Mitsui's Miike Coal Mine is World Heritage listed by UNESCO as one of Japan's “Sites of the Industrial Revolution.” The Japanese government, however, has failed to tell the full story of this mine, instead promoting bland tourism. In World War II, Miike was Japan's largest coal mine, but also the location of the largest Allied POW camp in Japan. Korean and Chinese forced laborers also were used by Mitsui in the mine. The use of prisoners was nothing new, as Mitsui and other Japanese companies used Japanese convicts as workers in the early decades of the Meiji era. The role of Australian POWs in particular reveals that there was resistance inside Miike even at the height of abuse by Japanese wartime authorities. Japan has a responsibility under its UNESCO World Heritage agreement to tell the full history of this and other “Meiji Industrial Revolution” sites.

As the English translation of Shiori Ito's book, Black Box, is published, she says her fight for justice goes on.

It has been over four years since Ito Shiori accused one of Japan's better-known journalists of raping her in an upscale Tokyo hotel. Ito had begun nervously reaching out to the Japanese and foreign media, not to avenge herself for what happened, she said, but to challenge public attitudes regarding sexual assault. Her proposal for a press conference was initially rejected by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (full disclosure: I was on the events committee at the time), which was nervous about airing unproven claims.

Xi Jinping's frequent references to Mao Zedong, along with Xi's own claims to ideological originality, have fueled debate over the significance of Maoism in the PRC today. The discussion recalls an earlier debate, at the height of the Cold War, over the meaning of Maoism itself. This paper revisits that earlier controversy, reflected in arguments between Benjamin Schwartz and Karl Wittfogel, with an eye toward their contemporary relevance.

In 2020 Chinese “dark fleets” replaced North Korean “ghost ships” in international discourse as symbolic of a certain form of global maritime threat and disturbance. This article takes a longer view of trouble on the high seas, looking back to the globalization of the oceanic commons at the behest of post 1945 geopolitics and new forms and methodologies of fisheries science. With Carmel Finley's articulation of Pacific Empires of Fishing in mind the article explores fishing histories of East Asia and the Pacific, both during and after the era of colonization The article considers the marginalization of already peripheral traditional Korean fishing communities by Japanese colonization, ecological collapse generated by the technological and statistical development underpinning scientific fishing, and the ghosts made of fish themselves as the powers and logics of accumulation and extraction transform the watery geographies of the Pacific.

The four major countries of East Asia—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—form one of the most densely populated regions on earth, and through the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries the region experienced some of its fastest economic growth, propelled by the policies of state-led developmentalism. As a result of this density and these policies, the four countries in turn became some of the most environmentally degraded. As each achieved middle-to-high income status, however, the populace and then the regime in each country realized that they could not sustain either rapid economic growth or popular legitimacy without addressing the environmental consequences of this fast growth. The four states thus changed their fundamental economic policies from pure developmentalism to what we call eco-developmentalism, an attempt to reconcile economic prosperity with environmental sustainability. Although success so far has been mixed, this turn to eco-developmentalism has allowed these states to claim world leadership in mitigating environmental degradation.

This essay provides insights into the circumstances and potential societal impact of more than 10 million evacuees who fled Japan's firebombed cities during World War II. Informed by interviews conducted by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey with Japanese citizens immediately after surrender, this analysis establishes a new vantage point from which to understand the complex social circumstances of Japan in the final months of the war.

Rising from obscurity to attain a seat in the upper house of the Diet in summer 2019, the Party to Protect the People from NHK and its leader, Tachibana Takashi, have utilized a purely internet-based strategy to establish a community-cum-forum for voices locked out of the mainstream media. This article attempts to establish a foundation for understanding the new Japanese internet politics heralded by the emergence of this party through a chronicling of the party's rise and decline, and an ethnographic analysis of the viewer experience of the October 2019 livestream of its Ikebukuro speeches.

Despite its oft-stated commitment to non-interference in the domestic affairs of foreign countries, the People's Republic of China has intervened on many levels in Burma's conflict-ridden society, both before and after 1988. It is in 2021 Burma's largest economic partner in terms of trade, aid and investment, and has fit Burma into its continent- and ocean-spanning One Belt/One Road Initiative. In chronically unstable border areas, it has a major influence on armed insurgent groups such as the Kokang Group and the United Wa State Army. Beijing's top priority has been to ensure political stability, and it found Aung San Suu Kyi a willing and able partner after she became “State Counselor” in 2016. But the coup d'etat of February 1, 2021 has cast a shadow over the Beijing-Naypyidaw relationship and Burma's future.

Active from the 1960s onward, Tsujimura Kazuko (1941-2004) was an avantgarde dancer who aimed for a “dance without body, without dancing.” This paper examines how Tsujimura sought, unconsciously or consciously, to reveal how the body was harnessed for—and constructed from—production in the increasingly capitalist world of high-economic growth Japan. As we shall see, through her limited, but often tense, movement in dance, in her use of costumes in fragmented installation pieces, and in her social alliances, she sought to undo the notion that the body was an expression of free agency.

