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This study focuses on the Japanese and Taiwanese dancers who—in the 1940s and under the auspices of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation—performed for the Japanese army on the frontlines of combat as a visiting entertainment troupe of comfort (Imon-dan). Imon-dan performers, unlike Ian-fu (comfort women), were professional artists even before the war. During the Sino–Japanese War, the Ministry of the Army deployed entertainment troupes of comfort who were professional performers to entertain soldiers stationed in the Japanese occupation area. Such troupes included Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese dancers because wartime Japan occupied Taiwan and Korea. This paper tracks one route to Burma in 1941 using new information from several people and a video recording. Consequently, the Japanese government used the Imon-dan in this instance to promote Japan's support for Burma's independence. These encounters resulted in modern dancers interacting with Taiwan and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an overview of Zainichi Korean magazines (magazines published by ethnic Koreans living in Japan) from 1980 to the present and examines the directions of major magazines. Zainichi Korean magazines started mostly as outlets for the ethnic Korean community in Japan in the political environment of the 1940s and 50s. Faced with factors such as the division of their Korean homeland and the suppression of Koreans in Japanese society until the 1960s and 1970s, they developed towards conveying a unified voice for the ethnic Korean community in Japan. In the 1980s, the third generation came to account for the majority in the population of the ethnic Korean community in Japan, and their perceptions of the Korean community in Japan, their homeland (Korea), and Japan were different from those of the older generation. The role and stature of Zainichi Korean magazines began to be undermined as an increasing share of the younger generation no longer expected an answer to the question of which source ethnic Koreans in Japan could rely on, now that the age of a collective consciousness had passed. The dwindling role of the Zainichi Korean magazine as an outlet for a collective consciousness was an inevitable trend. As if proving this, in the 1990s Zainichi Korean magazines rapidly lost their cultural dominance in all areas, including literature, politics, history, and popular culture. Since the 2000s, the market for Zainichi Korean magazines has generally been on the decline. Not only is the launch of new magazines dropping rapidly, but they can hardly be said to function as a public forum that can unite the entire Zainichi Korean community. As the specialized nature of the "Zainichi" Korean media is no longer appealing not only to the younger generations but also the older generations, the drift towards breaking away from the Zainichi Korean media is already a fait accompli. Notwithstanding this, many of the Zainichi Korean magazines are still looking for new roles to play in the midst of a changing environment for the Zainichi Korean community, and the future of Zainichi Korean magazines will depend on their decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines South Korea's division system which causes conflicts with Chōsen-seki Zainichi Koreans, focusing on their legal status and identification process. Chōsen-seki is an official designation given to those Koreans who have remained in Japan after liberation and have not acquired South Korean nationality (Kankoku-seki) after Japan recognized South Korea as the "sole legitimate government" on the Korean Peninsula. They are referred to as Chōsen-seki on their foreign registration cards. Chōsen-seki Zainichi Koreans do not necessarily have North Korean nationality and citizenship, but because they have chosen not to acquire South Korean nationality the ROK government considers them pro-North Korea group and routinely demands that they change their registration. This paper will first examine the historical process of division that surrounds the nationality of Zainichi Koreans, and then discuss the problem of exclusive administrative procedure of issuing passport in the postcolonial divided nation. The third section and below will show the point of conflict between the identification of Zainichi Koreans and the divided system, based on some samples of oral interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Nagasaki was reinvented from an imperial city to an “International Cultural, Christian city” and elicits the continuity of Japanese imperialism in postwar Nagasaki as well as the discontinuity between the war and postwar periods in the city. The paper seeks to determine what history and whose memory have been excluded or erased in the process of remaking Nagasaki into an international Christian city; it examines the particular historical and political conditions that enabled Nagai Takashi, Urakami Catholics and Kitamura Seibou’s Memorial Peace Statue to symbolize Nagasaki’s atomic bomb memory and postwar city identity as an “International Christian city” that “prays.” While Nagai is widely known as a spiritual, religious leader in postwar Nagasaki/Japan, and Kitamura’s Peace Memorial statue dominates Nagasaki’s commemoration space, this paper analyses how US dominance over Japan enabled the country to rehabilitate its imperial past and to revive the imperial legacy by appropriating the GHQ’s (General Headquarters of the Allied Powers’) demilitarization and Christianization policies. It argues that Nagasaki’s postwar reconstruction signifies the failure of what Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) calls the “deimperialization” of Japanese consciousness and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, rights advocacy has been gaining traction in Japanese politics. This paper argues for the rationale that led to the current legal development in post-Fukushima Japan—the