This essay examines a relatively new genre in Chinese literature: migrant worker poetry. These are poems written by rural migrant workers who have, since the economic reform and opening up of the early 1980s, moved to China’s booming cities in search of work in factories, mines and construction. The difficulties that these workers face are manifold, from exploitation of their labor and lack of welfare protection to an inability to make their voices and hardships heard. How best to represent this vast and oppressed demographic (an estimated 280 million rural migrants) has been at the heart of China’s social and political debate for the last 30 years. I argue that migrant worker poetry has been both overlooked and underestimated, not only for its emergent quality, but for its ability to address problems of representation - these worker poets eloquently represent themselves. By making use of online platforms they not only bear witness to the damaging myth of social mobility that motivates so many to seek work on the assembly lines, but they are able to challenge it directly, publishing their own sublimated suffering for each other and for society at large. The scope of this study is limited to the poems in Iron Moon, a 2017 anthology of migrant worker poems translated into English by Eleanor Goodman; it excludes novels, short stories or autobiographies by migrant workers that could be included in the wider genre of “worker literature”. I hope, however, that an examination of these poems demonstrates that the simultaneous emergence of the internet with China’s rapid industrialization has both created and enabled a vital new movement in the history of China’s working-class literature.

Over the past decade, China has been greening its electric power system faster and more thoroughly than any other industrial power. In the course of the years 2007 to 2016, China's dependence on thermal power capacity declined from 77% to 64%, and can be expected to tip below 50% within another decade if the trend continues. In terms of electricity generated, the contribution of thermal power has dipped from 82% to 72% over the last decade. But it is also true that China's growth model continues to pump out greenhouse gases. The issue: is the green transformation happening fast enough?

This paper will reconsider previous work on the demographic transition under way in West Papua (the Indonesian provinces of Papua and Papua Barat) in the light of documents received from the Indonesian Statistics Office (Badan Pusat Statistic BPS) that give an ethnic breakdown across the 29 regencies that comprise Papua province and the eleven regencies in Papua Barat. They show that, while the proportion of Papuan people as a percentage of the entire population continues to decline, this process varies widely between different regencies. While some have a strong majority of non-Papuan people other regencies are still overwhelmingly Papuan. This dichotomy is closely linked with topography – the mountainous interior outside of urban areas having a Papuan majority and the accessible lowlands a non-Papuan majority. The consequences of this dichotomy – a large chunk of West Papua about the size of Great Britain is peopled almost exclusively by Melanesian people, even as some of the coastal regions become non-Papuan majority– is profound. West Papuans of the interior have not only survived Indonesian occupation but have kept their lands and cultures largely intact, which continues to underpin calls for an independent West Papua and conflict with the Indonesian government and its security forces. While coastal regions continue to receive large numbers of non-Papuan migrants resulting in the increasing minoritisation of the Papuan people and their concomitant militarization, marginalization and dispossession. This process is also occurring in the highlands from expansion of the oil/gas sector and mining sector; the proliferation of new regencies (with new bureaucracies) and the continuing development of new roads, all of which alienate traditional land and draw in migrants. Meanwhile the conflict over the political status of West Papua will continue, and indeed grow, as external actors, such as the Pacific countries of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, shine a spotlight on the conflict and advocate for the right to self-determination for the West Papuan people.

This essay is dedicated to Professor Peter King, who died in Sydney in August 2016. Peter and I cofounded the West Papua Project at the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University in 2000 and was my teacher, mentor and friend for 24 years.

A “Japan-Is-Great” boom sweeping the nation in recent years invites comparison with the comparable phenomenon in the 1930s at the height of empire. This increase in self-praise has not come about merely as a spontaneous reaction to the decline of self-confidence in the aftermath of the collapse of the bubble economy. The reassertion of national pride and identity by the Japanese has also been actively encouraged as healthy and desirable by the United States. As the Cold War came to an end, Washington pressured Japan to shake off its postwar self-constraints and project its influence and political power (even its military power) in international affairs more forcefully.

The Miike Coal Mine, extending across Omuta and Arao in Kyushu, was an engine for economic growth in Japan until the nation's defeat in World War II. In 1873, the Meiji government introduced convict labor in the mine. This arrangement continued after the government handed the mine over to a private company, the Mitsui Coal Mine. It was not until 1931, in the wake of the International Labor Organization's 1930 Forced Labor Convention, that convict labor was terminated. The history of convicts in the mine was not widely known for decades until a local group started restoring memories of it in the 1960s. This paper examines the social and discursive environment in which the recovered history of convict labor evolved.

Medical journalist Aihara Hiroko assesses the threat of childhood thyroid cancer for the victims of the 3.11 triple disaster as a result of radiation and the melting of nuclear fuel rods in Fukushima.

The U.S. deployed a missile defense system, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in South Korea in April 2017, citing North Korea's nuclear and missile “threats” as justification. Its deployment, however, needs to be seen in the wider strategic context. Not only does the measure raise the arms race with North Korea, it also facilitates Japan's “proactive contribution to peace” and exacerbates the security dilemma between the U.S. and its allies on one side and China and Russia on the other.

2017 and talk of war games is all around us. When The New York Times reported on 10 July of this year that India, the U.S. and Japan had begun “war games,” surely very few readers thought of these war games as actual games. After all, they were designed to have submarines slide unannounced into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean in order to silently take positions near the Indian coastline. When, about a month later, according to The People's Liberation Army Daily China's army commanders declared that the mobile phone game Honor of Kings endangered national defense, they were not joking either. They appeared convinced that the game had infiltrated soldiers' and officers' daily lives and that their addiction to the game would undermine their combat readiness. Around the world, many similar, and often contradictory pronouncements are made daily.

On 7 July 2017 122 countries at the UN voted to approve the text of a proposed international treaty entitled ‘Draft Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.‘ This article assesses the significance of broad international support for the draft treaty, the opposition to it on the part of all nine nuclear powers, and its possible contribution to nuclear disarmament.

This paper focuses on civic activities to conserve underground sites that reveal the dark heritage of wartime forced labor in Japan. At times collaborating and at other times competing with others, various local groups seek to bring these shameful heritages to the center of the Japanese memory-scape. In doing so, these movements challenge Japan's homogenizing national war memories and carve out a democratic public sphere to renegotiate understanding of the war heritage.

Prime Minister Abe has committed 3 trillion yen ($27 billion) to finance a linear Shinkansen project linking Tokyo and Nagoya/Osaka by Maglev. Technical analysis shows that the Linear Shinkansen constitutes not only an extraordinarily costly but also an abnormally energy-wasting project, consuming in operation between four and five times as much power as the Tokaido Shinkansen which already provides high speed rail connection. Since the 1960s, Japan's major construction projects have become vastly more costly and less efficient. Deficit-breeding, energy-wasting, environmentally-destructive, and technologically unreliable, the Linear Shinkansen project must be considered a guaranteed fiasco, with the potential not only of its own collapse but of bringing the Tokaido Shinkansen down too.

On April 25, Okinawa's governor Onaga Takeshi held a press conference in response to the start of the construction of retaining walls by the Japanese government in Oura Bay, off the coast of Henoko, on the Northeastern shore of Okinawa Island. Many recognized this as the official launch of construction of the new Marine base. Onaga's angry remark that the state was “throwing ‘sute-ishi’ (riprap) into the ocean without sufficient explanation to Okinawa” invoked a painful association with the Battle of Okinawa, the last land battle in the Pacific theatre of WWII. Between late March and early July 1945, the Japan-U.S. battle took 120,000 lives of the more than 460,000 residents of the island prefecture. Okinawan people subsequently used the term “sute-ishi,” or sacrificial stone, to describe the nature of the battle, meaning that Japan sought to prolong the war at the sacrifice of Okinawans to buy time for the Imperial Headquarters to prepare for the U.S. land invasion of the Japanese mainland. Now, seventy-two years later, “sute-ishi” is used again to describe the assault against the sea, whose bounty provided food for the local residents to survive the deadly battle.

