Sumiteru Taniguchi was one of the “lucky” ones. He lived a long and productive life. He married and fathered two healthy children who gave him four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He had a long career in Japan's postal and telegraph services. As a leader in Japan's anti-nuclear movement, he addressed thousands of audiences and hundreds of thousands of people. Many of the more than 250,000 who lived in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 were not so lucky.

On July 10, 2020, seventy-one Okinawan and Japanese civil society organizations and groups (and one Philippine organization) sent a letter of request and a civil society report to the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission (MMC), the U.S. federal agency in charge of overseeing the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act. The letter asks the MMC to “review and comment” on the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) efforts to preserve the Okinawa dugong, an endangered marine mammal that is Okinawa's cultural icon, now threatened with extinction due to the construction of a U.S. military base at Henoko-Oura Bay, Okinawa.

Unlike the United States and elsewhere, political comedy is rarely spotlighted in Japan. Through interviews with three comedians, Hamada Taichi, Yamamoto Tenshin (The Newspaper) and Muramoto Daisuke (Woman Rush Hour), this article seeks to understand the practice, reception and standing of political humor in Japan today. What has motivated these comedians to pursue controversial routines that may have hindered their careers? How do they account for the relative lack of political satire in Japan today? The interviews provide a complex picture of media self-censorship and indirect pressure from the government – a picture that is both pessimistic and hopeful for the future of political satire in Japan. Interviews are edited for clarity.

In “Okinawa Demands Democracy” Maedomari Hiromari patiently details the cruel political and economic injustices that burden Okinawans today, such as their pseudo-citizenship and semi-colonial status, a status that arose from the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa (which began with the horrific 1945 Battle of Okinawa). His analysis reveals the way that such injustices are an inevitable result of Tokyo's subservience to Japan's imperial masters in Washington, and it demonstrates that, as a result of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, none of the people of the Archipelago, in fact, enjoy full sovereignty. That same government that repeatedly plundered Okinawa during the past three quarters of a century under the banner of fighting for freedom and democracy has also repeatedly violated Japan's sovereignty.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, became one of the most famous and influential public figures in the world following the emergence of the revolutionary new weapon, the atomic bomb, which was dropped over two Japanese cities in August 1945. Soon, however, he would be harassed by a Hollywood studio for permission to portray him in a big budget movie, and shadowed by the FBI because of his links to former Communists.

Issues we are confronted with in the age of the Anthropocene, such as climate change, extinction, and the coronavirus pandemic demand a fundamental rethink of human-nature relationships, but at the same time we are faced with a ‘crisis of imagination’, which is highlighted by the paucity of stories or narratives that enable us to fully engage with these issues. We have a ‘climate crisis’ as well as a ‘crisis of culture’ and both derive from the same source: epistemological limitations in the paradigm of modernity. The most problematic limitation is the fact that our social scientific knowledge has blind spots when it comes to nature and spirituality which makes it almost impossible for us to rethink human-nature relationships in a meaningful way. Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto, however, directly illuminate these blind spots by making nature and spirituality central features in their animation films. This opens up new epistemological and ontological spaces in the hearts and minds of a global audience, making it possible to imagine something new. And that ‘something new’ is ‘postmodern animism’ which emerged from the fusion of a critique of modernity with the intangible cultural heritage of grassroots Japan. Postmodern animism is a philosophy that sees nature as a combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world thus enabling us to engage with climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic in a radically different way. It helps us to conceive a new paradigm that is more suitable for the Anthropocene.

In 1901, British traveller Charles Henry Hawes (1867–1943) made a journey down the Tym' River on the island of Sakhalin, visiting villages occupied by indigenous Nivkh and Uilta people along the river and at its mouth on the Sea of Okhotsk. The island was at that time under Russian control, and had become notorious as a penal settlement, but Japanese influence was also strong: four years after Hawes' visit, following Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the southern half of the island would become the Japanese colony of Karafuto. Hawes had some ethnographic knowledge, but arrived in the island as an interested amateur, more concerned to record his encounters along the route than to develop any particular ethnographic theory. For that reason, he recorded what he saw with an unselective immediacy which sheds light on the fluid and dynamic interactions between indigenous communities, Russian colonisers, Japanese mercantile and fishing interests and other groups. While Hawes' published book, In the Uttermost East, has been used as a source by some scholars of the region, the notebooks that he kept on his travels have lain for years in the Bodleian Library, largely unnoticed by researchers. This article uses these notebooks, Hawes' published work, and photos that he took or collected on his travels, to shed light on aspects of indigenous society in Sakhalin at a crucial moment in its history.

Persistent in the environment, bio accumulative in animals and humans, and toxic at low levels, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are associated with serious health problems including cancers, hormone imbalance and harm to the immune system. One of the most widespread uses of PFAS has been in aqueous film forming foam (AFFF), a firefighting product linked to extensive contamination at Department of Defense (DoD) installations in the United States. Whereas the DoD has investigated – and in some cases remediated – this problem within the United States, in Japan, host to 78 US military facilities, there has been no such transparency. Civilian checks near DoD bases, notably in Okinawa Prefecture, have detected elevated PFAS levels in waterways, soil, residents' blood and the drinking water supplied to 450,000 people. But US military officials insist there is no proof that its bases are responsible for the environmental problems and they have denied requests from local authorities to conduct on-base checks. This article assesses the most serious environmental threats to Japan and Okinawa associated with PFAS and other chemicals originating at US bases. One method to overcome these obstacles to understanding the threat is the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Internal reports obtained by the author under FOIA reveal that US military operations have been polluting Okinawa and mainland Japan with PFAS via three principal pathways: (1) firefighter training; (2) accidental leaks of AFFF; and (3) disposal of AFFF. Contamination dates from the 1970s and is ongoing; PFAS has spread into neighboring communities, impacting drinking water supplies, and the problem has been exacerbated by negligent handling and disposal of AFFF stocks. This paper concludes with a discussion of how the problem can be further researched and ways to remediate both the contamination and the opacity of US-Japan environmental agreements which allow the US military to suppress information about incessant environmental damage.

The University of California, Berkeley, is considering a proposal to un-name a building that honors Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), one of the leading liberal anthropologists in the United States. Tony Platt describes the controversy and explains why it is time to come to terms with Berkeley's “salvage archaeology” that deepened the misery of survivors of genocide by plundering the graves of 10,000 ancestors on Kroeber's watch.