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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]

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]

This paper employs previously unused archival sources to highlight some of the misconceptions and debates which surround the Japanese National Police Reserve (1950–1952), the precursor to today’s Ground Self Defense Force. The paper, which is the first on the National Police Reserve in English, examines much of the current historiography’s categorisation of the Reserve as an army, based on a very thin set of sources, and contrasts this with the content of the primary sources in an attempt to reveal the true character of the force. In doing so it also attempts to assess the relative importance of the internal and external influences behind the NPR’s creation. The article and its conclusions will be valuable in deepening the understanding of the character of the NPR and its position in the broader histories of the Occupation of Japan, Japanese security policy and Japan’s Cold War(s). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The city of Tokyo has been a space where numerous forms of sexual subcultures and their histories have been born. This paper discusses one possible way of understanding queer space in Tokyo. Examining the discourses concerning Shinjuku Ni-chōme, a queer neighbourhood in Tokyo, I argue that this queer space functions as a discursive site of containment as well as resistance to hetero-normative narratives of the metropolis. Drawing on queer theories that focus on the notion of space, in this paper I demonstrate that queer space is often marginalised by mainstream society, but at the same time it can be a critical site through which to investigate hetero-normativity. I suggest that queers themselves sometimes deploy their own delegitimised status to construct a queer counter-public space that intervenes in and disorients the linear narrative of hetero-normative views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports findings of a study which examined court proceedings with the presence of an interpreter in Japanese criminal courts. With the increasing awareness of language rights over the last decade and the recent introduction of the saiban-in (lay judge) system, courtroom discourse involving non-Japanese speaking background (NJSB) people is increasingly under scrutiny as an issue of language in public spaces, and improvements have been made in provision of legal interpreting. The present study focuses on partial non-use of the interpreter, an aspect of court interpreting that has been little discussed and hidden behind the published statistics and public discourses on legal interpreting in so-called 'foreigner cases'. It examines which stages of trials are interpreted and which are in Japanese only, and presents an analysis of courtroom interaction involving an NJSB defendant without interpreter mediation. Using Halliday's register framework, the paper discusses courts' decisions regarding partial non-use of interpreters and problems associated with it. While the partial use of interpreters for the highly technical legal genre indicates the courts' effort to provide fair trials for second language speakers, it is argued that a simplistic view of register overlooks the risks involved in not using an interpreter in ostensibly non-technical questioning of the defendant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers historical insights into the political philosophy, electoral strategies and commitment to 'change' politics of Kan Naoto, who in June 2010 became leader of the Democratic Party of Japan and the nation's new prime minister. The preface introduces an unpublished paper that the author wrote immediately after Kan's first electoral success in 1980, not long after the author's extensive personal interviews with the then budding political aspirant. That paper, which follows, reveals how Kan's entry into the national political system he now leads is quite atypical of Japanese politicians generally and certainly of most of his predecessor prime ministers who were supported by a powerful mix of wealth and connections, often through inheritance. Instead Kan is a 'self-made' politician, the first to reach national leadership initially through participatory democracy: electoral organizations based on citizen movements and grassroots involvement in national politics. The epilogue that follows considers the possible consequences of this style of political advancement for how Kan operates as leader of his party, the national political system, and the Japanese nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Touch, as it is conventionally conceived, appears to be lacking in everyday Japanese intimate relationships, which are accordingly commonly characterised in terms of subtle non-tactile and non-verbal forms of communication; feelings are expected to be inferred. However, it is unclear as to how such forms manifest feelings of closeness in the first place. This paper explores the embodied experience in the intimate spaces of the Japanese family. Japanese parent-child relationships help us to become acquainted with different ways of understanding bodily intimacy and touch. The paper explores the cultural meaning of touch in Japanese bodily intimacy, particularly where the child is under five years old, and presents an embodied and sensuous understanding of the touch which informs parent-child relationships as the child grows older. Certain phenomenological tools are used helping to develop the notion of a blurring of the boundaries between bodies in Japanese bodily intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the Japanese whaling policy and