The main elements in Taiwan's green power shift are reviewed, with focus on developments since the election of the DPP government in early 2016 and its commitment to phase out nuclear power in Taiwan by 2025. The drivers of the shift are identified, concentrating on solar PV power and the potential for offshore wind power. Like other countries in East Asia similarly pursuing a green shift, Taiwan is as much concerned with the business and export prospects for green industry as with reducing carbon emissions. The argument is developed that further progress in Taiwan is linked to liberalization of the electric power sector, creating genuine competition for the quasi-monopoly, TaiPower.

Japan is shrinking. Current projections indicate a population decrease of around one quarter by mid-century. Depopulation is potentially good news, providing opportunities for reconfiguring living conditions and alleviating human-environmental pressures. Nevertheless, ageing and depopulation have outcomes that require adjustment. One of these is spatial inequalities, which have been accelerating since the 1990s. Japan is the Asia-Pacific’s pioneer ageing and shrinking society. In East Asia both China and South Korea are ageing and expected to begin shrinking soon. Even high immigration Anglophone countries such as New Zealand are experiencing post-growth demographic processes at subnational level. Japan’s significance is in how adaptive responses there inform prospects for others as they experience their own post-growth pathways. This article presents case studies of Sado Island in Japan and New Zealand’s South Island in a comparative qualitative analysis of rural agency under population decline. Overall, I contend there is potential for benefitting from demographic shrinkage - what I term a ‘depopulation dividend’ - and for rural regions in the Asia-Pacific to progress towards a sustainable post-growth economy and society.

At a time when the possibilities of a new and more contentious U.S.-China relationship is under discussion by the Trump administration, this article cautions that economic codependency should caution against aggressive moves that could jeopardize core American economic and financial interests and increase tensions in the Pacific. In assessing the deep two-way relationship, the article notes that China as well as the United States has powerful resources to bring to bear on their relationship including curbing US exports to China and ceasing to prop up the US deficit economy through the massive purchase of US treasury bonds.

The following two articles document the recent unfolding of hate demonstrations targeting Japan's Korean minority population (hereafter Zainichi Koreans). This introduction provides historical context for the organized expressions of hate against Zainichi Koreans. Earlier analyses of Japan's far right have emphasized how internet communications, explicit expressions of bigotry, and the frustrations of the “lost” generation, contributed to an emergent subculture of grassroots conservatism.

On the crisp autumn afternoon of November 26, 2007, a black car picked up Graham Spanier, then president of Pennsylvania State University, at Dulles International Airport and whisked him to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Using his identification card — embedded with a hologram and computer chip — he checked in at security and was greeted by the chief of staff of the National Resources Division, the CIA's clandestine domestic service. They proceeded to a conference room, where about two dozen chiefs of station and other senior CIA intelligence officers awaited them.

This article explains why the Abe administration's emergency powers proposal will likely be the cutting edge of its attempt to amend the Japanese Constitution, and assesses the consequences of such an amendment for Japan's democracy.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo announced his call for national elections on Monday, September 25. News reports explained that he deemed the timing right due to a recent bounce in public support triggered by threats from North Korea and by the severe weakness of the political opposition. Abe was especially eager to strike before Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko had time to organize a strong national party. By acting decisively to win the October 22 election, he would secure another four years of LDP power.

Tucked away in a remote corner of eastern Indonesia, between the much larger islands of New Guinea and Sulawesi, lies Maluku, a small archipelago that over the last millennia has been disproportionately influential in world history. Largely unknown outside of Indonesia today, Maluku is the modern name for the Moluccas, the fabled Spice Islands that were the only place where nutmeg and cloves grew in the fifteenth century. Christopher Columbus had set out to find the Moluccas but mistakenly happened upon a hitherto unknown continent between Europe and Asia, and Moluccan spices later became the raison d'etre for the European presence in the Indonesian archipelago. The Dutch East India Company Company (VOC; Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie) was established to control the lucrative spice trade, which was more valuable than gold, becoming both the world's first multi-national company and the globe's foremost trading and transport enterprise. So prized were the Moluccas that in 1667 the Dutch swapped their colony of Manhattan with the British for the latter's tiny island of Run in the Banda Islands, valued for its nutmeg. Subsequent Dutch conquests united the sprawling Indonesian archipelago for the first time and provided the precursor to the modern successor state of Indonesia.