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Love, sex and marriage are recurrent themes in Kurahashi Yumiko's literature, especially in her early works. In the novel Divine maiden (1965) she approached those topics from a different perspective, through the form of shōjo shōsetsu (girl's fiction): she even went so far as to define Divine maiden as 'the last shōjo shōsetsu'. The protagonist of this novel is a young girl, Miki: the story revolves around Miki's incestuous relationship with her father, as it is depicted in her three diaries, read by a male narrator. Even though incest is a recurrent theme in Kurahashi's work, it has been pointed out that the incestuous relationship between father and daughter could be considered shōjo shōsetsu's grand finale. However, not much attention has been paid to the relationship between Divine maiden and shōjo shōsetsu as a literary genre; moreover, the meaning of love, sex and marriage in the novel has been left unexplored. This paper aims to analyse the girl's sexuality depicted in Divine maiden in the context of post-war Japan's junketsu kyōiku ('purity education'); through an analysis of Miki's diaries, I will explore the way Kurahashi has parodied the concept of 'democracy' in relation to the ideal of 'pure love'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the Japanese television show franchise Terrace House, six people live in a large home together and cameras record their interactions, with the key addition of a group of comedians and television personalities who watch the show together and comment on it. In its ongoing discussions of which housemates and behaviors are the most 'manly', Terrace House offers a window into contemporary debates about masculinities in Japan. In examining in-show incidents and commentary related to the housemates' sexuality, aggression, passivity, maturity, and attitudes toward money and labor, we begin to see how certain norms surrounding masculinities in Japan are shifting (and how some remain static). Focusing on the 2017–2019 iteration of the show, 'Opening New Doors', this paper examines how the interactions of Terrace House's young housemates, the reactions of the show's (mostly older) commentators, the responses of fans, and the show's editing and structural choices reveal conflicting ideas about what it means to be 'manly' (as well as to be a responsible adult) in contemporary Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender, particularly the figure of theshōjo, plays a crucial role in the creation of heroes and the development of plots in Japanese popular texts. This paper focuses onThe Cat Returns(Neko no ongaeshi) (2002, dir. Morita Hiroyuki), one of the lesser-known films produced by Studio Ghibli. A socio-political reading and gender-sensitive analysis reveals that this film offers a deep and critical commentary on the gender order in contemporary Japan. Moreover, with its teenage girl protagonist Haru, it presents an exceptional case of ashōjo-centred anime that does not fit conventional genre characteristics. Through Haru’s refusal to become a wife in the Cat Kingdom the film criticises the expectation for young women to prioritise the pursuit of romantic relationships (ren’ai), and rejects the ideal of the Japanese housewife (shufu) as an existence of dependence in a semi-feudal social gender order. This paper views Haru’s coming-of-age story through major gender theories, and interprets the plot as a critique of what Ueno Chizuko and Nobuta Sayoko (2004) called the ‘Marriage Empire’ in Japan. We argue that the anime reflects shifting ideas on gender and at the same time presents an exceptional treatment of the need for young women to confront the social changes and gender role expectations of contemporary Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the Pacific War, Japanese boys and girls were increasingly pulled out of secondary school to help the war effort as factory and farm workers. Their labor-service hours kept increasing until, by January 1944, many students were working year-long shifts. This paper argues that secondary students had a sense of entitlement to education that went against the grain of their patriotic duty to the state asshōkokumin, or ‘little countrymen’. Their later memoirs support the postwar view of their labor as child abuse. However, their identity as adolescents came more from their status as students than from their age; before 1945 most Japanese left school and entered the workforce at age 14. This paper brings together evidence that has not been linked previously: (a) the voices of student workers in diaries and memoirs; (b) the disaggregation of wartime labor by age; and (c) the differential treatment of students in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Keirin - fixed-gear bicycle racing - is one of four forms of state-sponsored sports gambling in Japan. Originally started in 1948 as a way for prefectural governments to generate income for post-war reconstruction, keirin grew to become one of the country’s most popular gambling-sports. Today there are over 2,000 registered keirin riders, who compete in five main classes. Like with other sports, becoming a keirin rider requires intensive training of the body; however, it also requires training of the mind. Would-be keirin athletes must undergo an 11-month training course before they are allowed to compete. The aim is to produce bodies that can both perform athletically and conform to the sport’s strict rules, thus contributing to its legitimacy as a form of legal gaming. Keirin’s rules and regulations are meant to structure competition in a way that creates conditions for gambling by forcing cooperation, as well as competition, among riders, thereby introducing uncertainties and enabling odds. It is said that no rider can win a race alone. In this paper I employ an assemblage-theory approach to engage with the tension between gambling and sport that is central to the keirin enterprise. I argue that within the keirin assemblage rider-athletes are called upon to labor in ways that both enable the gambling-sport project and create coherence between the at times incongruent domains of sport and gambling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes female make-up and modern consumerism in Uno Chiyo's early short stories Shifun no kao ('Painted face', 1921) and Rōjo Manon ('The old woman Manon', 1928). These works were published as the notion of beauty transitioned in Japan's modern era, shifting from a preference for heavy to light make-up. The obsession with whiteness of the female protagonists, as well as unique motifs in Uno's short stories, suggests racial and sexual issues in modernity. Despite the common perception of their cosmopolitanism, this article argues that the modern girls described in Uno's works tend to internalize the ethnic and cultural hierarchy between Caucasian men and Japanese women, denigrating and othering non-Western people, including the Japanese whose bodies do not successfully represent Westernization or