For almost a century after E.S. Morse's 1877 excavations at Ōmori shell mound demonstrated the existence of a Stone Age culture in the archipelago, it was generally accepted that the Japanese people dated back only to the Yayoi period, the time when wet-rice farming was introduced from the continent. The Stone Age was associated with pre-Japanese peoples such as the Ainu. By the 1980s, however, the idea that the Stone Age Jōmon period formed a key component in Japanese culture became widely accepted in both academia and the popular imagination. ‘Jōmon’ became a household word for the first time. This essay uses recent interdisciplinary work in archaeology, linguistics and genetics to re-evaluate the contribution of the Jōmon to Japan. New genetic research has started to find significant Jōmon ancestry in ancient Korea, showing that Jōmon genomes were not limited to the Japanese archipelago. DNA studies have also concluded that Yayoi, Kofun and modern ‘mainland’ Japanese populations derive only around 10% of their ancestry from the Jōmon, a figure which rises to 25% for early modern and contemporary Okinawans. Such figures are comparable to reported levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry found in many European countries. Linguistically, with the exception of Ainuic in the north, Jōmon languages were replaced by the incoming Japonic family with, at best, limited borrowing. The idea that Jōmon culture has been a dominant factor in shaping modern Japan also requires reconsideration. Many ‘Jōmony’ traits in historic Japan reflect ecological constraints—there are only so many ways to eat an acorn. Other such traits can be seen as part of a transcultural strategic resistance to Japan rather than as unchanging tradition. While the Jōmon has proven a fecund source of ideology in post war Japan, its actual contribution to historic Japanese civilisation has been small. This conclusion requires a reevaluation of why the Ainu in Hokkaido were not absorbed in the same way as Jōmon cultures elsewhere and why they went on to make such an important contribution to the history of the northern archipelago.

Mori Ogai (1862-1922), novelist, essayist, translator and one of the towering figures of the literary world in the Meiji and Taisho eras, was a master stylist. His prose style could not be farther away from the flowing, often seemingly random and excessively emotional, style of Miyazawa Kenji. It is controlled, concise, rational, formal, and chockablock with erudite Japanese and foreign historical references, the latter being chiefly classical Chinese and modern German. His style exerted an astounding influence on modern Japanese literature, inspiring an author born less than three years after his death, Mishima Yukio. Mishima, a master of clear and rich style in Japanese, took the pen directly from Ogai's hand.

This article offers a critical assessment of J. Mark Ramseyer's analysis of the wartime Japanese military “comfort women” system, “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” Closely examining the Japanese sources that Ramseyer cites, it finds the article flawed in distorting the evidence and in confusing the prewar system of prostitution and the wartime system.

In Fukushima there are two museums that present different narratives of the 3.11 natural disaster and nuclear crisis. TEPCO's Decommissioning Archive Center focuses on the nuclear accident, what its workers endured and provides rich details on the decommissioning process expected to take three to four decades. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum focuses on how the lives of the prefecture's residents were affected by the cascading 3.11 disaster. The Archive elides many controversial issues that reflect badly on the utility while the Memorial conveys the human tragedy while addressing some of the controversies not covered in the Archive. TEPCO presents an evasive narrative at the Archive, but it is slickly packaged and casts the utility in the best light possible. The Memorial is impressive in scope and conveys the extent of the various tragedies with updates that responded to patrons' criticisms about controversial issues.

The continued construction of a US military base in the prefecture, driven by the national government, ignores strong opposition to the project among locals.

My novel, excerpted here, is set in old Beijing, a city of walls in their contemporary incarnations. By old Beijing I don't mean so much the remnants of the Qing Dynasty capital described by twentieth-century writers. The story is contemporary but much of it is set within the confines of the Mongol Dynasty summer capital described by Marco Polo as Cambaluc, and celebrated by Samuel Coleridge in a euphonic fit of imagination in “Kubla Khan.”

At the heart of Northeast Asia lie multiple contradictions and unresolved issues left over from Japan's militarist and colonialist past. Author Wada has written prolifically on both Japan-North Korea and Japan-South Korea matters and for the past 20 years has been a tireless advocate of what he calls the “Common Homeland” or “Common House” concept of a post-war and post-Cold War Northeast Asian regional community. Here he analyses the policy framework (established by Abe Shinzo, according to Wada) of Japan's “hostility” towards North Korea and “ignoring” South Korea. He raises questions as to the compatibility of a Northeast Asian community with the recently articulated (US and Japanpromoted and China-encircling) “Indo-Pacific” concept.

The essay explores Japan's policies of containing infection without heavy reliance on legally imposed lockdowns or digital surveillance. It examines the ‘social measures’ that local governments and the Ministry of Health relied on, including consistent public health messaging, contact tracing, education, with a focus on behavior modification. The pandemic worldwide has highlighted the importance of society in addition to the state in controlling infection. This article points out the benefits of this form of social control as well as its trade-offs, including stress concerning social expectations, informal forms of social control, and incidences of harassment and discrimination against the diseased.

In the year since the United States, United Kingdom, and Australian governments announced the formation of AUKUS, a new alliance whose centrepiece is to be the supply of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, a robust critique of the nuclear weapons expansion has emerged in Australia, China, and the International Atomic Energy Association among others.

China operates the world's largest electric power system, which over the course of the 21st century has been consistently greening at the margin, even as the whole energy system and the manufacturing system it powers remain largely black. In this article we update our argument to reveal how in terms of capacity, of electricity generated and of investment, China's electrical system is continuously greening and within less than five years, would be expected to be more green than black in terms of generating capacity. We demonstrate how the sourcing of generating power from hydro, wind and sun is becoming ever more significant, outranking the contribution from nuclear.

A secret pact between the Solomon Islands and China, mainly concerned with internal security in the islands, has sparked new US-China competition in the Pacific Island countries. The United States, Australia, and New Zealand worry about a future Chinese base in the Solomons and elsewhere, whereas most Pacific Island countries worry about environmental and economic problems and want to stay clear of the US-China rivalry. Omitted from most analyses is the overwhelming US naval and air superiority in the Asia Pacific, and the neglect of the United States and its allies of Pacific Islanders' concerns. Belatedly, the United States is trying to get back in the game, while China already is presenting the PI countries with a blueprint for economic recovery and environmental protection.

Sinjŏm or spirit fortune-telling is now an intimate part of everyday life among many North Koreans. Extremely popular at the grassroots level, the rise of this traditional religious culture since the late 1990s, if properly understood, can provide an interesting looking glass into North Korea's society and politics in transition. This report is one small step to that end.

This paper traces the history of Ryōzen Kannon, a little-known religious site in Kyoto, Japan, to consider war memorials as sites of transwar continuity and change, and as ideological tools to present certain visions of past and present wars. While Ryōzen Kannon is promoted today as little more than a typical Japanese temple, it has a remarkable history beginning in the 1950s with its establishment by the business entrepreneur Ishikawa Hirosuke. Opened in 1955, it was pitched as a Buddhist alternative to commemorating the patriotic sacrifices of the war dead. Shortly thereafter, a separate monument to Allied prisoners of war that professed world peace and reconciliation was added to the site. While accompanied by historically valuable records of these former prisoners, however, this monument was largely a homage to the Cold War-era Japan-US alliance, and it obfuscated memories of violence in East Asia from the site. Since the 1960s, Ryōzen Kannon has struggled to keep up with the times. Particularly after the death of its founder and the end of the Cold War, the site has become increasingly anachronistic. Now, it occupies an ambiguous space between remembering and forgetting.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on love, marriage and family life. Employing both social science and cultural studies perspectives, this article discusses romantic and familial relationships and their respective depictions in four Japanese romantic dramas (ren'ai dorama) produced under pandemic conditions. It touches upon the COVID-19 pandemic and related policies in Japan, elaborates on conditions of TV production during the pandemic, and asks: How have TV series addressed love, dating and (marital) relationships during the pandemic? How did the pandemic and concomitant policies impact depictions of these topics? Finally, what do these dramas reveal about the state of domestic gender relations and gender equality in the context of changing working conditions and stay-at-home policies implemented during the pandemic? The article identifies a trend consistent with ‘re-traditionalization’ on the one hand, and depictions of diverse, unconventional relational practices that are critical of the marital institution on the other. While the dramas touch on the impact of the pandemic on women's livelihoods and gender equality, more serious consequences remain unexplored.

Recent archaeological, anthropological, and historical studies have brought the relationships proto-Ainu/Ainu groups had with various neighboring states into light; notably the Yuan Dynasty, the Northern Fujiwara, and the Ando/Matsumae domains. In light of such scholarship, this article argues that Ainu ethnogenesis was marked by cultural practices of state evasion and resistance to state-like structures from emerging within. Moreover, it is argued that Ainu groups utilized their unique position to enrich their own culture by capitalizing on the productive capacities of neighboring states. By using other anthropological studies of state-evading cultures as a theoretical framework, this article examines different elements of Ainu cultures and their relations with states.

This article examines Filipino memories of the Asia-Pacific War. In particular, it investigates which survivor accounts developed into the dominant historical narrative as well as looks at how prisoner of war monuments on Camp O'Donnell have been influenced by political and economic developments after the Asia-Pacific War. This study also re-examines how these shared memories about Camp O'Donnell complemented each other and became part of the canonical wartime narrative in Philippine history. This article uses “politics of mourning” as a framework in analyzing key events that led to both the development of canonical narratives in the construction of public history as embodied in the monuments and shrines in the present-day Capas National Shrine.

This article provides a concise overview of the well-organized, nationwide student movement which emerged in Japan in the immediate aftermath of World War II; its participation in the escalating political struggles of the 1950s, including an abortive attempt at a communist revolution from 1950 to 1952, anti-military base protests climaxing in the Sunagawa struggle from 1955 to 1957, and the massive Anpo protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty from 1959 to 1960; its collapse into warring “sects” in the 1960s; its revival in the form of the radically de-centralized, anti-hierarchical zenkyōtō movement of the late 1960s; and a final turn to violent extremism and a resulting delegitimization of student activism in the early 1970s. Among other observations, this article elucidates how the movement grew so large and so powerful so quickly, how it differed from student movements in other nations, connections between the Japanese student movement and similar movements in the western world, and the movement's broader social and political context both in reference to other Japanese social movements and the ongoing global Cold War.

The Japanese government's crackdown on the independent Kan'nama Union of concrete mix worker illustrates the fraught position of Japan's labor movement in decline.

The historical experiences of Hawai'i‘s Okinawan American (Uchinanchu) community in connection with Okinawa after World War II helped to shape an understanding of their own cultural and ethnic distinctiveness, which was influenced by U.S. policies in Okinawa. In the aftermath of the war, Hawai'i‘s Uchinanchu community worked to provide relief for their brethren in the devastated islands of their homeland. Their efforts were supported and indeed encouraged by the U.S. military. As the U.S. military transformed and rebuilt Okinawa, the U.S. sought to justify the occupation of Okinawa and its concentration of military bases on the islands. One means of doing this was referring to the Uchinanchu contributions to the rebuilding of their homeland as part of the expansion of US soft power. It can be argued that the emergence of a unique Okinawa American identity in Hawai'i in the post-World War II period reflected America's Cold War “public diplomacy” within a liberal multicultural discourse.

This paper examines Japan's complex infrastructure of cemeteries that preserve the memories of Japanese soldiers who died during military conflicts, while simultaneously maintaining a literal and figurative distance from more controversial sites of memory, such as the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Yasukuni has been at the center of “memory debates” in East Asia, making it difficult for unobtrusive forms of commemoration such as war cemeteries to gain a significant profile. Japanese war cemeteries are scattered around the country and the East Asian region and contain ossuaries hosting the actual remains of the dead, cenotaphs, as well as individual and collective tombs. Their physical configuration provides an educational tool of transnational scope, involving, among others, displays of commemoration and mourning dedicated to non-Japanese ‘enemy’ soldiers. In addition, the presence of Japanese cemeteries and monuments for the war dead built and maintained throughout Southeast Asia, in Japan's former colonial and wartime territories, amplifies the relational and transnational composition of the notion of a ‘national space’ of mourning. By looking at two Japanese sites, Sanadayama Cemetery in Osaka and the Japanese Cemetery in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, I highlight the importance of the cemetery as a locus of transnational memory and a reverent educational resource which moves beyond the picture of Japanese war memory as simply “reactionary” or “revisionist.” I argue that these two sites allow for an interpretation of commemorative spaces at the heart of contested war memories that neither conform to, nor are constrained by the debates surrounding Yasukuni.