This chapter focuses on the litigation that followed the tsunami, which hit the Okawa Elementary School. The tsunami resulted in the death of the children visiting the school. The following litigation concerned the question of whether appropriate safety measures had been put in place at the school before the tsunami occurred. The two lawyers leading the litigation for the parents of the children report on how they used innovative approaches in the litigation proceedings. The legal innovation employed concerns the composition of the litigation team, the involvement of the children’s parents, the creation of witness statements addressing the emotional aspects of the disaster, the identification of the entity that should be liable, the doctrine determining liability, digitalisation of litigation and the distribution of risk in modern societies.

Japan introduced its utility model system in 1905, twenty years after the introduction of the patent system. Although the utility model system is still in effect, its content and use have changed considerably over the past century. Japan’s utility model system played a major role in the development of Japanese industrial technology through the 1970s. Until the 1970s, the number of applications for utility model registrations exceeded that for patents. However, with the improvement of Japanese industry’s technological capabilities and other factors, patent applications began to outnumber utility model applications around 1980, and the number of utility model applications declined sharply from 1985 onward. In response, the utility model system was extensively revised in 1993, including the abolition of substantive examinations, with the aim of making the system more attractive by ensuring that the system provides early protection for technologies with short life cycles. However, this revision caused problems, such as the loss of stability of rights, and the number of utility model applications has continued to decline.

This chapter addresses two works set in post-war Japan: Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story ‘The Summer After the War’ (1983) and novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It begins with a survey of various forces (legal, social, and political) which convinced contemporary commentators that moral sense had been left bewildered and judgements rendered ephemeral by the events of the Second World War and early Cold War, and then goes on to trace how this crisis of faith influenced the style and ethical consciousness of Ishiguro’s early fiction. Together ‘The Summer After the War’ and An Artist of the Floating World display a powerful interest in those Japanese citizens who flourished in a society operating with transient and ultimately dangerous values, and whose lives were threatened and emptied of meaning following their nation’s defeat. The chapter contains close readings of both texts and shows how subtle stylistic features contribute to their presentation of individuals endeavouring, through imaginative acts of narration, to attain absolution and stability in the face of changing moral norms and shifting geopolitical alliances.

After the US Civil War, technology, expertise, and surplus materiel flowed out into the Pacific World where it was adopted by “self-strengthening” movements in Peru, Chile, China, and Japan. As leaders in the Pacific faced the threat of North Atlantic maritime power, they sought to leverage technological and tactical advances pioneered in the US Civil War. In doing so, these four states transformed in a matter of years from “navies to construct” into “newly made navies”: industrial fleets, built from little or no naval infrastructure, leveraging recent technological innovations. This chapter also explores how newly made Pacific navies performed in the War against Spain (1864–1866), the Boshin War (1868–1869), and the Japanese Expedition to Taiwan (1874). Contemporaneously, US postwar demobilization created moments of parity between the US “Old Steam Navy” and Pacific states. Most histories frame the post-Civil War period as one of US naval retrenchment and stagnation, but when framed in a transwar context, the Pacific becomes a laboratory of US-inspired innovation.

The proliferation of advanced weapons in the 1860s catalyzed intraregional naval races between Chile/Peru and Japan/China. What began as efforts to accrue defensive capabilities in China and Peru against North Atlantic power soon morphed into spiraling naval races with Japan and Chile, respectively. Though smaller in scale, these races were every bit as dynamic as their better-studied analogs like the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-French and Anglo-German naval races. For US politicians and naval leaders looking out from San Francisco, the Pacific’s naval races offered a contrast with the relative deterioration of the “Old Steam Navy.” Even as it continued to perform useful missions as a constabulary force, the US Old Navy relied on ships built in the 1850s. By maintaining a status quo, the United States was, in practice, falling behind Pacific newly made navies, stimulating calls for naval reform and investment as a result.

