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.

The world faces a perfect storm of existential risk, with a deadly new pandemic, an escalating climate crisis, and the constant threat posed by nuclear weapons. The essential facts and dangers for all of these are long- known, but they have been downplayed or neglected until presenting an immediate threat – by which time it may be too late. We need to have a clear understanding of these risks, but also need to understand the deeper reasons why they have not been properly addressed. To a large extent these lie in the dogmas of military and political elites and in an optimistic preference for short-term results. Civil society and the world community of nations should come together to work for real change, as has already been achieved with the 2020 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. They should seek to safeguard the welfare of future generations, giving priority to that interest. The alternative is the growing risk of multiple disasters that could prove terminal.

West Papua, Australia's near northern neighbour, has for nearly six decades experienced widespread human rights abuses by the Indonesian state and military. In this article we argue that Australia has the responsibility and the expertise to do more to ensure that West Papuans' human rights are being upheld. First, in a situation as serious as that of West Papua, Australia, as a member of the United Nations, we contend, has a political duty to intervene under the United Nation's ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine. Second, we put forward that Australia also has a historic and moral obligation to the territory: West Papuans provided vital assistance to Australian troops in 1944 during World War 2. In the 1960s, however, Canberra betrayed its neighbour's preparations for self-determination but we argue Australia now has a chance to right this historical wrong by intervening in West Papua's struggle against Indonesian oppression. Third, we argue that because Australia has set a precedent of intervention when it led the humanitarian intervention in East Timor in 1999-2000, we know that intervention is possible and that the necessary political will can be mustered. Whereas Australia's involvement in the East Timor crisis led to long term diplomatic tension between Australia and Indonesia, however, we propose that in this case, Australia's contribution to addressing human rights in West Papua could ultimately strengthen ties between the two countries.

Drawing on Japanese press and TV reports, the authors explain the extraordinary costs of the decade long cleanup of the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, with no end to the process in sight.

This special collection of papers reflects the work of contributing authors to the newly released book Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). The edited volume addresses the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, taking a multi-dimensional, cross-disciplinary approach to understanding this epic disaster. The book is an intersectional collaboration that is unique in that it incorporates the work of Japan-area scholars, journalists, nuclear experts and Science, Technology and Society (STS) scholars from Japan and abroad, who discuss the trajectory of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in the first decade since its inception. There are 19 authors whose work is included in the book; this special edition of selected papers for The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus evokes that work, and while they do not entirely represent the scope of the material included in the edited volume, these papers delve into issues that any disaster studies scholar or student of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will find compelling.

Many commentators are likening the recent Taliban seizure of Kabul to a “repeat” of the 1975 “fall of Saigon”.

But the Taliban less closely resemble Vietnamese communists than they do Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. More than two decades ago, when the Taliban, a Sunni Islamist group, held power in Afghanistan, they massacred members of their country's Shia Muslim minority and others. In the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouge had committed genocide against Cambodia's Cham Muslim minority and others. In March 2001, the Taliban deployed dynamite to blow up their country's monumental 6th-7th century stone sculptures, the Bamyan Buddhas, part of Afghanistan's historic heritage. That act of vandalism resembled the Khmer Rouge's demolition of Phnom Penh's Catholic Cathedral, stone by stone, and their repression of Cambodia's Buddhist religion.

As a historian of premodern Japan active on Twitter, I seldom find myself embroiled in controversies in real time. I occasionally get pushback when I discuss the legacy of female emperors or nationalistic myths of ethnic homogeneity, but by and large, there's little trouble. So I hardly expected any powerful backlash in February of 2021 when I retweeted an article in The New Yorker by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen on a contentious publication regarding comfort women. In the tweet I had simply remarked “This is a fabulous summary of how this event unfolded across media and academic circles, also placing the major issues in historical perspective.” The result, however, was a ferocious Twitter storm from historical denialists that came to absorb my life and the lives of a number of my colleagues for months thereafter.

This article examines human experimentation under Japanese colonial rule, highlighting the practices by Japanese medical doctors at medical educational institutions in Manchuria in the years 1911-45. Although it proclaimed a civilizing mission in the colonies, colonial medicine exploited the bodies of the colonized for medical research and education. This article details unethical civilian practices which began well before the well-known, systematic atrocities of the Kwantung Army's Unit 731 in Manchuria. Bodies in the service of empire were long a part of the violent everyday life under colonial rule. The medical practices, experiments, and dissections carried out on the Chinese were more ethically problematic than those conducted in the home country. Over the period of colonial subjugation, such practices became steadily more radical. Colonial medicine, associated with physical experimentation, expropriated and endangered Chinese bodies. More importantly, the practices in medical colleges became the basis for Unit 731's human experimentation on Chinese using bacteriological and chemical weapons. The use of the human body is deeply intertwined with the interests of the power relations that governed the colony. This research shows how colonized bodies became material for the Japanese Empire.

