As the most devastating conflict between China and Japan, the Second Sino-Japanese War became an integral part of national histories in both countries during the postwar period. To commemorate this war, monuments, cemeteries, and museums were established both in Japan and China. These war memorial sites also serve the purpose of education, presenting their audiences with diverse interpretations of the same history. Today, the commemorative sites of the wartime past in China and Japan possess not only historical, but also contemporary significance. The different perceptions of the war's dark heritage intertwine with and exacerbate current politico-diplomatic tensions between the two countries, perpetuating their contest over historical narratives.

Nomad Relays is an annual non-profit event celebrating nomadic culture on a Saturday of every June. Initiated by film director Uragshaa (Wuershan), musician Yalagch (Ilchi), anthropologist Uradyn E. Bulag and artist Chyanga (Qin Ga) in June 2018, the event aims to bring academic lectures, art exhibitions, films, musical performances and other related activities together to present the charms of nomadic culture, explore its contemporary significance, and reflect on its inheritance and future development.

Since 2000, the driving force behind China's booming food industries has shifted from state planning to consumer demand. This shift has powered the growing importance of food branding, as consumers rely increasingly on known brands in the search for safe and wholesome food. While earlier eras of food branding strongly favored multinationals like Coca Cola and Nestlé, Chinese brands appear to be gradually regaining the trust of consumers, who increasingly rely on online ecosystems that seamlessly combine ecommerce, e-payment and home delivery into a self-contained purchasing environment. The 2019 Food and Beverage Innovation Forum suggests that future trends may include increasing reliance on data informatics, a domestic shift to focus on free spending GenZ consumers, and branded export of China's unique strength in logistics.

Aotearoa New Zealand provides an important example of successful citizen activism in the form of anti-nuclear peace advocacy. The collective efforts by peace actors over several decades resulted in the successful demand for a nuclear-free nation. This paper highlights the widespread participation and political support that facilitated the process and assesses its achievements.

An american organization founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

My recent book, Maritime Ryukyu, 1050-1650, is a revisionist history of the Ryukyu islands. Adopting the interdisciplinary approaches of recent Japanese scholarship, Maritime Ryukyu presents a new history of the region, treating the Ryukyu islands not as a unitary, natural political community but as locations within a maritime network that extended northward as far as the southern coastal regions of Korea. This article briefly explains my trajectory in writing the book and then summarizes some of the major arguments in Maritime Ryukyu.

The chapter that follows is excerpted from my book Women and China's Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), which asks: If we place women at the center of our account of China's last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? Women and China's Revolutions takes a close look at the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Building on the research of gender studies scholars since the 1970s, it establishes that China's modern history is not comprehensible without close attention to women's labor and Woman as a flexible symbol of social problems, national humiliation, and political transformation.

John Dower, who is now emeritus professor of Japanese history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was an essential influence during my years as a correspondent in Japan. I (and I know numerous others) considered him a giant in his field, one of the few scholars who were required reading for anyone with a serious commitment to covering a nation notorious for its opacity, its complex history, and the ideological shroud Americans draped over it during the Cold War decades. Dower held fast against that corruption of scholarship in everything he wrote over a career that now spans five decades.

On November 8, 2019 in Seoul, Wada Haruki delivered this urgent call to peace. It is in many respects a summation of his life's thinking, and APJ presents it as such.

As Northeast Asia confronts the stark choice between constructive peace and its cataclysmic opposite, nuclear war, Wada forcefully demands peace, well aware that his plan —like others in his career—is a “sheer product of imagination.” That said, his imagined ideas, springing from a lifelong commitment to a world without war, are more important than ever. Born in Tokyo in 1938, one of Professor Wada's recent books includes reproduction of the eight year old elementary-school handwriting practice of the Chinese character for “peace,” which he juxtaposes below now-retired Emperor Akihito's similar calligraphy homework (older than Wada by five years). For their shared immediate post-1945 era, “peace” was the order of the day; some students like Wada and arguably the former emperor learned; others did not.

This paper examines exhibits at the Shanghai Expo and the urban improvement schemes undertaken for the Shanghai Expo for what they reveal about the ideals for and experiences of urban modernity in contemporary China. Rather than focus on the experiences and perceptions of a global audience, this paper examines how the Expo sought to speak to a domestic audience about state legitimacy through its messaging about urban citizenship and urban modernity. It argues that the manner in which the Expo promoted certain forms of sustainability and the domestic audience's experiences with Shanghai urban improvements revealed tensions in the nation's development model and excluded sectors of the population from participation.

Amid the radioactive fallout of the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and across what would come to be known as the Exclusion Zone, Japanese members of the nuclear lobby laboured to contain the political fallout of the Fukushima disaster. This article scrutinizes the profuse rhetoric over recycling as mobilized by nuclear boosters and the wider operations of circularity in waste management in Japan. Japanese leant heavily on the notion of recycling to attempt to frame the clean-up in Fukushima in more ideologically convenient terms. This led, for example, to officials trumpeting plans to ‘recycle’ over 16 million cubic metres of radioactive topsoil scraped from hundreds of square kilometres of Fukushima Prefecture, as well as efforts to achieve ‘thermal recycling’ by generating electricity from the incineration of collected irradiated vegetal matter and the large amounts of protective clothing and other material used in the ‘decontamination’ campaign. By scrutinizing this appropriation of recycling rhetoric and its leveraging across Japan's nuclear waste management apparatus, the article exposes contradictions and distortions in contemporary Japanese policy that have considerable socio-political ramifications.