Nuclear Disaster Victims' Support Act, which emphasizes the right to evacuation—and presents the grassroots struggle against public authorities. The right to evacuation is the right of citizens to avoid exposure to radioactivity by allowing victims—in this case, the victims of Fukushima—to choose their living location, whether that means permanently evacuating to a new area, returning to their original homes after evacuation, or remaining where they are (i.e., not evacuating). In any of these situations, necessary support from the government is guaranteed. I claim that while the right to evacuation represents a vision about how people in Fukushima can choose to survive and develop their own self-determined future, it requires a set of tools to achieve it. As such, this paper also argues the ways in which Japanese civil society groups play a significant role in helping bring the grassroots voices of people in Fukushima to the law-making process, as well as actual implementation. Advocacy to achieve such a fundamental human right is gradually progressing and moving away from the perception of being merely a criticism of government; rather, advocates are presenting alternatives and giving government a chance to change itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the emergence of the so-called ‘liberal historiography’ in the mid 1990s, historical revisionism in Japan has been one of the most hotly debated academic topics in Japanese studies. While the majority of the current scholarship focuses on the structure of the revisionist texts and the individuals behind them, the case study presented in this paper seeks to explore the way young readers in Japan actually receive the revisionist texts, with a particular focus on the revisionist manga. Building on Stuart Hall's conceptualization of the relationship between media producers and the audience, this paper analyzes the results of a survey conducted among students of two Japanese universities. Its main argument can be divided into two parts. In terms of empirical findings it shows that in general the respondents engage in critical reading of those narratives that contradict the dominant discourse. Drawing on these findings the paper argues that academic scrutiny of a certain cultural product needs to take into account the broader discourse when speculating on its possible effects on the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the post-war occupation period in Japan (1945–1952), a number of political and legal reforms were conducted under the GHQ/SCAP's initiatives. Enhancement of women's rights was one of the major targets of GHQ/SCAP's policies, and existing studies have examined if the reforms have actually achieved the democratization of Japanese gender relations. This paper challenges some of the assumptions made in previous studies, and has revealed how images of women and femininity were recreated and consumed during that time. Rather than discussing how GHQ/SCAP democratized Japanese society, this study explores how ‘democracy’ was re-conceptualized in Japanese women's magazines, which were some of the most popular and influential forms of cultural media during the period. The paper demonstrates how the notion of democracy was understood as a way of life, rather than as a particular type of political structure, and how white middle-class American women were illustrated as the model of Japanese women. The author discusses how the Occupation period was a time where the notion of democracy was integrated into women's everyday life sphere, and America became the reference point in the Japanese woman's everyday life politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets forth the history of the academic activities of the Asian American Literature Association (AALA) in order to explore the evolution of Asian American Studies in Japan. When the AALA was established in 1989, several scholars had already published research papers on Asian American literature, as had researchers involved energetically in the study of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. Around the time when AALA was established, other research groups focusing on immigration studies were formed. In 1993, several members of the AALA presented their papers at the annual meetings of other associations and, as a result, the activities of the AALA became known to a wider academic community. In 1994, the AALA published its first annual journal and, around 1995, the number of papers on Asian American literature and culture accepted by authoritative journals in Japan began to increase. By the end of the 1990s, Asian American studies made its presence conspicuous in the field of American studies in Japan. Since the turn of the century, a growing number of Asian Americanists in Japan have become engaged in interdisciplinary studies, thus providing new perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the significance of engaging in Asian American studies in Asia, with examples drawn primarily from Japan. It asks: what happens when this US-based racial minority studies is relocated to the place where Asians do not constitute racial minorities? The paper argues that, on the one hand, the intellectual encounter between Asia and Asian America encourages the US-based minority studies to examine their implications in American imperialism in their perceptions towards Asia. On the other hand, Asian American studies as the racial minority discourse forces ethno-racial majority Asians, with all our ethnic, national, and other differences, to reflect upon the racial, ethnic, and (neo)colonial relations in our own lands while critiquing the inequalities that are taking place in and across Asia. The paper looks at the forms of minority struggles in Japan, zainichi Koreans and Okinawans, in order to propel the US Asian American scholars to decentralize their work and perspectives. It is my hope that this new perspective generated from Asia-based Asian American studies will help construct a