modernity. In a similar vein, Uno portrays the failure of female make-up as the attempt to emulate an artificial Western beauty, thereby illustrating the challenges faced by female authors describing Japanese female characters in the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan's national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan’s rise has often been conceived in terms of the ‘flying geese’ model in which Japan led a flock of emerging East Asian economies as its production networks expanded and it shed outdated technologies to the followers. Though the model implied a continuing Japanese leadership role in the East Asian region, two lost decades have undermined Japan’s claim to head the flock of ‘flying geese’ and Japan is often perceived as in decline relative to China’s rapid rise. This paper challenges such accounts to argue that Japan still has significant leadership ambitions and, potentially, the means to bring them to fruition. Understanding Japan’s leadership ambitions requires conceptualizing power in terms of discursive as well as material resources. Doing so highlights how different policymakers articulate contrasting visions of how Japan should take the lead in East Asia. These visions are of Japan as (variously) a functional leader, a conveyer of universal values, a conformist to ASEAN norms, a strategic partner and a promoter of open regionalism. Whilst most analyses have focused on Japan as a declining power, it is the spatial, temporal and ethical incompatibility of these regional visions that undermines Japan’s aspirations to lead the East Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Japan the average age of first marriage continues to rise steadily, and people are spending a greater proportion of their adult life single. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of singles express desire to marry one day. The reasons for the rise in late and non-marriage are varied and complex, but difficulty in finding an appropriate or compatible partner has emerged as one of the key issues. Against this backdrop, thekonkatsu(‘marriage-partner hunting’) industry has emerged, ostensibly to assist singles to find marriage partners. In this paper, we examinekonkatsupopular literature, online matchmaking sites and the perceptions of single women andkonkatsuworkers to consider the ways that contemporary discourses of gender and marriage are reflected, (re)produced or challenged. The ‘male-breadwinner family’ model, based on the functional roles of ‘supportive wife’ and ‘provider husband’, is increasingly both undesirable and untenable for single Japanese women and men. However, values and norms pertaining to gender and marriage as portrayed in matchmaking sites and in somekonkatsuliterature remain remarkably unchanged. In this context, single women’s ambivalence towardskonkatsumay reflect both ambivalence to marriage as a goal per se, and uneasiness with the gendered roles in marriage purveyed bykonkatsudiscourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stigma associated with alcoholism is common in Japan, and individuals who suffer from alcoholism often feel that it is a taboo to discuss their problems with alcohol in the general public. This paper describes the way in which the self-help group called Danshukai offers a model for recovery for people suffering from alcoholism in Japan. Since 2006, the authors have been involved in various meetings and conducted conversational and semi-structured interviews with leaders and rank-and-file members of Danshukai. In Danshukai, recovery is viewed as a spiritual process offering the potential for a new life compared to models offered by medical treatment that place little emphasis on the role of spirituality in recovery. While medical models seek to reduce alcohol-related stigma by viewing it as a treatable ‘disease’, rather than a personality weakness, Danshukai encourages members to embrace their identity as a Danshukai member and to engage with a ‘way of abstinence’ that includes a lifelong commitment to Danshukai activities and helping others with similar problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the changing definition of marriage for young women in Tokyo over the last 10 years. Based on fieldwork research conducted in Tokyo, I examine why women are delaying or refusing marriage, arguing that women’s decisions can best be understood in relation to work. I discuss how young women negotiate their conception of marriage by articulating their desires for self-realization, a career, and participation in society, within the context of a flexibilization of work and the transformation of family in contemporary Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the popularity of hula in contemporary Japanese society in order to understand how Native Hawaiian images and traditions play a role in constructing the image of a ‘paradise’ in Hawai`i. By drawing on the personal experience of the author as a participant observer in hula lessons and performance in Tokyo, it argues that aiming for the sense of cultural authenticity is integral to the Japanese practitioners’ attraction to hula. It also shows how Native Hawaiian hula teachers and performers skillfully appropriate the Japanese desire to discover an ‘authentic’ Hawai`i for their cultural as well as personal gain. Today’s Japanese discourse of ‘Hawai`i as paradise’ derives from the contemporary socio-cultural context of a Japanese society that longs for the authentic culture of the indigenous ‘other’ as well as from the shrewd use of that longing by the ‘other.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the interrelationships among Japaneseness, the Western and Japanese concepts of race, and the obfuscation of racism in contemporary Japanese society. The concept of race, which was conceived in the West in the modern era, has influenced the Japanese concepts of race,jinshuandminzoku. These two concepts played a key role in constructing modern Japan’s identity by distinguishing it from its significant discursive Others: Asia and the West. Today the Japanese simply call themselvesnihonjin, or Japanese people, rarely using the termsjinshuandminzoku, and racism is generally viewed as a ‘foreign issue’ that has little relevance to Japanese society. The purpose of this study is threefold. First, it discusses how the Japanese concepts of race,jinshuandminzoku, were constructed and shaped the dominant meaning of the Japanese in different historical contexts, intertwining with Western notions of race, nation,Volk, and ethnicity. Second, it suggests that obscured racism in contemporary Japan is linked with the conceptual presence and nominal absence ofjinshuandminzokuin defining Japaneseness. Third, it explores how the contemporary modality of racism in Japan overlaps with and differs from racisms in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines popular representations of Japan and China before and during the war, assesses the ideas of key figures from the press, and considers the ways in which