Between 2008 and 2010 the government identified 69 “resource depleted cities” of which 19 – more than one quarter – are in the northeastern provinces of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang. Once the heart of China's heavy industry, the country's northeast is in trouble; its oil fields and steel mills are struggling, and its coal mining sector is in chronic decline.This article originated as part of a Special Report on economic decline and rejuvenation in China's former coal belt. In part two photographer Stam Lee explores Fuxin, a hollowed out pit town pinning its hopes on wind power in photo essay, accompanied by a report co-authored with chinadialogue reporter Feng Hao who expanded it for the Asia-Pacific Journal. In old mining villages near the pits of Fuxin in Liaoning Province in China's northeast you can still find former miners like Huang Anyuan (above), who worked in coal mines for 30 years (Image: Stam Lee)

By the late 1880s, Salt Lake City had embarked on its rocky career as the eastern hub of Oceania. The Mormons had first landed in Hawai'i in the 1850s and, having failed among Euro-Americans, turned their attention to Native Hawaiians, learning their language, converting leaders and establishing plantation settlements enabled by new laws allowing foreign land ownership. For Natives, the faith aided the preservation of communal beliefs and practices in the context of rapid, dislocating change, including those brought by Mormon newcomers themselves. In the absence of a temple in the Pacific, Native converts began migrating to Utah, settling in the Warm Springs area of North Salt Lake City. The movement enacted the Mormon concept of “gathering,” but was also continuous with historically deep Hawaiian journeys of discovery, trade and labor that spanned the Pacific, including the Western edges of the imperial United States. Inscribed in Mormon imaginaries as Lamanites—descendants of Abraham who had traveled to the Americas and, after great wars, into the “west sea” in an “exceedingly large ship”—and gathered into a racially-stratified American West, the Hawaiian arrivals were socially and economically subordinated.

In recent years the American media has covered the grossly disproportionate U.S. military presence in Okinawa mostly following such atrocities as the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three American servicemen in 1995, and the 2016 rape and murder of a twenty-year-old woman for which a former Marine, employed by the U.S. military at the the time, is charged. However, the New York Times and Washington Post have published occasional articles about the ongoing protests in Okinawa against the planned Marine airbase at Henoko, and tcritics of American foreign policy have reported on them. The broadcast that follows is unusual in that it aired on PBS and offers multiple perspectives on the bases.

When Shiori was 10, her mother took her to Tokyo Summerland, an indoor pool. Wearing a new swimsuit, she splashed happily in the water until she was sexually assaulted. “A man came from behind and touched me on every part of my body,” she recalls, crying at the memory. Shaking and terrified, she told the grownups but their response was bewildering. “My friend's mother said it was because I was wearing a bikini.”

The several works of American literature set in Okinawa or about Okinawans include travel narratives, war diaries, memoirs, biography, fiction, drama, and musical theater Perhaps the earliest, Francis L. Hawks's 1856 Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, is an account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry's gunboat diplomacy of 1853–1854 when he forced his demands on leaders of what was then the Ryukyu Kingdom, allowing Americans to land, travel, and trade there. Hawks also provides informative and colorful descriptions of the local residents, architecture, and natural environment.

With rising US-China tensions in the course of the US presidential campaign, Marc Grossman considers the possibilities for a collaborative relationship and the costs of the alternatives as both nations offer a vision for a new silk road.

This article investigates the recent wave of staged confessions in China in historical perspective. Currently, the authorities “disappear,” detain, and parade people, both Chinese and foreigners, on state television, forcing them to incriminate themselves by making abject confessions prior to legal proceedings. This is a clear break with years of efforts to build the rule of law in China. It also reverses multiple solemn declarations to prohibit police torture and forced confessions, both longstanding practices in China. The new extrajudicial show trials, which are staged spectacles outside courts of law, suggest a return to Mao-era praxis, and have been criticized by many, including leading Chinese judges and lawyers. Despite the painstaking choreography, the TV confessions are widely regarded both in China and internationally as fake — not least because of several new witness accounts provided by former detainees which emerged during 2016. Elements for a historically grounded interpretation emerge from examination of Soviet Communist, Christian, and various East Asian parallels. Kafka's allegory in The Trial exposes how the powerful frame the innocent by forcing them to “confess,” in order to perpetuate their power.

Nearly five years ago The Asia-Pacific Journal published an early chapter from my translation of Tachibana Takashi's Tennō to Tōdai (The emperor and Tokyo University [Bungei shunju, 2005]. The full translation is now available for free download here. Herewith a second, late chapter, from that translation.