place of mutual learning, where we can engage in conversation to ask new questions, to challenge and transform Asian American studies as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) and Nagai Takashi's The Bells of Nagasaki (1949). These two best-selling books published in the US and Japan in the late 1940s portray the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although they appeared in a similar period—a postwar transition and a herald of the Cold War—their reception was strikingly different. Hersey's piece acquired international currency when the representations of the atomic bombings in Japan were censored under the US Occupation. Since then Hiroshima has virtually remained the ‘first and only’ text about the atomic bomb victims widely read in the US. Nagai's memoir, a rare exception allowed to be circulated nationwide under the censorship, and elevated to a canonical voice of Nagasaki's experience, however, has been the subject of controversies in Japan from the 1970s. The paper argues that despite these differences, both works share parallels in narratological strategies, such as historical emplotment, the personalization of the event, compassionate identification, the valorization of the power of the atomic bomb, and the promotion of compartmentalized knowledge. These effects create a psychological deterrent for readers not to confront larger political and ethical problematics of Japanese colonialism and postwar US hegemony in Asia. Their discursive entanglement and ostensible dissociation symbolize the ways in which trans-Pacific knowledge on the atomic bombings has been shaped postwar for many decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tells a story about miscegenation between US military personnel and Okinawan women from 1945-1952, which includes sexual violence, the establishment of 'entertainment districts,' and the emergence of international marriage. Whereas this history has been mobilized by leftists as a truth-weapon in the struggle for political sovereignty from the US military, this paper takes an explicitly genealogical approach. Drawing on Foucault's work on biopower, this paper shows how Okinawans were transformed into 'petitioning subject' - subjects that negotiated the sexual exploitation of their bodies in tandem with the radically changing relationship between their bodies and the territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ambiguous nature of Murakami's criticism toward the postwar Japanese condition - as the artist most effectively captured in his phrase 'A Little Boy,' which was also the title of his curated exhibition at the Japan Society of New York in 2005. As Murakami wrote in his introduction to the catalogue, demilitarized Japan after the Second World War underwent a collective sense of helplessness, and the metaphor of a little boy is intended to describe Japan's supposedly unavoidable reliance on its big brother, America. The name 'Little Boy,' in fact, originates from the code name used by the American military for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The proliferation of 'cuteness' in Japanese contemporary art, which draws upon youth culture, especially otaku culture, evinces a common urge among the postwar generation in Japan to escape from their horrible memories and sense of powerlessness. Murakami's rhetorical analysis of Japan's self-image seems, however, contradictory, given his extremely aggressive business tactics, which can find no counterpart in the Western art world - not even in the efforts of Murakami's predecessor, Andy Warhol. Like My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), whose hyper sexuality defies its pubescent and immature appearance, his art, theory, and art marketing indicate the paradoxical nature of his theory of impotence. By focusing on his manifesto and writings published on the occasion of his 2005 exhibition and his style of managing Kaikai Kiki Ltd., this paper delves into the dual nature of Murakami's interpretation of postwar Japanese art and culture, particularly in relation to those of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the development of J-pop under the post-Fordist condition and its ideological formation over the last two decades. J-pop, invented as a fashionable sub-genre by a FM radio station in the late 1980s, expanded its category throughout the 1990s and covers virtually all musical genres for young people in Japan. However, due to the lasting economic recession, the development of digital technology and the transformation of young people's lifestyle, the record industry faced a serious crisis during the 2000s. The paper explores ideological formations between the success of J-pop and the emergence of freeters' (young part-time workers) culture in Japan, by focusing on their nationalist sentiment and the idea of creativity, and tries to find a new way of reclaiming 'creativity' in DiY (Do it Yourself) music culture today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses one way to articulate queer male identity politics in 1990s Japan through Fran Martin's conceptualization of the 'mask' (Martin 2003). By comparatively examining two key Japanese 'gay' coming-out narratives, the paper shows how a reading of queer subject formation in the decade through a metaphor of 'masking' can shed light on the complex scenarios functioning beneath the surface of identity politics. I argue that the notion of 'masking' is useful in reading the multiple axes incorporated into queer identity formation in Japan in the context of globalization. The paper further refutes any reductive claim that queer identity in Japan can be understood in terms of essentialist epistemological binaries, such as global/local, West/non-West, and Japan/abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite little improvement in the socio-political predicament of Okinawa since its reversion to Japan, culturally there has recently been something of an ‘Okinawa boom’ in mainland Japan. This has