This essay analyses the Japanese sword boom in popular media in the 21st century, situating Touken Ranbu, an online video game franchise, within its wider political and historical context. In the first two decades of the 21st century, government, commercial, and semi-public institutions, such as museums, extensively deployed positive depictions of Japanese swords in popular media, including anime, manga, TV, and films in public relations campaigns. As a historical ideological icon, swords have been used to signify class in the Edo period (1603-1868) and to justify the Japanese Empire's expansion into Asia during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). By emphasizing the object's symbolism and aestheticism, the sword boom of the 21st century is following a similar trajectory. Popular representations of swords in media culture selectively feature historical episodes that are deemed politically uncontroversial and beneficial for promoting a sense of national pride. This practice systematically ignores the shadow of modern Japanese history in which swords played a central role, such as the controversial wartime “contest to kill one hundred people using a sword” (hyakunin giri kyoso) in China in 1937. The recent notable rise of this idealized symbolism exemplifies the mechanism through which historical revisionism—serving neo-nationalist/right-wing interests—infiltrates Japanese society through popular culture. The sword has been mobilized in contemporary Japanese media as a symbolic cultural commodity to influence consumers' knowledge and consciousness and to condition their views of modern Japanese history.

During the Meiji Period (1868-1912) the Japanese government hired thousands of foreign employees to accelerate modernization. Many employees were buried at Tokyo's Aoyama Cemetery. In recent times, the government issued notices of delinquent management fees for those graves whose descendants have not continued to pay for the graves' upkeep. Threatening to re-bury these employees elsewhere, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has been engaged in a dispute with a small organization committed to retaining the employees' legacy. Utilizing firsthand interviews with those directly involved, this article analyzes that conflict—of history, economic development, memory, and memorialization—as a struggle between the “spirits” of the foreign employees and the spirit of Japan's modernization.

Japan's beguiling mountain witch, the yamamba, has inspired artists from medieval Noh actors to contemporary poets. She offers a fertile metaphor for a creative energy that exceeds boundaries and threatens disruption. For female artists in particular, the yamamba epitomizes the freedom of refusing gendered expectations as well as the consequences that befall those who do. Renowned scholar and poet, Noriko Mizuta, has long found a muse in the yamamba. This article is excerpted and adapted from the book Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch, co-edited by Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich, which presents the surprising ways artists and scholars from North America and Japan have encountered the yamamba. Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch is available June 22nd from Stone Bridge Press.

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.

Korea’s modern historiography is characterized by a series of debates, “history wars,” since the colonial period. One of the central questions that has animated the debates is how to define the subject of Korea’s history. Colonial historiography characterized Koreans as a passive nation lacking an agency of its own, against which the first generation nationalist historians wrote to narrate a history of a nation that has staged a perpetual struggle for independence against foreign invasion and domination throughout time. After 1945, conservative nationalist historians continued a nationalist narrative but confined their historical imaginative space to the capitalist order within which the nation was defined. Critical nationalist historians grew in number and influence from the 1980s as they challenged the conservative historiography’s narrow confinement to expand Korea’s historical space. The critical nationalist historiography began to diversity in the 21st century, leading to a multiplicity of historical narratives, including those critical of nationalist historiography. To understand the history of modern Korean historiography is, therefore, to appreciate the formidable challenges posed by modernity and the indefatigable struggles made by the Korean people, including Korean historians.

This paper examines a protest tour in Okinawa in which participants travelled from different prefectures in Japan to protest against construction of a new military base at Henoko. Drawing on participant observation, surveys, and interviews with group members and a peace-tour guide, it examines how participants experienced Okinawa as a destination of political activismm, and assesses their experience. The tour contributed to developing a sense of solidarity among the participants in support of demilitarization in Okinawa. Protest tourism provided a space for education about militarism on the ground. However, drawing from the fields of critical tourism studies and indigenous studies, the paper also draws attention to the challenges of framing a protest tour as a strategy for demilitarization. I develop the notion of “souvenirs of solidarity” to reflect on broader issues concerning US bases in Okinawa, Japan and the Pacific and the possibilities for anti-base activism.

This article reproduces documents related to an aborted SCAP war crime investigation into the Ukishima-maru incident conducted during the Allied occupation of Japan. The incident involved the sinking of a repatriation vessel (the Ukishima-maru) on 24 August 1945 after it apparently struck a mine in Maizuru Bay, causing hundreds if not thousands of deaths among the Korean forced laborers aboard the vessel. The documents include the testimonies of Korean survivors (submitted in Japanese and translated into English by SCAP officers) which supported the claim that the incident was planned by the Japanese authorities. Though the investigation was eventually terminated by SCAP which dismissed the testimonies as “hearsay account[s]”, the documents are a useful window into the tense situation faced by Koreans in Japan during the immediate postwar years and cast light on the nature and quality of SCAP efforts to pursue justice in its investigation.

This article examines the often-noted “cuteness” in early post-war Japanese animation, and explains how this style has led in more recent years to grittier works depicting war's devastation through fantasy and cinematic technology. Anime provides insight into the social attitudes of each post-war era; and, into how collective memory has processed “unimaginable” horror. The author argues that what is concealed within “unrealistic” animation often reveals more than what is shown about people grappling with an apocalyptic legacy in search of a national identity.

