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.

While Dorothea Lange has long been widely known and acclaimed for her photographs depicting the impact of the Great Depression on farmers and laborers, her documentation of the Japanese American internment was long impounded by the US army. This article tells the story and shows some of the signature images contained in her documentation of the internment as well as explaining their long suppression.

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.

In 2011, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus published the first detailed research into the usage of U.S. military defoliants, including Agent Orange, on Okinawa. Six years later, official documents, photographs and testimonies from hundreds of veterans suggest Vietnam War defoliants were stored, sprayed and buried throughout the island.

In 2014, all components of Agent Orange were discovered at a former military dumpsite in Okinawa City; in June 2015, nearby water was found to be contaminated with dioxin, the poison which makes defoliants so dangerous, at 21,000 times safe levels.

How has ownership of the tiny and uninhabited Senkaku/Diaoyu islands become the most intractable issue in Sino-Japanese relations? Explanations have typically focused on legal and diplomatic issues, the context of the Cold War and the San Francisco Treaty system, and the economic and strategic values of the maritime region. This paper instead argues that people's diplomacy by both Chinese and Japanese turned the ownership issue into a “homeland dispute,” by confirming the status of these remote and uninhabited islets as “inherent territory” of their nations, thus making it nigh impossible for their governments to make compromises and concessions. From 1970 to 1972, political mobilization and street action by Chinese activists in North America, Taiwan and Hong Kong compelled the governments of both Taiwan and Mainland China to assert Chinese sovereignty over the islands openly and to maintain those claims consistently over time. Initially in Japan, some groups and individuals supported Chinese ownership. However, statesociety collaboration produced a consensus for Japanese ownership of the islands. Although an unwritten shelving agreement between the PRC and Japan kept tensions under wraps from 1978 to 2010, occasional flareups, initiated or aggravated by a combination of right-wing Japanese groups and Chinese activists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the PRC, prevented any resolution of the dispute. The shelving agreement collapsed in the aftermath of the 2010 trawler collision incident, leading to a semi-permanent state of tensions between China and Japan.

This commentary assesses the geopolitical implications for war and peace in Northeast Asia of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antimissile system that the US seeks to install in South Korea at a time of deep tensions in Northeast Asia.

Feminist thought leaders Onozawa Akane and Kitahara Minori discuss in dialogue the contemporary relevance of the Japanese military scheme of wartime sexual slavery. They identify the recruitment tactics of Japan's pornography and prostitution businesses today as similar to those used in the wartime trafficking of women, and suggest that low level comprehension of women's human rights means male demand for prostitution continues unhindered in Japan, as it has throughout modern history. The two authors suggest that the social context of women's prostitution, which occurs in conditions of gender equality, must be emphasized in order to combat victim-blaming ideas about women's ‘choice’ and voluntarism in being sexually exploited. They canvass policy alternatives against prostitution like the law currently in operation in South Korea and France that penalizes sex industry customers.

This article provides a summary of the first comprehensive overview of Japanese youth justice, locating it within wider conceptual considerations of youth justice before outlining its historical development and questioning its uniqueness. It discusses the contested notion of pre-delinquency, its net widening potential, and its place in the wider trends in Japanese youth crime. The study critically assesses the overall organization, administration, and impact of the Family Court (equivalent to youth or juvenile courts) and summarizes recent developments in youth crime policy. The Family Court is the fulcrum of youth justice, but involves many social welfare elements. Despite the increasingly punitive rhetoric, policy, and legislation for juveniles in Japan, there is no evidence that more juvenile offenders are being committed to the adult courts. Overall, we found a clear precedence of social welfare over criminal policy considerations.

This article examines and assesses the nature of civil society responses to the great Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008 which took the lives of 70,000, injured 375,000 and left five million homeless. The analysis is set against the rise of civil entrepreneurship of the preceding decade and considers its implications for democracy.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has made Work Style Reform (hatarakikata kaikaku) part of his core policy agenda, promising above all to remedy the Japanese way of work's two greatest problems: dangerously long work hours and grossly unequal wage gaps between regular and non-regular workers. However, critics charge that the proposals will likely aggravate these problems, given that labor policymaking is dominated by conservative business and political leaders bent on deregulation. This paper examines the current Work Style Reform proposals, explaining howthe work hour reduction and equal pay for equal work proposals are being promoted to the public, and why they ultimately fail as reforms from the worker point of view. Despite these serious problems, the government's effective marketing has helped to defuse potential resistance and the reform plans may become law in 2018.