involved a huge interest in Okinawa and Okinawan cultures in mainland Japan and an increasing ‘consumption’ of Okinawan goods and cultural artefacts. One of the symptoms of this trend has been the growth in the last five years or so, in the number of films set in Okinawa. Many of these films present conventional stereotypical images of Okinawa and, whether wittingly or not, have contributed to the ‘cosmetic operation’ of Japan’s multiculturalism by providing a utopian vision of Okinawanness and erasing Okinawa’s problems from the screen. However, an Okinawan filmmaker, Takamine Go, critically challenges such stereotypes and Japan’s cosmetic multiculturalism. This paper focuses on Takamine’s Untamagiru (1989) and Tsuru-Henry (1999). It examines the cinematic strategies mobilised by these films – the use of different languages, allegorical implications, complex montages of image and sound, and the departure from conventional narrative realism. These strategies, it will be suggested, not only enable the films to explore complex forms of public memory and history but also to challenge the notion of a homogeneous Japan and its ‘quasi-orientalist’ gaze towards Okinawa. The paper then proceeds to argue that Takamine’s films should not simply be regarded as a ‘regional’ variant of Japanese cinema but as a ‘specifically Okinawan cinema’ that both overlaps with and opposes a ‘national’ Japanese cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the work of the Japanese sociologist Koyama Eizō, this paper critically explores the development of Japanese race studies from the late 1920s to the 1940s. During this period, Japanese intellectual discourses on race developed in the context of the need to manage heterogeneous populations within the Japanese empire and contain the growing mobility of populations in and outside of the territory. Reflecting Koyama’s keen interest in racial/ethnic contacts and interdisciplinary perspectives, his intellectual work symptomatically exemplifies not only the convergence of knowledge production and the dominant imperial regime but also the transpacific implications of Japanese race studies. On the one hand, my study examines Koyama’s preoccupation with racial/ethnic contacts in relation to imperial security and also traces how his study intersected with the discourse of American social scientists who were also interested in Japanese migrations. On the other hand, the study examines how the development of the idea of minzoku in Koyama’s discourse coincided with contemporaneous attempts to mobilize diverse populations in the empire. Thus, my research reveals a complex dynamic of integration and differentiation in discourse on Japanese race studies in the interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan suffered a catastrophic disaster on March 11, 2011. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear radiation leakage from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant devastated the northeastern part of the country and threatened the entire country and beyond with the risk of radiation. Nowadays, movements against nuclear power plants are emerging across the country. The crisis indeed provides a chance for Japan to forge a new energy policy. However, the activists' claims are not narrowly limited to such energy issues. They call for a fundamentally fairer society and propose alternative ways of life, regarding nuclear power plants as symbols supporting the economic development that Japan enjoyed over the post-Second World War period. As an ethnography, this paper documents the 60,000-citizen Goodbye Nuclear Power Plants (Sayonara Genpatsu) rally that mobilized in central Tokyo on September 19, 2011, as well as the Occupy Tokyo action on October 15, 2011, presenting the real voices of the rally participants against nuclear power. In particular, I will focus on the voices of youngprecariatparticipants, the major actors in the anti-nuclear rally who were generated from and revealed as the negative result of Japan's neoliberal economic policy, held since the 2000s. Further, I argue that their mounting anger might be a trigger for new post-neoliberal politics in post-Fukushima Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Seattle 1999, plenty of summit protests around WTO, G8/20, IMF, WB, COP, and so on happened in each of the different summit sites in the last decade. Such incidents were amazingly accepted because of their mass actions and widespread networks of activists sustaining a series of mass actions. As some researchers argue, those of generating networks are based on horizontality and autonomy, and they have already prefigured a powerful model for (re)organizing society. However, on the other hand, some researchers also argue the major shortcomings. In theory, the ‘Global Activist Network’ has been constructed since Seattle, although in practice there has still been a serious spatial gap between the Western part of the world and the other side of the world. Actually, the global activist network has excluded Asia. However, in 2008, the G8 summit was held in Japan. This paper, thus, aims to show that the global activist network since Seattle, which was limited to Europe and North America, has expanded to involve Asia through the 2008 G8 summit in Japan. The 2000 G8 in Japan was right after the Seattle in 1999, yet, due to its single-issue and national character of the movements, globally expanding networks didn't reach Japan. However, movements around the 2003 anti-Iraq war brought in the autonomous character of the alter-globalization movement and referred to the legacy of autonomous activisms. During the 2008 G8, some autonomous activists in Japan took over the diversity of tactics and networks of activists inherited since PGA, DAN and ‘Dissent!’