This study investigates how former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) tried to reproduce and reinforce their conservative and nationalist ideologies from 2012 to 2020. Conducting critical discourse analysis on official statements, speeches, and remarks at press conferences highlights the strategies that Abe and his sympathizers used to promote and legitimize the idea of “Take back Japan (Nippon wo torimodosu).” This study also elucidates the implications of the party's efforts to reproduce and disseminate its campaign slogan in official narratives.

The year 2019, the centennial of the March 1st, 1919, witnessed an outpouring of historical scholarship assessing the complex set of events since “the starting point of Korea's modernity in earnest.” Among a flood of conferences and publications that ensued, one group of scholars stood out for its attempts to stand above a nationalist historiography and situate what it calls the “March 1st revolution,” rather than the more widely used “March 1st Movement,” within a regional and global time. Its scholarship was unique in highlighting the sui generis nature of Koreans' historical experiences without falling into the trap of nationalist historiography while at the same time bringing to relief common challenges shared by East Asia and the world during the modern period.

This paper will present a timeline of how a remote island in the South Pacific became a U.S. appurtenance (1860); then a U.S. territory (1925); and, finally, through a so-called “friendship treaty,” bargained away by New Zealand in order to maximize American Sāmoa's maritime boundaries (1980). The original claim to the island is fraudulent, as many government officials and scholars have long suspected but have been unable to prove. This paper will examine the fraud in detail and present conclusive evidence for the first time. The island's name is Olohega [olo'hɛŋa] and it belongs geographically, historically, and culturally to the nation of Tokelau.

This article examines the origins and development of the US “forever wars” in recent decades, and its implications both for democracy and warfare.

Over the twentieth century, various types of synthetic fibers were invented, mass-produced, and widely distributed across the globe. This article analyzes the political power that was exercised to generate this innovation in musical instrument industries. Synthetics also contributed to the growth of the global garment, textile, sporting goods, and military industries, among many others. This article specifically discusses the politics behind the transition from the use of silk to nylon during the World War II and Cold War eras. Modern cultural industry's tendency in the mid- to late twentieth century to favor synthetic and other “man-made” fibers over natural ones was importantly shaped by political-economic—and political-ecological—conflicts between the United States and Japan, especially during World War II. These conflicts prepared the ground for the rise of global capitalism's synthetic regime.

August in Japan is a time of remembrance—of family dead (honoured in the festival of Obon) and of war dead (those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in particular). Seventy-five years after the end of the war, the ranks of those who remember it have grown thin, but in August 2020 one story caught my eye. It was the story of Yi (or Lee) Hak-nae, born in the then Japanese colony of Chosen (Korea) in 1925 and known during the war and during his trials by his Japanese name, Hiromura Kakurai. Now aged in his nineties, Yi is the last survivor of 148 Koreans convicted of war crimes in the Allied trials that followed the East Asian and Pacific wars and continued to 1947. His story, published by Reuters in 2020, was headed ‘The Survivor: Last Korean War Criminal in Japan Wants Recognition’.

The Korean War remains conspicuously absent from assertions by the US that it is done with forever wars, but the war remains a fact of life that Koreans live with every day. It continues in other ways too.

Katō Kōko is the pivotal figure behind the World Heritage inscription process and the controversial historical narratives of “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Several of these industrial sites used Korean as well as Chinese and Allied POW forced labor during wartime, and Japan agreed to present narratives of the victims forced to work at the sites when they were inscribed as World Heritage in 2015. The plans for the Industrial Heritage Information Centre for these sites officially agreed to document the remembrance of these victims, but a July 2021 UNESCO/ICOMOS report stated that the Centre conveys a message that no one was forced to work at the relevant sites. Katō Kōko, Managing Director of the Information Centre, was central in planning and collecting source material for its exhibitions. She is also UNESCO's direct contact as Managing Director of the Information Centre. Katō has created celebratory narratives of Japan that actively deny the history of its forced laborers. With the backing of powerful Japanese politicians, Katō has put on a false performance of cooperation for UNESCO and related international stakeholders.

Twenty years ago, in December 2000, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the IMTFE, also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal or the Tokyo Trial), was “reopened” in Tokyo to address unfinished business: the crime of holding women as sex slaves for the Japanese imperial army. The women's tribunal was at once the culmination and launch of a renewed effort by international civil society to address war crimes that fester to this day. Norma Field and Watanabe Mina reflect on that occasion and urge readers to view the documentary record of that historic event, Breaking the History of Silence, easily accessed online until December 2021.

This special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The ‘Comfort Women’ as Public History,” edited by Edward Vickers and Mark Frost, analyzes the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. Papers include testimony from scholars involved in campaigns on behalf of comfort women, or in movements for their commemoration (Shin, Su, Norma); more conventional academic analyses of transnational efforts to secure recognition for comfort women, whether through litigation (Hao) or heritage activism (Vickers, Schumacher); and personal reflections by an academic educator (Heo) and filmmaker (Dezaki) who in different ways have sought to promote international understanding of this issue. An introductory essay by the editors, Frost and Vickers, examines how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration. Questioning any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation, they stress the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity.