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.

50 years after President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China, the Taiwan issue remains the most difficult and potentially most explosive dispute between the United States and China. At the core is the concept of “one China.” While Beijing insists that the “one China principle” with the People's Republic of China (PRC) representing all of China is the foundation of US-China relations, Washington emphasizes its “one China policy” that treats Taiwan as a separate entity from the PRC. Meanwhile, Taipei, under the rule of the Democratic Progressive Party, has asserted that Taiwan is already independent and the two sides across the Taiwan Strait are not subordinate to each other. Tensions have reached a record high in the Taiwan Strait and all three parties involved demonstrate intentions to change the status quo. To restore stability and avoid war in the Taiwan Strait, all three parties should provide reassurance to reestablish confidence and refrain from taking unilateral actions to further damage the delicate status quo.

In 1998, the International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute. With 123 nations now parties to the Treaty, the ICC, headquartered at the Hague, may investigate and prosecute individuals for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and aggression. It is hampered, however, by the fact that 70 countries, including the US, Russia, China and many other nuclear powers, have not joined and actively oppose the work of the court. What have been its accomplishments and its limits?

My life as a scholar and writer has been dedicated to unknotting the tangle of forces that created my mother’s mental illness, which became apparent to me in 1986, when I was fifteen. The biomedical paradigm of mental illness was dominant in the 1980s, and it said that her condition - a set of perceptions that Western psychiatry calls “schizophrenia” - was nothing more than genetic bad luck, her voices nothing more than symptoms of a broken brain. Her illness might have been cured, I was told, had we noticed it earlier. Schizophrenia was (mis)understood to be only a young person’s disease and not an ailment that could befall a middle-aged woman like my mother, and so the counselor at the community mental health center where I sought help for my mother said that it was “too late.” That year was when the seeds of my future work were planted.

War – its preparation, rehearsal, prosecution, and remediation – is increasingly the preoccupation of 21st century states and peoples. Attention in 2022 focussed on the savage fighting in the Black Sea and Ukraine, but preparations, plans and rehearsals on a hitherto unprecedented scale for conflict were underway around the world, notably in the form of US-led and organized exercises in the Baltic, the East and South China Seas, the Mediterranean and the Pacific, with an expansive NATO and US-led regional engagement involving new roles for Japan, India, Australia and others in the Western Pacific.

This article seeks to explain the disparity in treatment received by two groups of terrorists in 1930s Japan. First, Inoue Nisshō, head of a band of terrorist assassins popularly known as the Blood Oath Corps (Ketsumeidan), received lenient, if not supportive, treatment from powerful forces in Japanese society even before he surrendered to police on 11 March 1932. Second, a group of young Imperial Army officers and their troops attempted a coup d'état on 26 February 1936. However, in the aftermath of the failed coup, the leaders were arrested and, shortly thereafter, executed by firing squad. Both Inoue and his band of assassins as well as the young army officers were proponents of a movement known as the “Shōwa Restoration” (Shōwa Isshin). Despite the goal they shared in common, and despite the assassinations of important Japanese figures they both carried out, why was the treatment they received at the hands of the Japanese authorities so completely different?

The Battle of Tsushima was fought between Japan and Russia in 1905. It was the most notable naval battle during the century before the First World War and one of the most decisive naval clashes ever. Although it has left a deep and indelible mark on both belligerents, it was only natural that the battle would remain a center point in the collective memory of the country that won it. Indeed, throughout the years before Japan's surrender in 1945, and to a lesser extent even after, the battle continued to be the focus of commemoration and pride, possibly more than any other single battle the country had ever won or lost. Nonetheless, with the passing of time and changing circumstances, attitudes toward the battle witnessed their ups and downs much like the attitudes toward the entire war against Russia, empire, and militarism. Accordingly, the history of the battle's collective memory can be divided into four distinct phases: the immediate response; the subsequent forty years of imperialistic expansion; the era of Allied occupation; and the years since a democratic Japan regained its sovereignty. This article aims to examine the winding road of this memory, its sources and repercussions.

Technical trainees who come from overseas to work in Japan are subject to conditions that don't necessarily apply to foreign workers who come to Japan with conventional work visas. There are many people who feel these conditions are unreasonable, especially given the general understanding that the technical trainee system, whose ostensible purpose since it was established in 1993 is to “transfer technology” from Japan to so-called developing countries, has evolved into a system that provides Japanese employers with cheap labor.

“Korean sawagi” was the contemporaneous labeling of the rumor-driven commotion and massacres following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. This article examines the Korean sawagi as a staged event through a battle cry exercise in the Imperial Palace Plaza in Tokyo on the night of September 2.

This essay focuses on the war cemetery as a place of reconciliation, by exploring the commemoration of war dead. It describes the journey taken at the Cowra Australian and Japanese war cemeteries from postwar enmity, when the memory of conflict and loss was still raw, to a landscape of shared cultural memories (Ashplant et al. 2001). Looking at a site in which former enemies are interred in collocated spaces, it demonstrates how war cemeteries can function as performative spaces, host acts of reconciliation and sustain practices of memorial diplomacy (Graves 2014). Through the rituals of war commemoration regularly performed at the cemetery, and negotiated within a transcultural setting, it shows how these war cemeteries offered a comparatively neutral space for mourning when the tension of conflict between former wartime combatants remained. As the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) moves beyond survivor testimony, this essay provides a useful interrogation of the role of war cemeteries as sites of memory and how the materiality of human remains figures in the continuing evolution of war memory to post-memory (Hirsch 2008).