inquires into what lies behind its direction. The policy has many features and the longer Japan continues with its research whaling, the more controversial the policy becomes. Reasons put forward by the government, such as the maintenance of its culture and the utilization of the whale resource, have not convinced Western nations of its legitimacy. This paper argues that attempts to bring about a resumption of commercial whaling are less about maintaining traditions than about providing opportunities to the vested interests of the Japanese 'Whaling Iron Triangle'. This triangle is the driving force behind Japan's whaling policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses 'Karafuto Ainu no setsuwa'[The Tales of Karafuto-Ainu], a collection of Japanese translations of Ainu narratives by the Ainu-Japanese linguist and ethnologist Chiri Mashiho. Most of the material for Chiri's translations came from a collection of Ainu folktales, entitled 'Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore' (1912), compiled by Polish scholar Bronislaw Pilsudski. The paper argues that Chiri and Pilsudski had unique life experiences that affected their views of the Ainu culture, and by reading Chiri's text against that of Pilsudski's, the author demonstrates how Chiri responded to the challenge of keeping alive the performative qualities of the oral Ainu tradition and thereby created a unique style of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of 'the rise of China' on the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and its implications for Japan. Japan has traditionally enjoyed a dominant position in the Bank, as it has enjoyed a dominant position in Asia. However, with the balance of power in the region tipping in China's favour, one might expect that this would be reflected in the ADB as well. This paper argues that despite the worsening Sino-Japanese relationship, the ADB has facilitated the development and maintenance of shared expectations between the two parties over the future direction of development assistance, representing an oasis of liberal institutionalism in a relationship increasingly characterised in realist terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will present a historical overview of the yakeato generation. After investigating the occurrences of yakeato themes in contemporary Japanese literature a working definition of the yakeato generation is suggested and the paper will answer the question of whether the yakeato generation is still relevant in contemporary Japanese society. This historically pivotal Japanese generation will be analysed with general references to the criticism and literature of Oda Makoto, Nosaka Akiyuki, Oe Kenzaburo and Ishihara Shintaro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nosaka Akiyuki, a writer, singer, lyricist, and former member of the House of Councillors, is now struggling with the effects of a stroke which he suffered in 2003. Nosaka early identified himself as a member of the yakeato yamiichi sedai (the generation brought up in the ruins and black markets of the post-war period). In his works Nosaka repeatedly depicts his firsthand experience of the fire bombings of major Japanese metropolitan areas during the Greater East Asian conflict. This paper examines two recent satirical works before proceeding to a discussion of Nosaka's seminal work Hotaru no haka [Grave of the Fireflies, 1967], which deserves to be remembered as 'the most celebrated literary record of the yakeato generation'. Nosaka's original story has been overshadowed by the animated film version written and directed by Takahata Isao for Studio Ghibli. This paper describes and evaluates the unparalleled narrative style of Nosaka's original story, which covers an emotional spectrum ranging from the lighthearted depiction of the happy play of childhood, to the overwhelmingly dark and sorrowful portrayal of two children (brother and sister) dying from malnutrition in the dislocated society of post-war Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the nature of war-related reporting in Japanese newspapers through a survey of how the quality national newspapers reported the eruption of the ‘comfort women’ issue in 1991–1992. It challenges the widespread assumption about the ‘homogeneity’ of the Japanese press, which is based in critiques of press clubs, and illustrates how Japanese newspapers have developed distinct ideological positions in war-related reporting. The paper also clarifies the contested nature of Japanese war memories, some of the key features of that contestation and the pivotal role that the ‘comfort women’ and gender issues have assumed in contemporary Japanese war discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores senses of ‘Japaneseness’ among Japanese musicians today by considering the words of 32 musicians—from koto and shakuhachi masters to jazz saxophonists, rock guitarists, and classical and electronic composers-in a provincial Japanese city. Their diverse senses of cultural identity are analyzed through three metaphors through which they express themselves: Japaneseness as a fence, walling off Japanese from change and foreignness, Japaneseness as a flavor to be enjoyed by anyone in the world who so chooses, and Japaneseness as a phantasm: Japaneseness obliterated, to be created anew if enough people can be convinced of the validity of such a recreation. This paper suggests that these metaphors may be useful in explicating cultural identity across a broad range of settings beyond music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper examines a forgotten episode in the early 1870s when a steamship flying under the flag of the Bey of Tunis unexpectedly arrived