by China's Qing dynasty in 1895, fifteen years prior to Japan's annexation of Korea. Like Korea, Taiwan's women and girls were subsequently conscripted into Japan's military “comfort women” (ianfu) system. The author notes significant differences between the treatment of the women in the two colonies and in the remembrance of the comfort woman systems. In Korea, dozens of comfort women statues and memorials commemorate the system's victims while not one such statue exists in Taiwan. In December 2016, eighteen years after Korea opened its first of two comfort women museums, the Ama (Grandmother) Museum was opened in Taipei. While the museum in Taipei chronicles the Taiwanese comfort women's plight, its message represents more than an indictment of Japan or a pursuit of redress for the system's victims. The museum and its sponsors find ways to apply the lessons of this tragedy to the ongoing challenges of human trafficking and domestic violence.

It has long been a goal of the Chinese leadership to see the national currency, the yuan, play a greater role in international finance. The internationalization of the yuan has been pursued through many initiatives and strategies, most recently in relation to the IMF and the inclusion of the yuan in a “basket” of currencies underpinning Special Drawing Rights. Internationalization has doubtless been delayed by relative non-convertibility and China's state-run financial system, amongst other factors. As matters are liberalized on the financial front, so it becomes more credible for the yuan to play the global role that would be expected of the currency of the world's largest trading nation, the world's largest manufacturing nation, and the world's second largest economy. But the year 2018 has seen a dramatic break with this SDR-focused strategy, and its replacement by a strategy that targets the oil market – the world's largest commodity market, where trading in US dollars has been near-universal for decades.

Hidaka Rokuro was born in Qingdao, China, 11 January 1917 and died in Kyoto, Japan, 7 June 2018. His life therefore spanned much of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. He was a witness to the Japanese empire at its height and to its catastrophic collapse and the subsequent rise of a different sort of Japan, as economic superpower and close ally to its former enemy the United States. From the time he entered Tokyo Imperial University (as it then was) in 1938, for 31 years he observed momentous events from the perspective of student, assistant, then professor, at the nation's key institute of higher learning. Eventually, and dramatically, he resigned in protest against its crackdown on the then burgeoning student movement in 1969. His greatest travails were then still to come. They are discussed in the following under the heading of “The Hidaka Affair.” This essay does not purport to be a biography but hopes to shed some light on moments in the life of a remarkable individual living in remarkable times.

In 2012, the Central Intelligence Agency's Open Source Center published a manual for U.S. officials advising them on how to shape Okinawan public opinion about the large U.S. military presence on their island. Categorized For Official Use Only, the 60-page CIA report is titled A Master Narratives Approach to Understanding Base Politics in Okinawa. It was released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and the full text is now available here.

Japan was known as the home of a strong middle-class in the affluent 1980s, the fruits of its prosperous economy distributed more equitably than in many comparable high-income countries. Yet strictly speaking, contrary to popular perception, Japan was not that “egalitarian.” However, public credence was set and the Wall Street Journal (1989) to tellingly (if hyperbolically) characterize this secure society with impressive equality and principled values as “the only communist nation that works.” Then, sea changes followed. This once “egalitarian” society is now widely (not least in Japan) recognized as a kakusa shakai (unequal society) in which income and wealth have become more unequally distributed than in many advanced economies. While widening wealth gap between rich and poor is a global trend as shown in the graph by Thomas Piketty and his co-researchers (Figure 1.1), in the case of Japan, in recent decades this has been accompanied by economic stagnation, rising levels of poverty, precarity, and public debt grafted on top of population aging. Against these backdrops, the second Abe Shinzō government started its economic policies, proclaimed as Abenomics, in an effort “to sustainably revive the Japanese economy” that was promised to trickle-down to all. Five years on, evaluations have taken place on the Abe program centered on hyper monetary easing, fiscal stimuli, and structural reform.

A while back, a coworker at the company where I was working won a new writer's prize for a novel. I say coworker, but she'd already left the company before I started there, so until she won the prize I never even knew she existed. The prize-winning piece had as its narrator a woman working in sales at a building products manufacturer, and the work was clearly based upon my company. She became the sole topic of conversation around the office. Our company gave birth to a novelist, the in-house newsletter proclaimed, and there were five men who said you know, actually I was the model for that work. Looking coolly at the situation, T— who worked in the office commented:

But all she did was write about the company exactly as it is.

Chang Kang-myoung’s provocatively titled novel Because I Hate Korea (Han’gugi sireoseo) became a best-seller in 2015 and is among the most notable literary works to address rampant dissatisfaction among South Korean millennials. In recent years, Chang, a former journalist (b. 1975), has developed a reputation for adroit and prolific fictionalized expressions of local discontent. Because I Hate Korea reflects a pervasive desire on the part of the nation’s younger people to escape from “Hell Joseon,” a coinage that has attained widespread circulation. This piece briefly introduces the novel, setting it within its wider contemporary context, and then provides a translation of the first chapter.

The reasons for abandoning construction of the new US Marine Corps Air Facility at Henoko in northern Okinawa are many. It tramples on the Okinawan people's anti-war sensibilities; it adds to the already unequal burden on Okinawa compared to mainland Japan and is therefore discriminatory; it will cause more accidents and crimes victimizing Okinawans; it will damage, perhaps fatally, Okinawa and Japan's finest coral garden in Oura Bay (much of which is to be filled) and destroy the habitat and feeding ground of the dugong, an endangered species considered sacred by Okinawans; as shown by a decade of resistance, it can only be done by overriding the people's will with massive riot police force. If that's not enough, another factor is being increasingly discussed at the protest site and in the newspapers.

Over the last decade or so, China has seen an unprecedented building boom of museums and memorials. One curious new genre is the museums for Mao-era “Cultural Revolution” youth “sent down” to the countryside by Mao during the 1960s and 1970s. After Mao's death, they struggled to return to the cities. Surviving returnees have recently established several museums commemorating their suffering and sacrifice, even though the topic is politically fraught and the period's history is strictly censored in official museums and histories. One museum, the Shanghai Educated Youth Museum, doubles as a memorial site and a collective cemetery for former sent-down youth who wish to be buried together. This paper locates these memorials and burial grounds in their historical and political context. It also reflects the Shanghai institutions' copying of the design and architecture of the Korea and Vietnam war memorials in Washington D.C.

The Japanese government's refusal to recognize the presence of Korean and Chinese forced laborers during World War II at Nagasaki's Hashima Island coal mine, popularly known as Gunkanjima (“Battleship Island”) continues since the abandoned mine was World Heritage inscribed in 2015. Hashima is one of a number of locations approved under the title “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Hashima has become a major tourist draw, but lacks any meaningful historical information at or near the site, while excluding any mention of Korean and Chinese forced laborers. The site also is in serious decay and appears to lack any conservation plan in line with World Heritage “Operational Guidelines.” The South Korean and Japanese governments agreed to acknowledge the presence of Koreans who “were forced to work” at the mine, but the Japanese government has subsequently refused to implement the agreement. Use of Hashima as an “urban ruins tourist attraction” instead raises questions as to whether the Japanese government has complied with requirements for World Heritage listing. This policy of neglect continues the Abe government's refusal to acknowledge full responsibility for Japan's injustice toward Korean forced laborers during World War II.