On November 9, six days before the virtual meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and China's President Xi Jinping attracted the world's attention, the two leaders had shared their thoughts about the relationship between the two countries. It was at the annual gala of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, held in the Plaza Hotel in New York. In their congratulatory letters to the committee, both acknowledged the challenges in the relationship of the two countries and expressed willingness to overcome them.

Five and a half months ago (15 March), I wrote of the “Troubled Games of the XXXll Olympiad” in the context of the dual crises facing Japan: continuing, unresolved radiation emanating from the 2011 Fukushima quake/tsunami/meltdown and the COVID-19 public health crisis. The Games were supposed to resolve these crises, leading the world into a new era of recovery, hope and peace, but as they went ahead in July and August neither was even mitigated.

In the wake of the explosion of the “comfort women” issue, with the help of lawyers and activists, Chinese comfort women instigated four class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government. However, how the lawyers represented the history of comfort women and what happened in the courtroom have remained obscure. Unlike the conventional verdict-centered approach to civilian trials involving comfort women, this research adopts a procedural approach by delving into the court transcripts, legal briefs, and other evidentiary materials tendered to the court. It argues that although the plaintiffs lost every case, through the court proceedings the victims and their lawyers managed to carve out an official space for knowledge transmission and recognition. These proceedings have the potential to serve as an exemplary model for future civil trials adjudicating injustices (historical or otherwise) involving sexual and gender-based violence.

The Army-State, which had ruled Burma with an iron fist between Ne Win's March 1962 coup d'état and the initiation of a hybrid civilian-military government after the General Election of November 2010 and the convening of the Union Parliament (Pyidaungsu Hluttaw) in early 2011, has been resurrected. Burma's “transition” to democracy is finished, despite the promises of the new junta's leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, to hold new elections in 2022. Burma's tragic history of military control is a kind of alphabet soup: starting with the BSPP (Burma Socialist Programme Party) in 1962, the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council) in 1988, the SPDC (State Peace and Development Council) in 1997 and now, finally, the SAC (State Administrative Council), Min Aung Hlaing's sad contribution to decades of misrule and under-development. This article explains the factors leading to the coup despite the powerful role of the military in the earlier government.

Various problems can be found in the article by J. Mark Ramseyer (hereinafter, the article) to the extent that its content is hardly worthy of a serious refutation from an academic point of view. Although it is not clear whether it is intentional or simply a matter of negligence, there are many misrepresentations of facts. We should not underestimate the significance of the fact that such papers are being accepted in the academic world. Bearing this in mind, I will discuss the following three points related to modern Japanese history, my field of specialization:

1. 1) errors concerning the formation of modern Buraku,

2. 2) errors in the prejudicial equating of Buraku people with criminals, and

3. 3) errors concerning the Levelers' movement.

This article is the second in a two part-series. Part 1 introduced Katō Kōko as the pivotal figure behind the World Heritage inscription process and the controversial historical narratives of “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Using Hashima Island as an example, part 1 criticised Katō's omission of the history of Korean and other forced labor, and discussed the significance of Katō's historical revisionism in the Industrial Heritage Information Centre in Tokyo. Part 2 explores Katō's leading roles in several heritage related bodies in Japan. This allowed her to present historical evidence selectively and to interpret it to support her celebratory narrative of the Japanese industrial revolution while denying the relevant history of foreign forced labor. Her official roles were critical in creating platforms for neo-nationalism that legitimate radical historical revisionism. Katō's cooperation with UNESCO is demonstrably dishonest and she should be removed from her heritage related roles in order for Japan to honour its commitment at the time of World Heritage inscription to acknowledge the history of Koreans and others who were forced to work at these sites during wartime.

