This essay provides insights into the circumstances and potential societal impact of more than 10 million evacuees who fled Japan's firebombed cities during World War II. Informed by interviews conducted by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey with Japanese citizens immediately after surrender, this analysis establishes a new vantage point from which to understand the complex social circumstances of Japan in the final months of the war.

This article reproduces documents related to an aborted SCAP war crime investigation into the Ukishima-maru incident conducted during the Allied occupation of Japan. The incident involved the sinking of a repatriation vessel (the Ukishima-maru) on 24 August 1945 after it apparently struck a mine in Maizuru Bay, causing hundreds if not thousands of deaths among the Korean forced laborers aboard the vessel. The documents include the testimonies of Korean survivors (submitted in Japanese and translated into English by SCAP officers) which supported the claim that the incident was planned by the Japanese authorities. Though the investigation was eventually terminated by SCAP which dismissed the testimonies as “hearsay account[s]”, the documents are a useful window into the tense situation faced by Koreans in Japan during the immediate postwar years and cast light on the nature and quality of SCAP efforts to pursue justice in its investigation.

The green and the digital revolutions are intimately linked. Mastery of one technology will likely lead to leadership in the other. Both depend on ample supplies of critical materials, rare earth elements and other vital resources. Unfortunately, many are in short supply and demand for them will explode as those two revolutions unfold. Governments have awakened to vulnerabilities created by their need for these materials and are making efforts, with limited success, to ensure continued access to them. Given the consequences of leadership in both the green and digital arenas, it is not surprising that access to critical raw materials has become a geopolitical battleground.

How do we imagine and actualize the space of neutrality in the radically bipolarizing environment of modern politics such as those that prevailed in the early Cold War? We can pursue this question in the context of the Non-Aligned Movement, or the politics of the Third World more broadly, the early initiative of which took shape at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and in the precarious time in Asia immediately after the Korean War. Alternatively, we may explore the same question more squarely within the 1950–1953 crisis in the Korean peninsula; in particular, in relation to the intervention of the politics of neutrality into the resolution of the Korean conflict, a formative episode in the early Cold War international politics. This essay looks at the latter aspect of alternative space-making to the global bipolar politics of the mid-twentieth century, with reference to the idea of neutrality that was embedded in the grassroots experience of Korea's civil-and-international war.