media and policy interacted through the influence of opinion leaders. These prepared the way for the ‘soft’ peace relying on Japanese cooperation that would become the basis for a new alliance between America and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This special issue of Japanese Studies provides a snapshot of the teaching and researching of Japan through the initial years of the pandemic. It records experiences and reflections by scholars of Japan in South Korea, Australia, England, and Kazakhstan grappling with the challenges and potential of online learning and digital resources in the context of academic precarity and global uncertainty. The articles reflect on pedagogy, research methods, interdisciplinary focus, and the intersections of premodern, modern, and contemporary Japan with global politics, society, health, environment, and culture. They identify key challenges facing Japanese Studies, especially the corporatisation of institutions and the undervaluing of language and contextual studies, and consider how the lessons of the pandemic can lead to a transformation of Japanese Studies that strengthens its relevance and possibilities both in and outside the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I focus on the role of YouTube as a pedagogical tool and its associated media literacy issues. In the courses I have taught since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have included short videos produced by well-known YouTube history channels alongside required readings to stimulate student engagement with historiographical issues. Students respond positively to these videos, which they also seek out themselves. However, YouTube history channels are increasingly producing polished and entertaining videos that do not clearly cite sources and gloss over historiographical inaccuracies or misrepresentations. YouTube videos on Japanese history should be selected and utilised carefully. Media literacy skills and academic readings are essential to students' ability to critically view and understand these media representations of the past. Therefore, I argue that it is important for Japanese Studies students to develop critical media literacy skills and be aware of the role and power of social media sites such as YouTube in the creation and representation of Japan and Japanese history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fieldwork is about 'being there' in the field to gather data. But what happens when researchers cannot visit the field? This article explores how Japan scholars have been dealing with the impact of COVID-19 on their research. It examines how restrictions on travel affect access to materials and engagement with fieldwork subjects, highlighting how the pandemic has created both obstructions and opportunities. The term 'fieldwork' usually involves ethnographic methods of data collection such as participant observation and interviews, but a wider interpretation encompasses visiting archives, libraries and museums. This article takes an inclusive definition of fieldwork to discover the impact of not 'being there' for scholars of Japan. Findings show that the inability to 'be there' has led more scholars to seek out material from online data repositories, archives and library collections. However, while the demand for online resources is increasing, materials are not always easily accessible to Japan scholars. The impact of travel restrictions on librarians has in turn affected the aggregation of materials, which has occasioned scholars to seek alternative methods of sourcing materials. Finally, through a case study, this article examines the methods scholars are adopting in digital ethnographic data collection to adjust to not 'being there'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores challenges and opportunities for Japanese Studies during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea. From March 2014 to February 2022, after receiving a US PhD, I taught Japanese history in English at an international college for Korean and international students. The pandemic's initial effect was isolation: online courses reduced interactions with students and scholars in Japan cancelled our joint research project activity in Korea. Eventually, however, there emerged solidarity peculiar to where I taught, both with my students and with the Japanese, Korean, and American researchers. In my Japanese history courses, email exchanges with individual students in lieu of class discussion often generated academically valuable yet potentially sensitive inquiries, which could have upset some Korean students if raised in the classroom. For the research, some primary materials turned out to be available online on Korean national libraries' websites. Our further research indicated the richness of sources produced in colonial Korea, including police records documenting lives of Korean workers in wartime Japan. The students' critical inquiries and collaborative research suggest vast possibilities for Japanese Studies, yet illuminate the constraints of national boundaries, reemphasized by the pandemic, in a world that we had hitherto imagined to be moving toward the global and borderless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses papers published within the issue, include on the historical trajectory of the notions of jinshu and minzoku, another on Korea-phobia in Japan, and finally on how Japanese citizenship and nationality are a structural source of exclusion and marginalization for various groups.

Hard news is often assumed to be 'objective' and 'factual', with little or no trace of a 'subjective' authorial point of view. However, what is often forgotten is that journalists still choose what information to divulge, and how to communicate that information. This article explores how whaling news is presented in Japanese hard news reports, examining the types of 'voices' quoted and how these voices are presented. Analysing 176 quotations from 33 news articles published between 2014 and 2018 on news relating to controversies over Japan's whaling policy in relation to the International Whaling Commission's 2014 ban on whaling, this article found that in most cases, pro-whaling voices (43%) are quoted far more frequently than anti-whaling voices (24%). However, in news reports on Japan's resumption of whaling in 2015, pro-whaling voices became completely absent, because the Japanese journalists chose to quote foreign external voices that reject a pro-whaling point of view. Japanese journalists also incorporated emotional statements from local residents and fishermen in order to dramatise the issue and seek sympathy for those whose livelihood was threatened by the whaling ban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ten years after the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear safety regulation system in Japan has gradually moved from the exclusionary process of policy making, based on hierarchically organized policy, to a decentralized and open process of policy making whose