On February 1, 2019, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment submitted to UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) its nomination of four areas in the Ryukyu archipelago for UNESCO World Natural Heritage status. The areas are Amami-Oshima Island, Tokuno-Shima Island, the Northern Part of Okinawa Island, and Iriomote Island (see the Nomination Document and the Nomination Annexes).

The late Johnny Kitagawa was Japan's most successful talent mogul, enabled by an entertainment industry that turned a blind eye to his serial sexual abuse of children

As might be expected, the death of Johnny Kitagawa from a stroke on July 9th was met with grief and apparently genuine affection in Japan's entertainment industry. Kitagawa (87) had, after all, helmed arguably the country's most powerful talent agency. Johnny & Associates had ignited the careers of some of the best-loved Japanese pop acts of the last five decades, among them Four Leaves, Tanokin Trio, Hikaru Genji, SMAP, TOKIO, Kinki Kids and V6. Yakumaru Hirohide, a former member of Shibugakitai, an eighties boy band managed by Kitagawa, said he had “cried all night” on hearing about his death – a not untypical reaction.

On 14 December, the Okinawa Defense Bureau officially began reclamation work in preparation for the building of a massive US Marine Corps airbase at Henoko, in Northern Okinawa. I use the word “officially” advisedly: they announced it well in advance, with what could almost be called fanfare. The people opposing this base – the folks carrying out the six-day-a-week sit-in at the construction site and the dock where the ships are being loaded with dirt – call this “construction for show” (misekake koji). As they understand it, the Okinawa Defense Bureau is trying to persuade them, and the Prefectural Government, that all is lost, that they should give up their protest and stay home, so that full-fledged construction can finally begin. And so at every turning point in their preparations the Agency stages a performance, a kind of ceremony, the not-so-hidden message of which is “now there is no turning back: resign yourselves to the inevitable and give up”.

At the start of the 2000s, Suzuki Muneo was one of the most prominent politicians in Japan. Elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in 1983, Suzuki eventually served eight terms. He became a powerful figure in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and was appointed head of the Hokkaidō and Okinawa Development agencies in 1997. He also became deputy chief cabinet secretary in the government of Obuchi Keizō in 1998. However, while these are senior positions, Suzuki's real power was unofficial. Exercising extraordinary influence over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) that often exceeded that of the foreign minister, Suzuki established himself as a key figure in Japanese foreign policy, especially with regard to Russia.

We introduce Medoruma Shun, an Akutagawa-Award winning Okinawan author, Watanabe Osamu, a constitutional scholar in Tokyo, Kihara Satoru, a freelance journalist in Fukuyama, Hiroshima, and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, an Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus editor as rare voices of dissent over the media hype concerning the changeover of the Japanese emperor and adoption of the new era name Reiwa.

A retrospective tour of the haunts and hideouts of the 1989 Tiananmen student uprising would not be complete without a visit to Beijing University, known simply as Beida. Arguably the most prestigious university in China, Beida has long been home to creative thinkers and intellectual ferment ever since the days a young Mao Zedong worked in its associated library and literati such as Hu Shih and Lu Xun graced its grounds.

In 1989 Beida was the fount of discussion and discontent that spread to other campuses. Among Beijing colleges, it was the most distant from Tiananmen, but the Beida contingent always seemed to show up first.

The F-35 is a game-changing American fighter jet developed to penetrate present day air defences by evading radar detection. In the face of a resurgent China and assertive Russia, Japan is in the process of acquiring the largest fleet of this jet outside of the United States, thrusting it into a position in which it is able to compete with its regional rivals for military supremacy. Despite its technological capabilities, the F-35 has been plagued by a series of technical glitches, resulting in a 2019 crash of a Japanese-assembled F-35. Detractors of the F-35 have attributed this recent crash to fundamental flaws in the plane, ignoring the fact that fighter aircraft programmes tend to undergo a three-decade long development period, marked by significant technical challenges. The F-35 raises significant questions about the next stages in a costly and accelerating arms race involving Japan, China, Russia and the United States.

In a 3 May 2019 interview with Sankei Shimbun, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said,

In October 31, 2019, a massive fire tore through the UNESCO World Heritage site of Shuri Castle in Okinawa, sparking a global reaction and comparisons with another World Heritage site. As in the case of Notre Dame, government officials immedicately declared their intention to rebuild, and donations flooded in from Okinawa, throughout Japan, and other countries. Shuri Castle is widely recognized as the symbol of the former Ryukyu kingdom. This article shows that the significance of Shuri Castle can only be fully understood by examining it in the context of castles in modern Japan. By understanding the commonalities and differences between Shuri Castle and mainland castles, we use the site as a tool to examine Okinawa's modern history. In spite of Shuri Castle's early origins and architecture differing somewhat from mainland Japanese castles, it was treated similarly to these other sites in the modern period. Like hundreds of other castles, Shuri Castle was taken over by the central government in the early Meiji period (1868-1912). Like dozens of other castles, Shuri Castle eventually became a garrison for the modern military. Like the castles at Nagoya, Hiroshima, Wakayama, Okayama, Ogaki, and Fukuyama, it was destroyed by US bombs in 1945. Like many other castles, it was demilitarized under the US Occupation and came to host cultural and educational facilities. The reconstruction of Shuri Castle from wood using traditional techniques in 1992 echoed similar projects at Kanazawa, Kakegawa, and Ōzu, as well as dozens of planned reconstructions. For many regions in Japan, castles have played a similar role to Shuri Castle, serving at times as symbols of connection to the nation, and at times as symbols of a local identity opposed to the often oppressive power of the central state. Examining the modern history of Shuri Castle as a Japanese castle can further complicate our understandings of the complex dynamics of Okinawa's relationship with Japan over the past 150 years.