in the port of Yokohama. This steamship, the Zadkia, immediately became involved in a legal dispute regarding the debts of its owner and the status of the ship itself as a vessel from a non-Treaty Power. The Zadkia story was significant in several respects. First, it revises our understanding of when and how Japan and the Islamic lands re-established contact in the modern period. Second, it throws additional light upon the history of the treaty revision movement in Japan. Finally, it represented a new phase for native Japanese journalism when a Japanese reporter attended a European-style trial for the first time. This paper is based upon newspaper reports as well as diplomatic correspondence between London, Tokyo, Yokohama, and Tunis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the Japanese position on East Timor and highlights tension in bilateral relations between Australia and Japan on East Timor during the year 1999. The sources of tension were over leadership, appropriate policy towards indonesia and the style of diplomacy conducted by Australia. In many respects the tension over East Timor shook complacency in bilateral relations. By January 2001 tension was resolved and bilateral ties have been strengthened in the areas of security and regional cooperation. What does this episode reveal about the bilateral relationship? Quite clearly, and despite the depth of networks that have been established over the decades, there was insufficient consultation on East Timor. In pan, the extraordinary events that unfolded after the results of the ballot in East Timor were announced on 4 September 1999 and Australia's leadership role in the international Force in East Timor (INTERFET) can explain the lack of consultation. Also, a drift in relations that had been evident for several years was a significant factor. Finally, the paper argues that despite the substantial improvement in bilateral relations, policy towards Indonesia will remain a potential source of friction between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to clarify conflicting accounts of the fundamental elements of rape law and its interpretation in Japan. The central question is how judges in Japan understand rape and sexual violation more generally. The paper is part of a larger project that explores the process of judicial decision making in Japan and, in particular, the social context shaping those decisions. I use a qualitative analysis of 41 cases involving sexual assaults to examine the ways in which judges construct gender, sexuality and sex. My analysis draws on the legal storytelling approach to highlight a pattern in judicial decision making that results in the exclusion or disqualification of narratives of rape, and thus women's and men's experiences, that do not conform to pervasive rape stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which the modernist paradigm is at work in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by focusing on its spatial demarcation--a map of the Self against the Other. The boundaries of gender in this text are firmly fixed; the Mother represents corporeality, ignorance, and profanation, while the Father represents spirituality, knowledge, and sacredness. Striving to embody the Father, the narrator is forced into the position of the brooding Son. He is unable to become a speaking subject proper, nor to slip back into the comfortable pre-symbolic domain. The paper also focuses on the narrator's gaze, which constantly splits and vacillates on different levels, being unable to obtain the unified singular perspective necessary for the constitution of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Japanese business community continues to be perceived as male dominated, the majority of students of Business Japanese in Australian universities are female. This paper examines Business Japanese textbooks from both macro (social practices) and micro (linguistic discourses) level perspectives, using critical discourse analysis as an analytical tool, to assess the adequacy of the textbooks to be used in a primarily female student community. The analysis reveals that the textbooks present a stereotypical and exaggerated version of social practices of the Japanese business community, based on idealised native-Japanese norms. Female characters in the textbooks have less access to managerial positions, and fewer opportunities to participate in business, than in reality. The analysis also highlights the invisibility of non-Japanese female characters in the textbooks. Female students using the textbooks are not provided with role models or spaces to acculturate into. These textbooks do not grant adequate learning tools for non-Japanese female students. The paper calls for textbooks which provide more diverse perspectives of the Japanese business community, where non-Japanese female students are able to construct their own social identities accompanied by relevant use of the Japanese language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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 paper examines the way the outcaste head Danzaemon, or more precisely several individuals who successively bore that title, negotiated their place in the eighteenth-century Edo status order through official genealogical pronouncements.Etaandhiningroups became closely linked together in the political imaginary in Edo from around the beginning of the eighteenth century in an extraordinary legal battle that emerged between the leaders of these groups. The head of the former group, Danzaemon Chikamura, achieved a qualified victory in this struggle through genealogical posturing, positioning himself at the apex of an increasingly well-defined Edo outcaste order. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the privileged place within the order held by the next Danzaemon came under renewed pressure from a new generation ofhinin. As a result, Danzaemon Chikasono made an attempt to rearticulate the grounds for his status through a different kind of genealogical statement. This article, using the official correspondence between Danzaemon and the Edo City Magistrate, examines the distinctive features of the genealogical imaginations of these two outcaste leaders in order to reveal the ways they negotiated their place within the Edo outcaste order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a diplomatic reflection based on a long connection with Australia and Australians and a posting to Canberra as Japanese ambassador (1998-2001). Key issues that have caused tension in the relationship and the process towards the development of mature bilateral relations are discussed. Finally, the paper argues that the bilateral relationship will continue to develop and prosper and that this is in the interests of both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many recent studies have discussed the features of Japanese civil society. Some of them point out that these have been greatly affected by the legacy of the new left movements, a network of anti-Vietnam War groups, student groups, and young workers’ groups which developed toward the end of the 1960s. This article explores the formation and development of the ideas and actions of the Japanese new left movements, examining the discourse of student activists in particular. These activists were critical of the conservative consciousness – which they termed ‘everydayness’ – which was a product of the economic boom of that decade, and sought to transform it. They were willing to take confrontational direct action against armed police officers on streets and on campus in spite of the risks of arrest and injury. I analyse their activism, and the reasons leading to it. By exploring the ideas and actions of new left movements, this paper aims to historicize certain features of Japanese civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The term ‘otaku’ is generally used in Japan to denote subcultures revolving around the consumption of popular culture, such as manga, anime and games. This paper, however, seeks to analyze ‘otaku’ as a label applied to individuals whose consumption is perceived and judged to have compromised certain values in contemporary Japan. Through analysis of interviews with a group of Japanese students, I found that the values they invoke to judge who the ‘otaku’ are, and which they construe as a form of common sense concerning consumption, correspond to the demands of advanced capitalism: consumption should be productive of capital, either leading to further production or fostering communication that is directly productive. At the same time, people are labeled as ‘otaku’ not merely for failing to produce capital through their consumption, but also for actively practicing a perversion of the capacities that are necessary to advanced capitalist Japan, most notably imagination and autonomy. ‘Otaku’ labeling thus points to capital's anxieties over capacities such as imagination, knowledge and autonomy: these capacities, while essential to a flexible and immaterial economy, could potentially become unproductive and threaten advanced capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The switch to digital terrestrial broadcasting on 24 July 2011 marked a watershed for the broadcasting industry in Japan. Digitalisation is the single largest industry-wide event since the advent of alternative distribution technologies, satellite and cable, in the 1980s. Preparation for the switch to digital, known as chideji-ka, has put existing business arrangements under pressure and has led to a renewed focus on the future shape of the industry. There is increasing acknowledgement that change, especially in the relationship between central and local broadcasters, is inevitable. This paper summarises the position of the industry at the beginning of its digital age, arguing for a new view of broadcasting in Japan that recognises the two-tier reality behind industry rhetoric. It also summarises the major options open to the industry as it looks to redefine itself in a much-changed media environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the processes by which humanoid robots become sites of affective investment in contemporary Japan. It particularly analyses how narratives of intimacy, conventionally found in relationships between humans, are being reproduced and embodied in interactions with humanoid robots. It uses ethnographic research on participants in Robo-One, one of Japan's most popular robotics events, to examine the development of intimate relationships between the human and the robotic, understood in terms of kokoro (loosely translated as 'heart'). The robot's heart emerges in the grey area between technological material and human imagination. Through the respective processes of tinkering and spectating, both robot builders and 'robot watchers' experience the intimacy that results from apprehending the robot's heart. This experience creates an endless hermeneutic circle, drawing together subject and object, original and copy, creator and created, and watcher and watched, to ultimately reconfigure participants' senses of their own kokoro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, electronic government is being pursued at both national level (denshi seifu) and local level (denshi jichitai) in Japan. It is therefore useful to examine how local administrations communicate with the public in the Internet age. This paper examines