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the official recognition of sex-reassignment surgery in 1996, the concept of Gender Identity Disorder (GID), i.e. a disjuncture between one's biological sex and gender identity, became accepted as medically correct in Japan. Since then, media representations and popular perceptions of gender/sexual variants have tended to revolve around notions of ‘illness’ or ‘disorder’, where they are often perceived as souls ‘trapped’ in the wrong bodies. While some people have benefitted from the medical discourse and are happily settled in their new identities across the gender border, there certainly are gender/sexual non-normative people who do not fit into the pathological category of GID. Using award-winning drama Last Friends as its main text of analysis, this paper seeks to highlight the difficulty, if not impossibility, of classifying one's gender and sexuality into clear-cut polarized categories of male/female, heterosexual/homosexual and homosexual/transsexual. Once the basis of the male/female dichotomy is ruptured, other categories that have this divide as their foundation will also start to destabilize. Coming more than a decade after the re-legalization of sex-reassignment surgery, I argue that Last Friends plays an important role in questioning the gender status-quo and opening up a new path for articulating gender diversity on Japanese mainstream television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the neo-liberal 'reforms' of Japanese higher education that have taken the form of incorporating national universities, and are now entering a decisive stage one year afterwards. I will also describe the devastation that has resulted from university incorporation. From these descriptions, I will demonstrate how the incorporation of national universities is a typical example of neo-liberal control in present day Japan. Moreover, we will then be able clearly to see the current situation of the weakening of Japanese intellectuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 film Lost in Translation has attracted both acclaim and critique concerning its representation of the urban imaginary of Tokyo. Examining both the film representation and the critical responses to the imaginary, this paper discusses how they illuminate some of the emerging issues that Tokyo and Japan face in the era of globalization, such as the loss of the idiosyncratic status of non-Western modernity that Japan has long enjoyed; post-(self)Orientalist cultural othering; and the transnational alliance of media and cultural industries in a global cultural economy of branding the nation through media and consumer cultures, all at the expense of the issue of intensifying migration and multicultural situations in the urban space. It will be suggested that both the film and Japanese critiques of the film are lost in the actuality of Tokyo (indeed, of Japan) and its populace, which is being radically transformed by intensifying transnational flows of people, capital, and media imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self-naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non-normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter-discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous 'name' may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper not only gives an overview of the transgender word in contemporary Japan but also attempts to illustrate the male to female cross‐dressing (MTFCD) community in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which plays an important role in the overall transgender world and how people in the community think and live, by conducting comprehensive fieldwork. The MTFCD community consists of amateur cross‐dressers and their patrons, and it is formed around about ten bars/clubs in Shinjuku. This community differentiates itself from the gay community in their customs and consciousness; they tend to recognize gender based on gender performance rather than biological sex, which is usually accepted for distinguishing sex. Therefore, a MTF cross‐dresser with feminine performance is considered as a ‘woman,’ regardless of one’s physical and biological conditions. Because of this recognition of gender based on gender performance, people in the community are able to develop the ‘quasi‐heterosexual’ relationships as men and ‘women.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama, this paper explores the way in which the fan subculture, in connection with digital technologies, has carved out alternative practices in the circulation, production and consumption of Japanese TV drama. As ‘minority audiences’ who are not targeted as the objects of capitalist interests, online Chinese fans invent spaces for Chinese transnational networking with self-help and sharing, as a way of resisting the aloofness from marketing strategies of Japanese TV distributors in Asia. This case study reveals that the online Chinese fan clubs, the websites for downloads, pirated VCD markets, digital file conversion, and private VCD burning – all of these have linked endless networks for the digitalized circulation and consumption of Japanese TV drama. The online Chinese fans are guerrilla fighters in the politics of autonomy, network and low-cost digital technology; they are attempting to break down time–space constraints and the official distribution hierarchy. Such fan practices shed light on the new trends of audio-visual consumption via digitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an introduction to the journal "Inter-Asia Cultural Studies" of November 2003. The first paper, by Park Keunho, "The Vietnam War and the "Miracle of East Asia", focuses on South Korea and examines the relationship between the Vietnam War and the rapid economic development of Asia. "Okinawa's Postwar" by Toriyama Atsushi demonstrates how the mainland Japanese at the end of the Second World War forgot Okinawa and how the US took advantage of such Japanese national amnesia by turning Okinawa into its permanent military base. Tanaka Yasuhiro in his "The Media Representation of Okinawa" illustrates how the image of Okinawa as a southern paradise has been reproduced in the postwar Japanese media.