Tachibana Takashi (b. 1940 in Nagasaki) is one of Japan's leading independent researchers. He has dozens of books to his credit: on Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, the Lockheed bribery scandal, near-death experiences, space travel, cancer. He has also been a figure in radio and TV journalism and has acted on TV.

Ever since the Meiji Period (1868-1912), treaties and the laws of other countries have been used to justify laws the Japanese people neither want nor need. The most recent use of this technique involves a treaty called the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

Never heard of it? According to the Abe administration, implementing the treaty was important enough to justify creating hundreds of new criminal offenses, most comprising an entirely new category, namely “planning the execution of a serious crime for a terrorist or other organized crime group.”Most writers are using the word “conspiracy,” not just because it describes the new crimes more concisely, but also as this whole endeavor is widely regarded as the repackaging of past government efforts to add conspiracy to law enforcement's arsenal.

“The mountains are like the bones of the earth. Water is its blood,” wrote a Vietnamese geographer in 1820. Lowland Việt Nam is aquatic, but it is also multiregional and polyethnic. The country's three historic lowland regions are bounded by extensive uplands, all linked by interrelated landscapes, economies, and cultures. Throughout the plains, water plays a key role in the economy and communications. In the north and south, the Red River and the Mekong River form wide deltas and flow into the South China Sea. Linking the two deltas is the central region, many hundreds of miles of curving coastline, broken every twenty miles or so by river mouths and port towns.

In September 2016, the Cabinet Office of Japan published the results of an epidemiological survey focusing on acute social withdrawal (hikikomori). This article summarizes and assesses the major features of the survey. It aims at facilitating research and international exchanges on a mental health and social problem affecting at least 541,000 people in Japan that seems to have spread to industrialized societies.

This article examines the forces behind former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purna's recent imprisonment and the subsequent political upheaval in Indonesia. It delves into the murky ties between President Donald Trump's most important Indonesian business partner, multi-billionaire Hary Tanoesodibjo and the latter's relationship with pro-Islamist politicians and the military to evaluate the consequences of political turmoil on the future of Indonesia.

This article examines the new sphere of transnational activism in the Japanese environmental movement of the 1970s. What was previously a domestic phenomenon of local mobilizations against pollution and development expanded into a new array of transnational initiatives, many with a specific focus on pollution in the countries of East Asia. The article focuses on a transnational movement involving South Korean and Japanese activists to stop the relocation of a polluting mercurochrome plant from Japan to South Korea. I argue that such transnational involvement had a significant impact on activist identity. Within the framework of the Japanese nation, activists could seamlessly position themselves as victims of the state and industry. But transnational involvement upset this schematic by exposing their complicity in the transgressions of Japanese industry abroad. The result, I argue, was a more self-reflexive activist identity and the development of a kind of grassroots regional consciousness within some Japanese civic movements throughout the 1970s.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is often now cited by the remaining band of optimists in Washington as a safe pair of hands, limiting the influence of the foreign policy manias permeating the White House. Unfortunately for both the United States and the rest of the world, Tillerson's public comments during his mid-March visits to Japan, South Korea and China show the precise opposite by threatening China with U.S. encouragement of acquisition of nuclear weapons by Japan and South Korea. Faced with American risk-taking on this order, at a time of mounting tensions in the Asia-Pacific, Australia and other nations in the region require an independent foreign policy focussed on sanity about nuclear weapons.

In contemporary Japan Ainu women create spaces of cultural vitalization wherein they transit between Ainu identity determined by their natal relationships and actively negotiating with Ainu identity through their art. Engaging in self-craft through cloth arts has empowered Ainu women to imagine new expressions of self and to redefine their identities as Ainu or mixed ancestry, and thus reflects women's lived realities and struggles. Women's clothwork, as well as musical performance and other arts, has also been pivotal to the Ainu Indigenous rights movement and to cultural revitalization efforts. By carefully positioning heritage cloth, ritual regalia, and ancestral patterns as mouthpieces of Ainu indigeneity, Ainu women have leveraged traditional knowledge to claim Indigenous rights in UN forums and the Japanese Diet.

As such, Ainu women move between “being Ainu,” a racist label attached to Ainu bodies by settler society, to actively “becoming Ainu” and determining what this means on their own terms. The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum, and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and Indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles.

Shifts in U.S. nuclear policies under the Trump Administration may affect Japan in significant ways. The demands of formulating a coherent set of policies and implementing them, and dealing with pushback from other states and domestic opposition make it hard to anticipate exactly what U.S. nuclear policies may look like under Donald Trump. President Trump, however, has been outspoken on nuclear policy issues, and even though the statements are often contradictory, they offer some insight. These statements form the basis of this analysis.

