With the embers of the Johnny Kitagawa scandal still glowing, more victims of sexual abuse have come forward with disturbing claims about a major figure in Japan's entertainment industry. One of them talks to David McNeill.

On October 26, 1967, John McCain (1936-2018), the naval aviator who later became a US Senator from Arizona was shot down while flying over Hanoi, Vietnam. McCain then became a war prisoner for five and a half years until his release in March 1973. Where McCain was captured became the site of a memorial, depicting a soldier kneeling with two arms raised in surrender. Originally intended to celebrate the Vietnamese victory, the memorial later turned into a symbol of McCain's relationship with Vietnam and the US's relationship to the country. McCain himself visited, as well as recent US leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Upon McCain's passing, both Vietnamese people and American expats brought flowers to the memorial to pay their respects. This commentary discusses how the memorial became an instrument of diplomacy, serving the present rhetoric of friendship the US has fostered with Vietnam and demonstrating both peoples' desires for an amiable future. By honouring the memorial, the Americans and the Vietnamese have engaged in what we argue is strategic remembering, reconfiguring the meaning of a war artifact and making it not only a testament to the past but also a marker of renewed reality in the present.

The topic of how professionals' religious identity travels in a migratory context remains under-examined. Drawing on data from interviews with twenty Muslim Indonesians in Tokyo, this study discusses how Muslim professionals navigate their religious identity during employment and living in Japan. It finds that the image of Islam in Japanese professional settings is still positive, and suggests that working in Japan paves the way for Muslim Indonesians to promote cultural diversity in Japanese professional settings, which also serve as a platform for introducing Islam. This study contributes to the discourse on the emerging Muslim professional identity in non-religious societies.

This article explores popular music of Japan's Cold War era, with a special focus on singing duo The Peanuts and the film Mothra. It argues that Japanese culture of the Cold War must be understood as participating simultaneously in all three networks of the Cold War order—the First World of capitalist liberal democracies, the Second World of the socialist bloc, and the Third World of the decolonizing and nonaligned Bandung Movement.

It was recently revealed that Japan's Self-Defense Forces now designate China as a “hypothetical enemy”. This phrase has a controversial history that stretches back to the era of prewar militarism. In the 1930s, the Japanese military designated the US as a hypothetical enemy. After World War 2, this designation was identified as a reason for the militarists' view of war as inevitable. A strong taboo against labeling other countries as hypothetical enemies therefore emerged. But as the collective memory of war has waned, so has the hypothetical enemy taboo. The fact that the label is now attached to China by Japan's defense establishment does not bode well for Sino-Japanese relations.