competence is divided beyond the pre-given political actors. Yet policy making and implementation need to bring together multiple stakeholders to work in concert to achieve a desired outcome of nuclear safety. This article seeks to explain why the trend towards more inclusive forms of policy making may still lead to negative consequences for democratic accountability of nuclear safety. The author argues that the coordination issue becomes critical to a plurality of conflicting interests and beliefs of autonomous stakeholders. Although the decision-making plurality favours democratic interest representation, empirical evidence suggests that a poorly coordinated response by the national government to nuclear policy implementation fails to get stakeholders to work together for Japan's nuclear safety. From a broader perspective, the lack of coordination among different stakeholders is one of the weaknesses of expanding accountability mechanisms to include more stakeholders, and results in challenges to policy coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games provided Japanese stakeholders opportunities to pressure policymakers to pass reforms, including measures to improve accessibility. However, the Games alone are not sufficient to explain the scope and consequences of recent accessibility reforms. We argue that researchers must also consider the impact of historical contingencies such as decades of activism for accessibility by affected parties (tōjisha), the 3/11 'triple disaster,' and Japan's 2014 ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to understand how disabled persons' organizations were able to leverage the Games to influence reforms. Drawing on government records, news media reports, and documents from disability advocacy organizations, we unpack several causal mechanisms that linked activism for accessibility to policy changes and thereby contribute to studies of minority social movements and policymaking in Japan. Our analysis of accessibility initiatives documents a 'legalistic turn' in Japanese governance, characterized by more formal rules and enforcement mechanisms. While the implementation of those initiatives was hampered by scarcity of human and material resources as well as the spread of COVID-19, they nevertheless improved accessibility for many individuals and encouraged conversations about equity and inclusion that persist into the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2004 to 2017, Kamigata Rakugo Kyōkai (KRK) – the professional comic storytelling guild for the Osaka area – issued the magazine Nna aho na (That's ridiculous). Concurrent with the tenure of one of the art's most recognisable and progressive artists, Katsura Bunshi VI (b. 1943), as KRK chairperson, the magazine hailed Kamigata rakugo's 'new era'. It heralded the first dedicated rakugo hall open in Osaka in 60 years, as well as several other big-ticket enterprises. Nna aho na presented a brassy campaign of building and monument erection teamed with pageants and re-enactments of history, displays of tradition, and ritual. These served to promote Kamigata rakugo as a venerable art and one worthy of official recognition by Japan's government. Examining the reforms that Bunshi VI orchestrated in the early twenty-first century, one sees a tension between 'traditional' and 'new' negotiated through an expedient trade-off. KRK was able to use Bunshi VI's considerable star power to improve the art's exposure, status, and infrastructure, while he became the face of the art, advanced his own agenda, and cemented his name in rakugo history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of democracy in modern Japan often position 'democracy' itself as an elite, introduced, inorganic facet of post-defeat Japan's reconstruction by outside influences. However, analysis of discourses and texts prior to this revisionist narrative reveal a much more complex and continuous intellectual history at play. Ishizaka Yōjirō's (1900–1986) run-away hit Aoi sanmyaku (Blue mountain range, 1947) was a timely and highly influential serialised work in The Asahi Shimbun, which was quickly republished as a novel and then adapted into a massively successful film in 1949. In this discussion the work both uses and challenges a feudalism versus democracy binary, and reveals strong intellectual continuities between prewar and post-war thinking regarding modernity. The work also challenges the positioning of relationships between school-age male and female students as a symbol of democracy and modernism in this era. Through Ishizaka's use of debate and humour, this work is not an account of the failings of democracy, or its success, but rather an exploration of the tensions that emerge with attempts to implement these discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen the rise of Japanese methods of decluttering, adding everyday stuff to the increasing number of things that the modern subject must manage to gain a sense of wellbeing. This article examines Danshari by Yamashita Hideko and the Konmari method by Kondō Marie. Using the 'affective affordances' of objects as an analytic lens, I will argue that paying attention to everyday practices of decluttering reveals a close connection between material landscapes, gendered subjectivities and competing ethics of personhood. These connections only become visible when we put the decluttering methods in the context of the gendered expectations regarding attachment towards objects and their care in domestic work. Objects serve as an integral part of the affective regulation of everyday life; their careful or wasteful treatment is closely linked with ethical consumption and moral personhood. Attachments to objects and injunctions against wastefulness make ridding a morally fraught task. By contrasting a close reading of the two methods with insights gained from fieldwork on everyday disposal, I will trace the ways in which affect is mobilized in order to get rid of things and put this in the broader context of consumer capitalism in twenty-first century Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As exercised by the recent Tokyo 2020 Olympics and 2020 Paralympics, both delayed until 2021 due to COVID-19 conditions, sports diplomacy is shifting, from emergence as a concept, toward empirical legitimacy. Extant literature has allowed scholars to clearly establish the factors constituting sports diplomacy, which has culminated in the sports diplomacy model proposed by Abdi and colleagues. This study examines the sports diplomacy model through a qualitative investigation of an operational Australian sports diplomacy campaign, AUS+RALLY, within the context of Japan. The evident conformity of the extant sports diplomacy model with the AUS+RALLY campaign represents an important step for sports diplomacy scholarship, and the case utilised provides critical insights into the conduct of sports diplomacy activities and suggests enhancements to the extant sports diplomacy model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elderly