“Those who have power invariably attempt to conceal their victimization, so it is a journalist's job to go and report to the whole world what they are hiding,” veteran photojournalist Hirokawa Ryuichi said in an interview with author Ochiai Keiko in the Spring, 2019 edition of Tsuhan Seikatsu. Tsuhan Seikatsu is a triannual magazine published by mail-order company Catalog House that often runs politically progressive articles on topics such as nuclear power and militarism.

Months before the U.S. invasion of Okinawa in April. 1945, thousands of civilians evacuated Okinawa with their families to rural areas of mainland Japan. Tamaki Rieko's father, a physician, decided to stay as his duty in the war effort. Among his family of ten only Rieko survived the battle. She writes, “even as the onslaught worsened, Okinawans believed that, if they could just endure a little longer, a huge force of support troops from mainland Japan would be coming to their rescue.” Later the family decides to leave the cave-shelter where they'd evacuated and move farther south to avoid advancing U.S. forces. “We heard from the adults speaking in low whispers about what the enemy did to prisoners of war. The ‘devil-beast Americans’ would slice them up into little pieces, they said. We firmly believed this, which was … why we had to leave the shelter.” Of the battle's end she writes, “How could the war be over, I wondered again, never imagining that it could end with Japan's defeat. After all, we'd been taught that Japan was ‘the land of the gods,‘ and no matter how desperate the situation might be, the kamikaze winds would blow and bring the nation victory.”

This book is an exploration of the nature of memory and how it links us with people from different places and distant times. It ranges from Roger's upbringing in a Jewish household in Los Angeles to his first trip abroad, in 1964, to the Soviet Union; from his days at Harvard Graduate School studying Russian to his stay in Warsaw, a stay that was truncated by a spy scandal that rocked the United States; from his arrival in Kyoto in 1967 to his years in Australia, where, in 1976, he gave up his American citizenship for an Australian one.

I first visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 1981 on my initial trip to Japan. The displays at the museum have been renovated twice since, for the 1995 fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bomb, and most recently in April 2019. This article examines the three presentations about the bombing exhibited there in light of the shifting historiography.

While all eyes have been focused on the evolving US-China trade war, China has been pursuing multiple initiatives of which its long-term global investment strategy known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most ambitious – and now (finally) being addressed by mainstream media and US Congressional hearings. China's BRI, encompassing the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt and the sea-based 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, is the world's largest multilateral infrastructure-building project. This initiative is now creating a community of states that have common interests in the building of infrastructure with China's financial assistance and in setting rules and standards for international trade within the BRI area. Through this process, the BRI is creating the world's largest trade and investment area, and one with clear security implications as China's geopolitical profile rises. Enjoying the highest level of political support in China, the multiple projects of the BRI utilize Chinese finance provided primarily by state development banks in an extension overseas of the industrial development model fashioned at home. Critical commentary has fastened on the possibility of countries entering “debt traps” as they sign up for BRI projects. Such claims need to be scrutinized from the perspective of China's own debt-fuelled economic development strategy and the mutual goals tying China to dozens of industrializing countries in a new arc of Chinese economic and financial diplomacy. The wider significance of BRI explored here includes its role in promoting the internationalization of China's currency and reinforcing China's industrial and energy strategies abroad.

Itō Ken (1895-1945), a proletarian writer, stated in 1930 that his collection of short stories Shanhai Yawa (Shanghai Night Stories) was intended to be a “detective and proletarian like popular novel.” But how can a proletarian writer with a Marxist worldview change an apolitical genre such as the detective story into a weapon of proletarian literature? Could a Marxist detective reveal the crimes of capital? Examining Itō's journalistic articles and fiction within the context of mass media and detective fiction, I aim to show how Itō Ken tried to rework the detective genre into a form of proletarian literature.