This is an excerpt from Venetia Welby's novel, Dreamtime, set in Japan and Okinawa.

Dreamtime tells the story of an American woman's journey to Japan to find the father who abandoned her, a marine in Okinawa. It's set in the near future when both climate change and sabre-rattling between the US and China have intensified: sea levels are rising, commercial aviation's about to be banned – and anything can be justified in the face of the climate catastrophe and impending war. When Sol and her childhood friend Kit reach Tokyo, the gulf between expectation and reality becomes apparent; invisible boundaries start to shift. Soon they are joined on their journey by Hunter, a large marine who infatuates Sol and riles Kit. He leads them to the military heartland of Okinawa – and swiftly out of their depth.

Having arrived in France in 1921, the young student of French, Komatsu Kiyoshi 小松, 清, made the acquaintance of Ho Chi Minh. While briefly noting Komatsu's career as litterateur through the French Popular Front years, this article brings to light the nature and depth of Komatsu's relationship with Ho Chi Minh, especially as revealed by French police documentation. Komatsu's links with communist and anarcho-syndicalist networks in Paris - Japanese included - and his surprising memoir of Ho Chi Minh published in a Hanoi newspaper in 1944 casts new light on both men and the relationship between Vietnam and Japan.

Japan's scrappy weekly magazines, led by Shukan Bunshun, are filling the void in investigative journalism left by the mainstream media. The editor of Shukan Bunshun, Shintani Manabu, says the magazine's combative reporting is driven by commercial not ideological concerns – and its bigger rivals must learn this lesson, or risk irrelevance.

This article analyzes the impact of the coronavirus epidemic in India after first situating it in the wider international context. It begins with a global perspective on the spread of the pandemic that correlates more with geography, demography and seasonality than lockdown stringency and sequencing. The responses of governments have damaged economies, lost livelihoods, worsened healthcare-access and learning-outcomes, while curbing rights and freedoms of citizens. In India, the draconian lockdown dealt a crippling blow to the economy which has hurt the poor badly but could not ‘flatten the curve’. The inadequate and inappropriate policy response has made the task of economic recovery even more difficult. Yet, the crisis also opens possible opportunities for India to enhance its global role and profile.

The world's electric power system continues to be a principal source of carbon emissions, comparable to transport and such industries as steel and cement. Intense debate surrounds the issue of the pace at which it is greening. In this paper we offer a precise definition of greening as a rising proportion of electric power sourced from water, wind and sun (WWS), since these are all fundamentally renewable. Using the latest data from the BP Energy Review as well as national and regional sources, we demonstrate that by 2019 the EU-28 had reached a proportion of electricity generated from WWS of 34%, followed by China at 27%, Japan at 19% and the US at 17%. Moreover, the EU-28 achieved the fastest pace of transition, increasing its WWS-share of electricity generated from 20% in 2010 to 34% in 2019, or a 14% green shift in a decade. Over the same period, China's green shift in power generation was 10%, while that of Japan was 9% (all achieved in the decade following the Fukushima disaster) and the US at an 7% shift. The IEA has just issued a report revealing that globally renewable sources of energy account for 29% of electricity generated in 2020, up 2% on 2019 levels.

In this paper we examine the performance of China in greatest detail, since it is now the world's largest burner of coal, operates the world's largest electric power system, and is responsible for the highest levels of carbon emissions. We make the case that China has overall goals of decarbonization and dematerialization (i.e. using less material per unit of GDP), where the former goal is met by the shift to renewable sources of energy and the latter by the shift towards urban mining and the circular economy. Based on newly published data from the China Energy Council, we update our previous analyses of China's energy choices, looking for the green shoots in an otherwise black energy system. China's electric power system, now the largest in the world, continues to burn a lot of coal – nearly 4 billion tonnes in 2020, a 1% decrease on the 2019 total. But within this black power economy the green shoots are increasingly significant. We show that the proportion of China's electric power generation sourced from water, wind and sun (WWS) by 2020 reached 27%, up from 17% a decade earlier – a 10% green shift in a decade. In terms of generating capacity the figures for China are even more striking. In 2020 China's generating capacity sourced from WWS reached 41%, up from 25% in 2011, or a 16% green shift in capacity in 10 years. At this rate of a 1.6% green shift in generating capacity per year, China's electric power system would be more green than black by 2026, with widespread repercussions, for China and the world. We put these data in their international comparative perspective, and in the perspective that China is electrifying its economy faster than any other major region. But the levels of carbon emissions continue to rise (reaching 13.5 billion tonnes carbon dioxide in 2020), with China's leadership not predicting their peaking before 2030. So there is much to be done in terms of decarbonizing energy and electric power in particular. The wider significance of China's green choices, in the context of its increasing assertiveness internationally, is discussed.