Japanese are increasingly turning to crime. Yet the intersection of old age and criminal justice is mostly an untold story in the extensive English-language literature on Japanese aging, and has only recently begun to be seriously researched in Japan. Elderly Japanese are also increasingly being charged with serious offences such as murder, bringing them within the newsaiban’in(lay judge) system. This article highlights the complex social problems arising from the unprecedented aging of Japanese society by analysing statistical evidence, nascent empirical research published in Japanese on elderly crime, and asaiban’incase involving an elderly defendant. The elderly defendant in the case pleaded guilty to murdering his alcoholic, co-habiting, adult son. The circumstances of the case highlight the possible implications that lay participation may have on serious social issues such as elderly crime, in particular through sentencing decisions, and the possibility that it may contribute to changing perceptions of Japanese criminal justice, away from traditional readings based on benevolence and rehabilitation togenbatsuka(punitiveness). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how social beliefs about language use and users influence writing-restricted variation in contemporary Japan by analyzing ojisan gokko ('impersonating middle-aged men'), a practice where young Japanese women playfully message each other as though they were lecherous men. While the production of a stylized ojisan voice during ojisan gokko involves many traditional Japanese indexes (markers) of 'male' language, it also relies prominently on particular uses of script, emoji, kaomoji, and punctuation, ultimately creating a form of mocking which is bound to the written mode. Using indexicality as a framework, the article analyses 195 screenshots of ojisan gokko acts shared on Twitter to establish which writing-restrict forms are key to the practice, and examines the multiple social motives and origins behind these forms. Ultimately, ojisan gokko is noted to involve a complex interplay of variants traditionally linked to distinct social groups, with this combined use traced to a series of Japanese social actors observing, imitating, discussing, or parodying how others write. Consequently, ojisan gokko shows that writing-restricted variation can be highly motivated by social concerns, ideologies, and conflicts, including the desire to establish, contest, and modify which identities and forms of language use are appropriate or 'cool'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines policing of the boundary of Japaneseness in contemporary Japan by analyzing the experiences of 15 young individuals. Despite their self-recognition as not having any foreign ancestors, they are often misrecognized as half-Japanese or non-Japanese by others. This article explores the causes and consequences of this categorization and reflects on the implications of ethnic or racial misidentification for the misidentified and for the wider society. The findings confirm that others labeled the participants as hāfu (mixed) or foreign to make sense of the inconsistency between the participants' 'non-Japanese-like' personal features and a narrow notion of Japaneseness. Their lack of Japaneseness meant the participants experienced exclusion owing to the unmarked norms in Japanese society. They were also treated as though they were hāfu or foreign. However, their belief or claim of having only Japanese ancestors often confused others as well as themselves, which resulted in various attempts to make sense of their 'differences'. This article concludes that the marginalization and othering of various ethnic or racial groups in Japan helped avoid challenging the notion of Japaneseness. Therefore, to tackle exclusion, diversity among 'majority Japanese' needs to be acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Hanshin Earthquake, which struck western Japan on 17 January 1995, ushered in a year of social, economic, and political upheaval. In his prize-winning short story '"Aboji" o fumu', Oda Makoto employs the earthquake to explore this broader upheaval and the unresolved postwar tensions that it revealed, in particular the legacy of Japan's colonization of Korea. This article offers a close reading of Oda's story, contextualizing it within his other writings, the events of 1995, and broader postwar history, particularly the migrant flow between the Korean island of Jeju and the Hanshin (Osaka-Kobe) region. It examines how Oda uses images of land and water, fixity and flow, to undermine the coherence of the nation and substitutes an understanding of the colonial legacy grounded in the local. This reading offers an example of how to recognize the significance of this year of upheaval, as it is represented in Japanese cultural production in and around 1995, as marking the start of a rupture with the postwar order that would be confirmed two decades later by another, greater catastrophe at Fukushima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent increase in the number of international students employed in low-skilled part-time work raises the question; are they incorporated into host labor markets after they graduate, and if so, how? This article addresses this issue by examining the case of South and Southeast Asian students in Japan. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, this article shows that labor market incorporation occurs for most SSA students and takes two different forms. First, an analysis utilizing the Japan Student Services Organization datasets on student pathways after graduation (2014–2017) revealed that the primary form is their (re)incorporation as low-skilled part-time workers. Mostly enrolled in vocational schools, these students go on to another school upon graduation, which in effect means an extension of their status as student part-timers. Second, while incorporation as full-time workers also occurs, interviews with these workers suggested that they are employed as a workforce that serves the migrant population and/or supplements shortages of native-born workers. Based on these results, this article argues that SSA students in Japan are incorporated into the host labor market as complements to the labor needs that Japan's new demographic reality has created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illustrated posters appealing to passenger conduct – so-called 'manner posters' – are ubiquitous in Japanese public transport spaces. This article draws on archival research and interviews with railway and design professionals to introduce transport company-issued manner posters as a genre of public communication, and link its development to social shifts in post-war Japan. The article first examines passenger behaviours targeted by posters, discussing efficiency, comfort and safety as underlying concerns of company appeals, and analyses the textual structure of posters. This review of the genre's defining characteristics is followed by an