In recent years, successive Australian governments, in coordination with the United States, have responded to the dramatic rise of China with military and economic policies that directly challenge the possibility of accommodation with China.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) occupies an integral position in the memory politics of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In recent years, dominant representations of the war create a memory discourse which portrays the heroic triumph of the Chinese people led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Japan. This article shows how the war has been remembered from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to the present in the PRC. It contributes to the debate on the effectiveness and limitations of the monopoly of war memory by the CCP.

While Hong Kong's Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) Movement in 2019 did not lead to systemic policy changes, the protests provided coalitional moments for mainstream Hongkongers to connect with the city's marginalised South Asian community. This essay first contextualises the positionality and history of marginalisation of South Asians in Hong Kong. It then examines moments of rupture during the Anti-ELAB Movement that fostered solidarity between the two ethnic groups. This case study illustrates how anti-authoritarian social movements and the affective charge of protests help cultivate a politics of relation that supersedes racialisation.

In recent years, academic research and investigative reports have brought to light several cases of computational propaganda (i.e. orchestrated attempts to manipulate public opinion or the outcome of elections via social media), as well as proof that filter algorithms amplify right-wing conservative content on Japanese social media. Piecing together the scattered pieces of a puzzle, this article summarizes recent findings from various disciplines and provides an overview of the mechanisms and potential scope of computational propaganda in politics. Although there is no conclusive evidence of who is behind this anonymous activity, an analysis of these findings demonstrates increasing circumstantial evidence that certain factions of the LDP are actively using computational propaganda, either by commissioning external contractors or through its online support group, J-NSC, thereby condoning and appealing to anonymous Internet right-wingers (netto uyo). The concluding discussion assesses the effects and consequences of computational propaganda on the political sphere in contemporary Japan.

The book presents personal accounts by veterans of an Army nuclear weapons storage base in Henoko Village, Okinawa during the 1960's in the context of nuclear weapons history, Cold War tensions, and the proposal to use them in Vietnam. They describe their entrances into the Army, training, leave times, re-entry into civilian life, and illnesses associated with radiation exposure three of them later suffered, one of whom died in 2015.

This paper, as a conclusion to this special issue, discusses approaches taken to memory studies of the First World War and what they can tell us about commemoration of the Asia-Pacific War. A lot of work remains to be done in connecting the historiographies of the two world wars of the twentieth century, but this is important if we are to fully understand the development of war and memory throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The First World War was an important reference point for those who fought in the second and founded practices of commemoration such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Based on my experience as a First World War historian, I address some of the important themes that this special issue on the Asia-Pacific War has raised, namely the image of the soldier, commemoration, the temporal memory of war and how an expanded geographic lens has altered our understanding of the Second World War in general.

The clean energy transition is complicated by material constraints that threaten national security. Idealized proposals for a rapid decarbonization via a greatly accelerated diffusion of solar, wind, battery and other technologies entails massive amounts of critical raw materials (CRM). These CRM include copper, aluminum, cobalt, lithium, graphite, rare earths, and other minerals and metals. In the international debate, CRM are also referred to as “critical minerals,” “critical strategic minerals,” “battery minerals,” “energy transition metals,” and various other terms. The International Energy Agency (IEA) aggressively supports decarbonization, but also warns that zero-carbon scenarios imply that the energy sector's overall demand for CRM could sextuple by 2040. Japan aims for net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, and India's net-zero target is two decades later. But like all countries, their CRM supply chains are at present unable to satisfy ambitious goals for deploying solar, wind, battery storage, power transmission, and green hydrogen. Multilateral cooperation is imperative to address the growing challenges of CRM, especially their price volatility, security of supply, and Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues. Building a sustainable and diversified global supply chain is crucial to building security in clean energy. One step in this direction was seen in September 2021, when Japan, India and other members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or QUAD, signed an agreement for cooperation in procuring rare earths. This paper discusses potential additional cooperation between India and Japan, for bolstering both countries' CRM supply security.

Contemporary readers are most familiar with George Orwell's later works of political satire, such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Less known is the fact that the writer, who is often considered the epitome of ‘Englishness’, was born in India and as a young man served for five years in the Imperial Police in Burma—an experience that reverberated throughout his oeuvre. In Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022), Douglas Kerr offers the first comprehensive study of Orwell's writing about the East and of the East in his writing

On January 3, 2022 the White House circulated the following joint statement of the five nuclear-weapons states on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races. It is reprinted here with a comment by John Gittings.

In 1969, a group of Japanese veterans returned to New Guinea to find the remains of their comrades and conduct funeral rites, one of many such postwar missions to former battlefields. The group documented its search in photographs and published a book of these photographs in 1970. This article shows how the visual cues of the photographs functioned to blur the temporal distance from war and encouraged an emotional response in the viewers by contrasting the recognizable, shattered remains of the dead with the peaceful and ostensibly timeless environment in which they were now found. The photographs also reveal unequal power relations between Japanese veteran visitors and their New Guinean hosts, and the enduring nature of the veterans' colonial viewpoints. This article argues that the aim of the veterans in presenting these photographs to the greater public was to contribute an emotionally engaging argument against forgetting the sacrifice of veterans in the war, underlining the powerful mechanisms that allowed conservative alliances of veterans, bereaved families and politicians to bypass debates about war guilt by appealing instead to emotions connected to grief and mourning.