Disaster commemoration serves as a moment to remember victims and honor survivors. In the case of 3.11, commemoration works differently. As a slow disaster, with radiation exposure and evacuation at the center of the story, 3.11 is not yet over. This places special importance on commemoration as a moment for memory, but also for ongoing commitments to research, justice, and health interventions for survivors.

Ninety percent of Japanese people live in cities, seemingly disconnected from the agrarian world their ancestors inhabited in premodern Japan. Focussing on Tokyo, where the apparent disconnect with the past is most stark, this article looks at old trees in public parks, shrine forests, and old bonsai, and argues that that beneath the city's modern veneer, these trees allow residents to feel close to nature, and stay connected with the history, myths and traditions the trees evoke.

This article discusses Japan's colonization of Korea in the context of world time. Korea was a unique colony as it was one of the last to be colonized in the world. Japanese colonizers pushed a heavy-handed “military policy”, mainly because of the sharp resistance at their accession to power in the period 1905-1910. In 1919 when mass movements swept colonial and semi-colonial countries, including Egypt and Ireland, Koreans too rose up against Japan's rule. Stung by wide resistance by Koreans in March and April 1919 as well as general foreign reproach, Japanese leaders adopted a “modern” practice by starting the imperial “cultural policy” in mid-1919. The most important consequence of the cultural policy was the integral role Korean industry soon had in linking the metropole with hinterland economies, and it is from this point that we can date Japan's specific brand of architectonic capitalism that has influenced Northeast Asia down to the present.

The green and the digital revolutions are intimately linked. Mastery of one technology will likely lead to leadership in the other. Both depend on ample supplies of critical materials, rare earth elements and other vital resources. Unfortunately, many are in short supply and demand for them will explode as those two revolutions unfold. Governments have awakened to vulnerabilities created by their need for these materials and are making efforts, with limited success, to ensure continued access to them. Given the consequences of leadership in both the green and digital arenas, it is not surprising that access to critical raw materials has become a geopolitical battleground.

The Navy ship containing nuclear bombs that a junior officer saw anchored off Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station in 1959 was only the most notorious of many U.S. violations of Japan's official policy banning nuclear weapons. The Japanese government has a long history of secretly agreeing to their deployments, and feigning ignorance when they were revealed. The outrage that erupted in the press and in the Diet when former American Ambassador to Japan, Edwin Reischauer, spoke publicly in 1981 about nuclear-armed warships in Japan's ports came close to bringing down an LDP government. In Okinawa local residents protested the large numbers and types of nuclear weapons based there during the U.S. military occupation (1945-72). Breaking its promise that they be permanently removed, the Japanese government concluded a secret nuclear understanding as part of the 1969 Okinawa Reversion Agreement that the U.S. government could bring them back whenever it decided there was “a great emergency.” In 2009 a high Japanese government official advocated their return to Okinawa in testimony before a U.S. Congressional Commission.

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the One Belt and One Road Initiative, commonly known as the Belt and Road Initiative. The initiative proposed ‘peaceful development’ and ‘economic cooperation’ connecting Asia, Europe and Africa. Within this framework, the establishment of the ‘China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC)‘ is envisaged as a promising step toward regional connectivity and economic development in Eurasia through the territory of Mongolia. This article analyzes the BRI projects to identify opportunities and challenges to creating the Corridor in Mongolia. The data draw on both primary and secondary sources.

Pacific War, and the history of colonial Korea. What is written here is our work, but it was made possible due to the efforts of a much wider network, including historians and colleagues around the globe, who generously contributed their expertise. We base our findings below on our experience reading and interpreting Japanese historical documents, as well as our common investment in producing responsible scholarship.