exploration of its history. While manner posters are frequently traced back to a 1974 poster series issued by Eidan (now Tokyo Metro), this article argues that although posters became more complex and widespread in the 1970s, their history reaches back to the Taishō era. The article explores the historical context of the genre's development by highlighting changes in the railway and advertising sectors. I argue that it was railway companies' increased efforts to improve the quality of public transport, along with advances of posters as an advertising medium and changes in the style of public communication, that spurred greater adoption of elaborate manner posters in the mid-1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the notion of 'community spirit' as it occurs in the discourse of community development (machizukuri) in the context of a society characterised by multicultural coexistence (tabunka kyōsei). It does so by examining multigenerational Korean residents' integration in post-Korean Wave Japan. Despite the recognised deficiencies in Japan's attempt to accommodate ethnic diversity in line with the government's vision of multicultural coexistence, some long-term Korean and Japanese residents have begun to foster a shared sense of community as Japanese consumers of mainstream culture have familiarised themselves with Korean culture in recent years. Inspired by the existing gap between community spirit embodied among residents and the Japanese government's sustained rhetoric aimed at maintaining the existing social order by juxtaposing Japanese and non-Japanese residents, this article aims to identify the keys to fostering an effective vision of an inclusive society in Japan. I argue that informal networks, personal engagement, and active participation would complement the current top-down policy that is implemented to negotiate Japan's increasing diversity. Based on data gathered during ethnographic work that included participation in community initiatives and council discussions in western Japan's Hanshin area, I shed light on the competing forces of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a flashy montage, viewers of television show The Bachelor Japan (2017–present) are introduced to Japan's inaugural bachelor, 35-year-old Kubo Hirotake. Kubo is described as everything women in Japan are said to want – he is tall, handsome, sporty, highly educated, and most importantly, rich. In the program Kubo is presented with a pool of 25 potential marriage partners and charged with finding the woman of his dreams in what producers describe as the ultimate modern fairy tale, a 'heated battle' for the heart of the perfect man. Appearing at a time in Japan when marriage rates are at an all-time low and young people increasingly deem romantic love unimportant to their lives, the program may on initial viewing be a treatise on the importance of marriage. On closer inspection however, the politics of The Bachelor Japan reveal the dreams of contemporary Japanese women and the pressures they face surviving a society hostile to their independence. In this article I argue that The Bachelor Japan, far from following the traditional fairy tale narrative in which a woman is rescued by a handsome prince, instead shows women on a completely new path – one on which they may become princesses on their own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka's 1886 'Rippu ban unkuru') and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm's 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out of sync with the recognized, official timeline; dismayed and alienated, their reactions indicate how drastically the world changed while they slept. Both texts allude to contemporary conditions in modernizing Japan and Egypt – representing the distresses of those who were perhaps unwilling to embrace rapid, irreversible Westernization – and are self-conscious of their formal novelty. Kyūka's text is a 'new-style poem', retelling a story by an American author who was then unknown in Japan; al-Ḥakīm's play is a philosophical drama of a sort that was unprecedented in Arabic literature. Belatedness is thus represented, in each of these texts, from a vehemently neophilic (and pro-modern) perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical appraisal of the Abe Cabinet's plans to orchestrate a national celebration of the 150th anniversary of Meiji in 2018, following the example of the Meiji Centennial celebrations of 1968. The article begins by introducing some of the criticisms voiced at the time of the 1968 Centennial by prominent Japanese historians such as Tōyama Shigeki and Yamaguchi Keiji, who saw clear links between the post-war celebration of Meiji and broader efforts to revive Japanese nationalism and promote the long-term goal of re-militarization. It goes on to consider some of the public statements that have been made by Prime Minister Abe regarding 'Meiji 150ʹ and explores the significant gap between the government's vision of the significance of Meiji and the perspectives that emerge from scholarship on the Restoration period produced in recent decades by historians in both Japan and the English-speaking world. It concludes with a brief consideration of the divide that separated Japan's post-war historians from some of their American colleagues in the 1960s, and the role that scholars today have to play in combating the manipulation of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between the writings of fiction author Ogawa Yōko and the Konkōkyō sect of Shinto. It describes Ogawa’s religious upbringing at a Konkōkyō shrine and the religion’s beliefs in order to explain elements of her fiction. While a consideration of Konkōkyō is not necessary to enjoy Ogawa’s writings, it offers an important way of interpreting her work. Most published critics have focused on common themes of postmodern literature to categorize her writings such as depictions of dilapidation and moral degeneration. In contrast, this article builds on the research in this area of literary critic Yamazaki Makiko, who argues that according to Konkōkyō, the greatest spiritual realizations may occur at times of strife and in situations typically judged as degenerate and immoral. I argue that since the publication of Yamazaki’s research, Konkōkyō-related motifs have become increasingly central to Ogawa’s stories, which corresponds to her own statements about the changing focus of her later writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, Japan established its first-ever National Security Council (NSC) as the leading edge of ambitious reforms to its foreign-policy-relevant institutions. Within weeks, Japan’s new national security tripod was firmly in place: the top-level, political NSC ‘control tower’ as well as Japan’s first-ever National Security Strategy and National Security Secretariat. Ever since, the NSC has played a central role in every major aspect of the Japanese strategic trajectory that has attracted so much global attention (and controversy) in the ‘Abe