The first consciousness that a new Korean cultural wave –hallyu– was in motion began to take shape in different forms and at different times in the rest of East Asia. It was the craze for Korean TV drama that represented a sudden apparition of something new from South Korea. Before long, however, this wave grew bigger and far more complex than anyone might have predicted, including Korean pop music and films, animation, online games, smartphones, fashion, cosmetics, etc. There have been resistances to this inundation notably in Japan, a country where several earlier mini-hallyu now seem long forgotten.

Moon Jae-in's failure to challenge South Korea's servile relationship to the United States has condemned his presidency to impotence. As the ‘August Crisis’ unfolds the South Korean president has little influence over the situation. He is spurned by Pyongyang, has no traction in Beijing or Tokyo, and is taken for granted in Washington.

Political parties on the far right are today enjoying a surge of support and access to government power that they have not experienced since their heyday in the 1930s.

This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, a resolution of the history problem will finally become possible.

The 2016 presidential campaign was hardly the starting point for surging neo-nationalism centered on a normative white male identity. Yet the election of Donald Trump reinforced certain links among racism, sexism, and neo-nationalism in the contemporary United States (and beyond). No less than the general public, universities across the nation have felt the impact of our forty-fifth president's supremacist and exclusionary rhetoric. Many students, faculty, and staff reacted to last November's results with shock and despair, while some felt acutely threatened by attacks on minorities, documented and undocumented immigrants, and other at-risk groups. In response, a number of universities have declared themselves “sanctuary campuses,” pledging to shield students and employees of uncertain immigration status. Many others, including the University of Colorado Boulder, where I teach, have issued statements of support for diversity and have mounted various formal and informal discussions of how to meaningfully support impacted members of the community.

The city of Ōfunato is located in northeastern Japan, in the southeastern portion of Iwate Prefecture. It lies on the Sanriku coast and is a fine example of a ria coastline with several prongs of mountainous ridges that extend outward into the sea. The coast is home to Iwate's largest port, and houses several well-developed industries, including industries related to fishing, marine products processing, and cement production.

The impact of the 3.11 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power meltdown is told here in visual images and the poetry by Arai Takako.

In mid-2016 the Chinese ocean shipping company COSCO succeeded in acquiring a controlling stake in the Greek port of Piraeus. This was the culmination of more than a decade of preparation and prior part ownership, and it represents an important piece in the complex jigsaw of China's One Belt One Road internationalization strategy linking Europe with Eurasia. Along the way there were major setbacks, and in particular a narrowly avoided ejection of COSCO from Piraeus by the newly elected Syriza government, the far left government elected in Jan 2015 by a Greek people exhausted by the austerity imposed by European creditors. This threatened ejection was narrowly avoided by a more comprehensive set of negotiations, which would have seen China funding the Greek government through purchase of its Treasury bills – thereby enabling the Greeks to get around sanctions being imposed by the European Central Bank.

This article examines four recent South Korean action drama films dealing with the Japanese colonial period and the Korean nationalist resistance movement in particular – Chung Chiu's Modern Boy (2008), Ch'ae Tong-hun's Assassination (2015), Kim Chi-un's The Age of Shadows (2016), and Hŏ Chin-ho's The Last Princess (2016). It explores the ways in which these films valorize armed anti-colonial resistance through a spectacular form of violence detached from real everyday politics during the colonial period and which hermetically seals such past political involvement from any corresponding activity in the present. The result of this, I will argue, is the repression not only of the memory of mass political mobilization under Japanese rule, but of the 1980s-era minjung or “people's” movement as well, having significant implications for how contemporary social movements may be imagined and represented.

The New Battle of Okinawa

On the morning of April 25, 2017, amidst continuing opposition, the Okinawa Defense Bureau began “construction of a seawall” in the area of Henoko-Oura Bay in Nago City, Okinawa. Many saw this as the real beginning of land reclamation work to build a U.S. military base there to replace the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan City.

Women of Japanese nationality have been erased in relation to the history of the wartime ‘comfort women’. For many decades after the war the existence of military ‘comfort women’ as a whole was ignored, and Japanese women, too, were ignored, at least in respect of their status as victims of wartime sexual violence. As we know, this deadlock over the history of the so-called comfort women was broken in the 1990s by survivors publicly testifying about their experiences, specifically those from North and South Korea. These women spoke widely about their experience of violence and abuse at the hands of the Japanese military, and campaigned for the restoration of their human dignity, compensation for their suffering, and for the Japanese state to take responsibility for apology and reparation. It was this bravery that gradually turned invisibility into visibility for the former ‘comfort women’, and led to the restoration of their individual subjectivity and dignity as survivors. This achievement was attained not on the basis of just one public action; it took years of persistent campaigning, and not just by survivors. Many individuals and organisations supported their work.