In April 2015, I was invited by the Cercle des Francophones (Francophone Association) of Hanoi to present the film Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) at Hanoi Cinémathèque. The film was made collectively in 1967 by some of the great names of new French cinéma: Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, in support of Vietnam's resistance to US aggression.

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.

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.

As an outcome of the ongoing re-democratization movement in South Korea, the recent success of the Candlelight Revolution provides valuable perspective for those grappling with the crisis of democracy in the U.S. Tracing an unexpected material link to the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, this article also seeks to explain the relationship between the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster and the Candlelight Movement, a connection readily taken for granted among most South Koreans but often perplexing to those outside of Korea.

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.