era’. This study analyzes the motivations driving Japan’s decision to establish an NSC, the institution’s key characteristics and functioning, and offers a preliminary assessment of the current and likely future implications of this historic institutional reform. Beyond the NSC’s impact on policy, of potentially greater long-term significance is its effects on Japan’s foreign-policy decision-making processes: in particular, expanded Kantei-centered political leadership of national security affairs and more ‘whole-of-government’ approaches specifically designed to transcend the ‘vertical hurdles’ traditionally dividing Japan’s powerful bureaucracies. The goal of these reforms is as straightforward as it is ambitious: to transform Japan’s ability to flexibly and independently cope with a rapidly changing, increasingly complex, and ever more uncertain security environment in East Asia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how strategies for capitalist accumulation drove the industrialization of chicken husbandry and increased consumption of chicken products in Japan. By the start of the Showa era, leaders in the Japanese chicken industry sought to promote larger and more productive operations through the adoption of Western breeds. Following the upheaval of World War II, the US facilitated three major changes for Japanese chicken husbandry: expanded grain exports from the US in the 1950s; the importation of specialized breeds in the 1960s; and the Japanese industry’s emulation of American corporations in the 1970s. The connections between Mitsubishi and KFC-Japan illustrate how Japanese firms implemented new organizational structures that allowed them to profit from the chicken industry in multiple ways. I suggest that the increases in consumption of chicken meat and eggs in the Japanese diet indicate the advancement of capitalist strategies for overcoming the barriers to industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The March-May 1937 Nagoya Pan-Pacific Peace Exhibition (NPPPE) promoted the Nagoya region as an industrial and cultural center of the empire. Though intended to show the city prospering in free-trade, capitalist peace, it was a ‘mega-event,’ large and complex enough to permit alternative interpretations, resistance, and even discord. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) objected to a ‘peace’ expo, extracting various concessions from NPPPE organizers, including a national defense hall and live-fire demonstrations. This made the event appear a cynical misappropriation of the concept of ‘peace.’ However, underneath this bellicose veneer is evidence that even on the eve of all-out war, local business and government elites clung to a 1920s style vision of peace through international trade and intercourse rather than through autarky and military force. Nagoya could not prevent military interference in the peace expo, but the city’s commitment to an agenda diverging from those of the IJA and Tokyo testifies to the continued political diversity of Japan in the mid to late 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baseball occupies a privileged position as Japan’s most popular sport, commanding ample attention across numerous levels and contexts of play. Baseball’s popularity has also inspired value-laden and sometimes nationalistic language around its athletes and how the sport is played. These associations, linking baseball and its athletes to the Japanese nation today, arise in a diverse sporting landscape where transnational movement by athletically gifted individuals is possible. This article asks how the bodies of non-Japanese baseball players are remade or rejected as Japanese baseball bodies. Through a focus on interpretations of bodily capability and athletic potential, I map shifting views of transnational identity as they are tied to bodily interpretations. I argue that how athlete’s accomplishments and failures are viewed and interpreted insidiously serve to embed perceptions of racial and ethnic difference. These perceptions of difference divide Japanese from non-Japanese baseball players through a focus on height, strength, and speed as well as attitude, reverence, and commitment to the team and its hierarchies. Baseball thereby becomes a conduit that perpetuates and preserves categories of ethno-racial difference and superficial views of the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kiyoshi Karl Kawakami was one of the most influential Japanese immigrant journalists to defend Japanese imperialism. He did so at a time when Japanese immigrant communities showed various responses to Japan's becoming an Asian empire between the two world wars. This article shows how a Japanese immigrant journalist utilized minority politics to represent Japanese immigrant communities in the United States. Cooperating with the Japanese government's public diplomacy and propaganda projects, Kawakami also linked the interests of his home country and Japanese immigrant communities to American national interests. For this purpose, he utilized the notions of open-door international trade and anti-communism -- both widely shared by the American public -- to justify Japanese imperialism and hide its colonial nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and the subsequent nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima (referred to collectively as ‘3.11’), critical discourse in Japan has become increasingly tense. Public debate about nuclear power has polarized society, and commentators, as well as ordinary citizens, are pressuring each other to choose between two ideological extremes. With this stifling atmosphere in the intellectual world, fiction has become an important creative venue outside the constraints of other written publications, such as non-fiction and journalism. The fictional aspect of what is known as ‘3.11 literature’ allows authors to express their opinions freely, portraying a side of Japanese society that does not appear in mainstream media. One such author is metafiction writer Takahashi Gen’ichirō, who spearheaded these fictional responses to 3.11 with his 2011 novel,Koisuru genpatsu(A Nuclear Reactor in Love). Through an analysis of this text, I will argue that this seemingly playful, experimental and at times even offensive work contains a serious exposé of problems confronting literary and political expression in post-3.11 Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of childhood in Japan frequently neglect to engage with the texts and images that young people produced, focusing instead on the adult imagination of youth. By looking solely at adults’ conceptions, we miss the importance of other children in forming their peers’ subjectivity. By analyzing the diaries, letters, postcards,yosegaki, and artwork of evacuated children during World War II, this article shows how adults framed the process of language acquisition, but also that children contributed to the creation of a shared language for describing their experiences. When children combined language learning