The Pacific not only inspired early investments in the New Navy but the region also offered a series of crises in which the United States could deploy naval assets. As of 1890, the New Navy could muster only five modern warships into its model “Squadron of Evolution.” As a collective, it was a force that mattered little to the North Atlantic balance of power. In the Pacific, by contrast, New Navy ships were sufficient to force Chile – a longtime antagonist – into diplomatic settlements during the Chase of the Itata (1891) and the Baltimore Incident (1891–1892). These successful acts of “cruiser diplomacy” delivered political results. Naval proponents cited operations in the Pacific as evidence of the New Navy’s efficacy and necessity. By 1893, as its sailors and marines intervened in the Hawaiian Coup, the New Navy already had a record of coercion in the Pacific. Such results undergirded celebrations and naval reviews from Astoria, Oregon to New York City, as officials displayed the New Navy and its achievements to the public and the world.

The themes of technical parity and cultural insecurity endured into the 1890s as Japan replaced Chile in the role of Pacific threat to the US New Navy. As the relative power of the Chilean Navy faded after 1892, Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) created a new challenge to US narratives about its civilizational superiority and technological prowess. Much as California’s security was a source of anxiety during the US–Chilean naval race in the 1880s, Hawaii now served as a new site of conflict between US and Japanese imperialisms – acutely in the crises of 1893 and 1897. US policymakers and naval officers used recent experiences with Chile (and China) as a lens through which to understand Japan. The upshot: the origins of the US–Japanese competition – culminating eventually in World War II – were intimately tied to navalist politics and US–Chilean tensions in the 1880s.

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope and familiarizes the reader with the history of Angang and industrial Manchuria. In the process, it positions Mao-era China within multiple bodies of scholarship: The global history of late industrialization; the transnational history of Manchuria; the intersection of geopolitics and technological transfers; and the study of state-owned enterprises in China.

The conclusion encapsulates the book’s main arguments, discussing the role of Manchuria in modern China, the intricate interplay between technology transfers and national security, and the complex manifestation of power within Mao-era China’s socialist political economy. In doing so, it contextualizes Mao-era China within the broader global narrative of socialism and capitalism.

Summarizes the industrial policies of Japan since the late nineteenth century, especially since World War II, emphasizing its rivalry with the US.

The global and historical entanglements between articifial intelligence (AI)/robotic technologies and Buddhism, as a lived religion and philosophical tradition, are significant. This chapter sets out three key sites of interaction between Buddhism and AI/robotics. First, Buddhism, as an ontological model of mind (and body) that describes the conditions for what constitutes artificial life. Second, Buddhism defines the boundaries of moral personhood and thus the nature of interactions between human and non-human actors. And finally, Buddhism can be used as an ethical framework to regulate and direct the development of AI/robotics technologies. It argues that Buddhism provides an approach to technology that is grounded in the interdependence of all things, and this gives rise to both compassion and an ethical commitment to alleviate suffering.

In this chapter, the historiography of international law in East Asia is approached and critiqued as a tale of two centrisms, i.e. Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism. The historiography of international law in the region prior to the ‘encounter’ between East Asia and Europe has been largely Sinocentric. It is suggested that the traditional East Asian order be reinterpreted through the concept of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’ under which the regional actors of differentiated subjectivity were able to reconcile and manage their diverging interests through the crucial intermediary of diplomatic rituals. The historiography of the post-‘encounter’ period can be characterised as Eurocentric, being premised on the overwhelming positional superiority of Europe over East Asia. This traditional narrative is critically revisited (again) through the prism of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’. Despite Europe’s overwhelming dominance, East Asians articulated a wide variety of responses to the onset of a new normative discourse claiming universal validity, demonstrating their agency (if restricted). Critical engagement with Eurocentrism in the historiography of international law, one of the core questions of today’s historiography of international law, inevitably gives rise to the question of how to view universality. As a cautionary tale from this region, an attempt in interwar Japan to construct its own historiography of international law and relations by rejecting the universality articulated by the West (a ‘historiography of Sonderweg’) is investigated. By way of conclusion, it is suggested that the history of international law be reconceived as the fusing together of diverse normative voices through an intersubjective dialogue based on mutual recognition, rather than as the self-realisation of a certain universalistic normative discourse.

This chapter presents case studies from ten countries: Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, and Spain. These cases show that many world leaders believe that nuclear latency provides greater international influence.