In the six decades of division since the Korean War ended in a “cease-fire,” the vestiges of Japanese colonial rule have used various causes such as anti-communism, liberal democracy, regionalism, and Christian values to cement their status as a cornerstone upholding the system of the North-South division. In this context, the task to eradicate the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators must target the “vestiges of Japanese colonial rule” in every aspect, rather than just the “vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators.” Furthermore, the “vestiges of Japanese colonial rule” must be clearly understood and addressed in light of their fundamental role in maintaining the division of North and South Korea. We must carefully observe how the political activities of sovereign citizens will affect the candlelight government's efforts to complete the imminent tasks to seek reform and to eradicate the vestiges of Japanese colonial rule that remain a cornerstone of vested interests based on the North-South division.

In October 2017, the application to list the Voices of the Comfort Women archive on UNESCO's “Memory of the World Register” was rejected (or “postponed”). In this paper, I set that decision in the context of other recent instances of “heritage diplomacy” in East Asia, highlighting the tensions between nationalistic agendas and UNESCO's universalist pretensions. I then discuss the nature and extent of similar tensions in the framing of the “comfort women” issue, as manifested in “comfort women museums” (institutions closely associated with the preparation of the 2016-17 Memory of the World application). I focus especially on the case of China, where the Xi Jinping regime first sought to weaponize this issue against Japan, only to pull back in 2018 as Sino-Japanese ties warmed. I conclude by considering how the story of the comfort women might be reframed to underline its global significance (or “outstanding universal value”), in a manner that makes it more difficult for Japanese nationalists to portray the campaign for recognition and commemoration as an anti-Japan conspiracy.

We argue that the post-Fukushima nuclear safety debates in the United States and Europe fundamentally altered the definition of nuclear safety. In the United States, the industry effectively took control by strengthening technical measures as the solution to nuclear safety concerns. In France, technical solutions were part of the process, but they were less dominant than in the United States and were overshadowed by larger organizational shuffles. The European Union, in contrast, engaged in a drawn-out debate over the very definition of nuclear safety, resulting in a stress test initiative that, while cumbersome and frustrating to many, included truly deliberative elements and ultimately revealed just how precarious the definitions of control and nuclear safety were.

I consider problems in the references to the history of Buraku in J. M. Ramseyer’s article, “On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan”, published in Review of Law and Economics in 2019. As a researcher on the history of those who had been subjected to discrimination in the early- modern era, mainly in East Japan, I would like to point out problems in the article, focusing on its references to and quotations from previous works.

On 25 March, the Olympic Torch Relay is to set out from Fukushima with its “sacred flame” on a grand national circuit, visiting all 47 of the country's prefectures and arriving at the Tokyo Games venue for the opening ceremony on 23 July. But will this scenario really play out? Even as the countdown to the Olympic opening ceremony proceeds, in the shadow of the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster and the Covid pandemic there are reports that cancelation might be imminent.

The first tsunami that hit northern Japan in March 2011 was a big wave of salt water. The second tsunami was comprised of cement dikes designed to protect against a tsunami. The third tsunami is a socio-political process that erases memory of the disaster. The nuclear disaster that followed the first tsunami has reactivated the dispute over the effects of low-dose radiation. This controversy, which dates back to the experience of the hibakusha in 1945, includes a problem of hermeneutics—a conflict of interpretation—over what is being counted as “data”.

We are researchers with strong concerns about J. Mark Ramseyer's (hereafter JMR) article “On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan.” We are active in various disciplines and have published work on aspects of Buraku history and literature, as well as the history of slums, deviance, and marginality. The article comprises one part of a larger body of writing by JMR in recent years that has been critiqued and refuted for its misrepresentations of sources, which have in turn created larger historiographic misunderstandings that reproduce discrimination against Burakumin. At the same time we raise these questions, in Japan, scholars and representatives of the Buraku community have openly rejected the author's writings on Burakumin, including this 2019 article. They have specifically questioned his research methods; his use (and abuse) of evidence; his characterizations of people, problems, and processes; and the validity and truthfulness of his various claims about (1) the status of pre-modern Buraku occupations and social mobility, (2) the origins and nature of the Suiheisha, the first nationwide Buraku social movement, and (3) the character and impact of government Dōwa subsidies on Buraku communities since the 1960s.