In December 2020, an article by J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard University about the so-called ‘comfort women’ issue was published in the International Review of Law and Economics. This article caused widespread controversy amongst scholars, many of whom responded with serious criticisms of its content. On the other hand, some commentators argued that Ramseyer's critics were seeking to suppress his right to express controversial opinions. In the past few years, there has been widespread international debate both about the protection of free speech and about problems of assessing the quality of knowledge and distinguishing well-founded information from ‘fake news’. Against that background, this study aid aims to encourage debate about ways to maintain research integrity while protecting free speech, and uses the example of the Ramseyer article to provide illustrative material. This is the first in a series of responses on the “comfort women” issue prompted by the Ramseyer article.

This article assesses the US debacle in Afghanistan in light of the Vietnam War and US forever wars.

This paper assesses the role and the challenges of the use of critical raw materials in Japan's program for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Today, it is customary to describe the Japanese archipelago in terms of the neutral distinction between the Sea of Japan side (Nihonkai-gawa) and the Pacific Ocean side (Taiheiyō-gawa). For much of the 20th century, however, these regions were called respectively ura Nihon and omote Nihon, or roughly “the Backside of Japan” and “the Frontside of Japan.” This continued until the 1960s when the terms were criticized as discriminatory and their usage terminated. How, then, did the Sea of Japan coastal region come to be known by the discriminatory term “the Backside”? Intrigued by this question, this paper retraces the little-studied history of the place name ura Nihon. As I will show, behind the place name ura Nihon are forgotten histories not just of uneven domestic economic development but also colonial expansion and empire building in Northeast Asia. That is, ura Nihon is both a history of the Japanese nation and of the empire. By retelling this history, the paper seeks to contribute to understanding the ways in which empire building in Northeast Asia was connected to the domestic history of the Japanese nation-state in the 20th century.

On July 28, 2021, Okinawa Prefecture's governor authorised coral transplantation at the construction site of the controversial Futenma Replacement Facility (FRF) in Henoko. Two days later, he revoked this authorisation. The coral have become a contested political issue, linked to the larger conflict between the Japanese government and Okinawa Prefecture. Diving into the waters of Ōura Bay and the history of the base issue, this article explores how Japanese authorities have ignored Okinawan protest, science, and the life of other species during the construction. This political strategy of ignorance aims at frustrating opposition and framing the FRF as inevitable.

This paper examines how the Asia-Pacific War is presented in the new textbooks for the recently upgraded “special subject” of moral education in Japanese elementary schools. Three stories are analyzed to show the discursive strategies utilized by the authors and the moral values presented. As the analysis reveals, the image of the war created by the stories is highly selective and profoundly revisionist.

Throughout his career J Mark Ramseyer (hereafter JMR) has delighted in generating an academic reputation as a contrarian who applies the “rationality of social science” to explain aspects of modern Japanese history that he considers others both in Japan and elsewhere to have failed to comprehend. His usual method is to create a simple model that he thinks illustrates the basic dynamics of the situation and then apply the logic of rational choice/game theory to it. It was probably only a matter of time before he turned his attention to some of the most controversial topics in twentieth century Japanese social history: Zainichi Koreans, the “comfort women” (ianfu) issue, Okinawans, and Burakumondai.

At a time when many libraries are struggling to maintain their budgets and collections and fieldwork travel is restricted, access to online research databases has become more important than ever for scholars around the world. This makes the new open access research tool ‘Japan Search‘(https://jpsearch.go.jp/) – launched in September 2020 – particularly welcome.

This article examines the reluctance of nuclear-armed nations to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons. After the U.S. government produced and used nuclear weapons to obliterate Japanese cities in 1945, a nuclear arms race ensued among a limited number of nations. Although treaties, agreements, and unilateral actions eventually reduced the number of nuclear weapons in nuclear arsenals, this reversal in public policy was above all the result of massive popular pressure. However, with the decline of popular pressure, the nuclear arms race resumed. Despite the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in January 2021, signed thus far by 86 non-nuclear states and ratified or acceded to by 52, the nine nuclear powers have strongly resisted it. Although the Biden administration has begun initiatives to get nuclear disarmament back on track, these actions will fall short of producing the nuclear weapons-free world called for by the new treaty. Furthermore, given continuing international rivalries, it remains unclear whether even limited disarmament initiatives will proceed or will restrain the nuclear ambitions of the nuclear powers.

In the book, Summoned at Midnight: A Story of Race and the Last Military Executions at Fort Leavenworth (Beacon Press, 2019), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Richard A. Serrano revealed the racial injustices of the US military justice system. Between 1955 and 1961, a number of black and white prisoners were incarcerated on death row at Fort Leavenworth military prison, Kansas, but ultimately all the white prisoners were paroled and only African-Americans were hanged.

President Biden is continuing the disengagement policy toward China that began under Donald Trump, now with strong bipartisan support. The policy has all the elements of containment of China, including restrictions on technology, trade, investment, formation of the informal Quad (US-Japan-Australia-India) alliance, sale of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, continuation of high tariffs on Chinese exports, and increased official contacts with Taiwan in a period of growing China-Taiwan military tension.

This article considers the bases for establishing common ground with China in a period of rising tensions between the two nations.