with group experience, which was inscribed through collective writing practices, evacuees came to embrace a strong group identity. Grasping the relationship between collective experience, life-writing, and children’s culture is crucial to understanding how children perceived their world. Apart from these methodological considerations, dismissing the documents left behind by evacuees as mere recapitulations of adult discourse does the history of childhood a great disservice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historical research on modern Japan has often given insufficient attention to the lives and experiences of children and young people. However, this situation is beginning to change, as historians start to exploit the rich documentary resources, including children’s diaries and letters, that have been collected by institutions across Japan. Japanese children’s responses to disaster and war are especially well documented, and the articles in this special issue begin to explore the potential of these resources. They illuminate different ideals of childhood in Japan during the years between 1920 and 1945, and show how tensions and conflicts between these ideals played out under the stresses of natural disaster and man-made catastrophe. In analysing documents written by children, one crucial methodological and theoretical question is how to assess the degree of agency that such documents show. Adult influences on children’s writing cannot be ignored, and in modern Japan, the education system was arguably the most important channel for such influences. However, we should remember that children also influence one another, and also that the writing of children is, as is of course the case with adults, powerfully shaped by contemporary cultural and social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the summer of 1944 to the autumn of 1945, Japan’s government evacuated over 400,000 urban primary school pupils. They were sent in the custody of their teachers to rural areas away from the increasing threat of air raids. The children lived and were schooled with classmates in Buddhist temples, inns, and other facilities. Officials couched the policy in terms of a training exercise, placating military and political opponents to the removal of children from their families. Furthermore, the government offered images of nurturing teachers as surrogate guardians to assuage parental concerns. Local environments strongly influenced how comfortable or severe living conditions were, but food supplies dwindled throughout Japan. Evacuees largely avoided air raids but experienced health problems from insufficient nutrition and crowded residential quarters. This article explores the ideological underpinnings and implementation of Japan’s wartime school evacuation, finding evidence of contradictory principles, unauthorized motives, and illicit improvisations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the Allied occupation in 1952, the Japanese press reported that two hundred thousand ‘mixed-blood’ children had been fathered and abandoned by foreign (mostly American) soldiers in Japan. Japanese commentators often converged on a single solution: the expulsion of all foreign troops and all ‘mixed’ children from Japan. Although most scholars treat the 1950s sense of ‘crisis’ surrounding ‘mixed’ children as a product of concern for their welfare, the ‘crisis’ is better understood as a complexly co-authored moral panic. Opposition politicians deployed wrath and fear over ‘blood mixing’ to discredit the dominant Liberal Party and its alliance with the United States. Meanwhile, ideological activists and mass media circulated false facts to present ‘mixed’ families as doomed and dangerous. Moral panic over ‘mixed-blood children’ fostered a ‘pure-blood’ identity in Japan after World War II and helped reconstruct Japanese nationalism on a new basis: that of the ‘pure’ race rather than the failed state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Youth who grow up in Japanese child welfare institutions (‘children’s homes’ or ‘orphanages’) are socially and structurally marginalized, and many have pasts characterized by neglect and abandonment. In a contemporary context in which young people in Japan are encouraged to think of themselves as agentive, ‘self-responsible’ subjects, I argue that Japan’s child welfare system disproportionately depends on chance in shaping positive or negative outcomes for state wards. Japan’s system of care and emancipation from the child welfare system is, I suggest, rooted in a non-empiricist view of experience: despite the fact that most of us depend on our past experiences to guide our expectations for the future, the child welfare system demands that youth leaving care break with a past of dependency and social marginalization to care for themselves with minimal or no state assistance. This article focuses on Tanpopo, a self-help group for people with putatively common experiences receiving care in a child welfare institution. I explore two Tanpopo members’ narratives in order to interrogate the assumptions about ‘experience’ that underlie Japan’s child welfare system itself, and the discursive representations of self-responsibility and agentive action in Japan today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the Meiji government’s programs of colonial migration to Hokkaido established the intellectual foundation for the earliest wave of Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the US and colonial expansion in the South Pacific and Latin America between the 1880s and 1894. The experiences of migration-based colonial expansion and the trans-Pacific diaspora in modern Japan have been studied in isolation in existing literature. This article shows that these two experiences are actually inseparable from each other. The ideological origins of both were the migration-driven expansionism that emerged from the Meiji government’s colonial project in Hokkaido from 1869 to 1882. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Doing work that is characterized by instability and low incomes, Japanese male part-time workers often remain in the natal home well into adulthood even in cases where there is considerable discord and where familial bonds are strained or complicated. Through detailed case studies this article examines how, for some male part-time workers, a desire to disconnect from familial kin in the search for individual autonomy leads to the creation of alternative forms of relatedness. Meanwhile, for others, pressure to work in particular ways combined with the negotiations of complex family relationships – especially with (male) heads of households – contributes to alienation from family and society. Although work status is not the only cause of family strain, gendered work expectations and labour pressures considerably contribute to discord and can lead to significant experiences of social exclusion and disconnection from the family and wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]