Calls for reparations and apologies for crimes committed during the 1930s/40s war in Asia have been major points of contention in East Asia's public memory since at least the 1980s. In recent years, a “history/memory war” over the “comfort women” issue has intensified. At the same time, the battleground has also shifted to the terrain of “heritage” and has increasingly taken on a global dimension. This paper considers an increasingly significant arena for East Asian memory wars, involving diaspora communities in Western countries. Its particular focus is the coordinated “comfort women” activism of Korean American and other Asian American diaspora groups in certain regions of the United States. While their decades-long activism has produced a ‘memory boom’ in its own right and resulted in raising the political profile of Asian Americans, I argue that this has also come at the cost of straining to breaking point post-war arrangements for symbolizing and cementing US-Japanese reconciliation. The paper builds on existing research to delineate the expanding scope of Asia's memory wars and introduces new insights into some of the US activists' inter-ethnic alliance building that underscores the increasingly global nature of these memory conflicts as well as the potentially lasting repercussions for societies far beyond East Asia.

A decade ago, Japan learned some bitter lessons from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, after ignoring global and local ones over the preceding four decades. But elements of the country clearly haven’t, whether it comes to the atom or dealing with an international event like the Tokyo Summer Olympics during a global pandemic. Because of Japan’s mishandling of the pandemic and new variants resistant to vaccines, whether the games, which a majority of the public wanted cancelled or postponed again, would have become a super-spreader event, trigger a new variant or create an explosion of COVID-19 cases or a combination thereof remained a continuing concern. What’s clear is that Tokyo put political, bureaucratic and commercial interests ahead of the health and wellbeing of the overall public —similar to what happened in the decades preceding Fukushima.

Since 1991, scholars from all over Asia have sought to reconstruct the history of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” - that is, to recover the facts relating to this system of sexual slavery - by analysing documentary records and interviewing survivors. As a result, an international consensus has emerged concerning the status of this system as a wartime atrocity involving large-scale violation of human rights, for which Japan ought to apologize. However, within Japan many persist in denying responsibility for the invasion [of China and associated atrocities]. Therefore, no effort should be spared to pass on the memory of this history to future generations, through discussing this atrocity of sexual slavery in school textbooks, applying for a [UNESCO] Memory of the World inscription, producing documentary films, or building museums, memorials and so forth. Other Asian countries thus continue their intense disputes with Japan over the nature and scale of the comfort women system, and the appropriate terminology for describing it.

Earlier this month at the request of the editor of the International Review of Law and Economics, we began to write a critical response to the article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” by Professor J. Mark Ramseyer, at that point released online by the journal with plans for formal publication in March.

March 11, 2021 marked the tenth anniversary of Japan’s triple disaster of 2011. Residents of Fukushima towns which endured the greatest environmental, social, and economic impact of the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident have lived with uncertainty about the future for a full decade. Major infrastructure projects are fully or nearly complete, and decontamination efforts in reopened towns have largely concluded. Nevertheless, evacuee return rates have been low in most towns which had been placed under full evacuation orders. As a result, the current populations of many affected towns are less than 20% of their pre-disaster levels, and the majority of current residents over 65 years of age. Despite the huge challenges, the energy and know-how of the people of Fukushima are tremendous resources. Many see the possibility of new forms of long-term viability that capitalize on technology, the age of the population, and the ready availability of land and other resources. What has been achieved so far in realizing these visions has been made possible by an emergent network of informal community leaders, who display a charismatic, soft leadership style.

We, the signatories to this statement, condemn the publication of J. Mark Ramseyer’s paper “On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan,” Review of Law and Economics (RLE) 16; 2 2020. The article does not meet scholarly standards; furthermore, the foundational argument is based on a logical fallacy, blaming Burakumin for the social conditions that underlie their oppression. This is a thin, recognizably reactionary move that has no place in scholarly journals.