This essay looks at how United States nuclear arms control and disarmament policies may change over the next few years. It begins by looking at Trump's views on nuclear arms control issues, including the New START agreement and U.S. plans for modernization, the possibility of new nuclear weapons and a resumption of nuclear testing. It then looks at Trump's views on U.S. nuclear posture, including the question of the first use of nuclear weapons. The essay also examines how the President has viewed the challenge of nuclear proliferation, especially the case of North Korea and U.S. policy toward Japan. Finally, with talks to begin in March 2017 on a UN mandated treaty to ban nuclear weapons, the essay looks at the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The erosion of civil liberties proceeds apace in Okinawa, the most conspicuous case being the imprisonment for five months (17 October 2016 to 19 March 2017) of Yamashiro Hiroji, head of the Okinawa Peace Movement Center and a prominent activist opposing base activist. In most developed democratic countries, a suspect may be held in police custody for up to four days before she or he is either indicted or released, but in Japan the limit is 23 days, and in Yamashiro's case it was arbitrarily extended by serial arrests on unrelated charges.

Cultural heritage preservation is literally and metaphorically big business in Japan. Not only does the Japanese government commit considerable resources to the designation of heritage at local, national, and international levels, heritage preservation plays a central role in strategies to develop Japanese tourism on which the country’s economy is increasingly reliant. Many local communities are persuaded both by the idea of tourism as a path to economic development/revitalization, and by heritage preservation’s place in it, and vie to have heritage sites in their locales recognized for their cultural value. These combined local and national interests in heritage produce an ever-expanding landscape of acknowledged cultural heritage, which functions, in effect, as a circuit of state-sanctioned national history and cultural value. Not surprisingly, the narratives told in this circuit are celebratory, speaking to Japan’s extraordinary cultural and aesthetic achievements, or its remarkable natural landscape. Where sites commemorate tragedy or disaster, the narratives slant towards positive attributes like resilience, peace, or a regard for nature’s awesome power.

The incredible growth of China's cattle, sheep and dairy production is a visible phenomenon of the past twenty years, but its foundations were laid decades earlier. Seeking to industrialize its hinterland, and exploit its vast wealth of grazing livestock, China created slaughtering and processing facilities across its northern grasslands during the 1950s. Since the 1980s, much of this infrastructure has been privatized by companies which, like their predecessors, seek efficiency through economies of scale. Brutal competition over price and constant arrival of new domestic and foreign players have encouraged the integration of processing chains, but also sidelined small operators, and created gaps in safety best epitomized by the 2008 tainted milk scandal. Despite steps taken to “green” the production chain, it remains to be seen if such gaps have been adequately filled.

What was the Cold War? Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press, 2015) is an inquiry into the very nature and meanings of the conflict. It traces the Cold War's metamorphosis during the Korean War from a diplomatic stand-off among policymakers to an ordinary people's war at home through examining not only centers of policymaking, but seeming aftereffects of Cold War politics during the Korean War: The Red Purge in Japan, the White Terror in Taiwan, Suppression of counterrevolutionaries in China, the crackdown on “un-Filipino” activities in the Philippines, and McCarthyism in the United States. Why did such similar patterns of domestic repression occur simultaneously around the world? Were there any similarities among these repressions? What would happen if we were to remove the Cold War lens? What were the implications of such a worldwide phenomenon?

While these events have usually been examined separately and are commonly considered aftereffects of the global Cold War, the book redefines these events as parts of a global phenomenon of nativist backlashes—a sort of social conservative suppression—that operated to silence various local conflicts that surfaced in the aftermath of World War II. It shows how ordinary people throughout the world strove to silence disagreements and restore social order under the mantle of the global confrontation, revealing that the actual divides of the Cold War existed not necessarily between the Eastern and Western blocs but within each society, with each, in turn, requiring the perpetuation of such an imagined reality to maintain order and harmony at home. Exploring such social functions and popular participation, Cold War Crucible suggests that the Cold War was more than an international and geopolitical confrontation between the Western and Eastern blocs. It was also a social mechanism for purity and order, which functioned in many parts of the world to tranquilize chaotic postwar and postcolonial situations through containing a multitude of social conflicts and culture wars at home. This article draws on and extends parts of Chapter 8 and 9 concerning Japan's Red Purge and China's Suppression of counterrevolutionaries.