foreign-language provision on local government websites, concentrating on the 47 prefectures. An overview is supplemented by more detailed discussion of several selected websites, looking at aspects such as the languages available, content, target audiences, translation and efforts to make Japanese-language information more accessible to non-native speakers. Local governments increasingly have to take into account the linguistic needs of the growing numbers of foreign residents in their communities. Making provision for foreign residents is, however, not the only reason for local governments to use languages other than Japanese on their websites. Examining these websites in terms of which languages are used and the type of material presented offers insights into broader issues of internationalisation, multiculturalism and globalisation as experienced and managed at local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Japanese language used by JSL learners in Japan, while examining JSL classrooms as public space. It draws upon JSL literature, Japanese textbooks and their discourses to find the kinds of Japanese that are taught and used in JSL classrooms and how they are presented and consumed, and it observes how diversity in learners' language is dealt with inside and outside of JSL classrooms in Japan, keeping in view the danger of 'colonisation' of classrooms. It will then study new developments where JSL speakers are participating in development of their own 'third space', which values hybridity more than diversity, and in turn the continuous re-construction of the public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at multilingual signs and what these signs have to tell us about multilingualism in Japan in general. Working with a larger sample of signs collected in central Tokyo, it is shown how these signs can be read to reflect larger transformations in Japanese society and its linguistic make-up at large. Four interrelated factors are identified as indicative of these transformations: (1) favourable attitudes toward foreign languages, (2) official internationalisation policies, (3) growing ethnicisation in some areas, and (4) a recent interest in Korean culture and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates regimented language choices at Naha Airport in Okinawa Prefecture in order to study how these language choices relate to language ideology on one hand and to creating a self-supporting language ecology of maximum diversity on the other. Issues of power and ideology underlie the language choice and the language ecology which evolve from them, as well as ideologically erased language choices. Despite its multilingual heritage and the presence of a large English-speaking community of US military personnel on the island, Naha Airport reproduces ideas of individual and societal monolingualism with regard to Japan as well as to neighbouring countries. Owing to entrenched nationalist ideology and language attitudes, a change in such language regimentation cannot be envisaged in the near future, despite several shortcomings in the present linguistic organization of Naha Airport. Officially regulated public spaces accessible to all, such as Naha Airport, can play a key role in readjusting and re-evaluating specific behaviours and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the plight of the Taiwanese, who were pawns in the larger conflict of World War Two, helps us to understand the complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. The postwar legal adjudication of BC class Japanese war crimes in East Asia is a key element in unwinding the historical complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a Taiwanese identity, and its connection to Japan's postwar foreign relations goals. This paper considers three inter-related issues - analyzing how Japanese rule was restructured in the postwar former colonies, dissecting the prosecution of lower-level Japanese war crimes, and resolving the conundrum of collaboration within the former empire. These problems are tied intimately together due to the transformation of postwar identity and colonial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reconnect the history of modern Japan with that of Japan's colonies by examining debates over the legal inclusion and exclusion of colonial Taiwan in 1899. It examines why and how an inconsistent legal structure evolved within the Japanese Empire. I argue that the creation of the Japanese nation was intertwined with the empire, and that this can be seen in the discriminatory deployment of the Family Register and Nationality Laws. Japan included Taiwan within the scope of the Nationality Law to achieve full sovereignty over its territory but also excluded the colonised people of Taiwan from the family register system to deny them citizenship. The rapid reconfiguration of the idea of 'Japan' under the strong influence of the West added significant ambivalence to this process, and thus to the making of the nation-empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1593, 1609 and 1616 three very different attempts were made by the rulers of Japan to establish formal diplomatic and trade links with Taiwan. The 1593 approach consisted merely of a letter that proved impossible to deliver, while the others involved sending well-equipped fleets to the island. Both the latter expeditions were led by prominent Christians in efforts that ultimately came to nothing, in spite of being backed up by very meaningful threats of military intervention. This paper argues that it was largely the nature of Taiwan itself that frustrated Japan's schemes. Taiwan had no overall ruler who could participate, willingly or not, in the accepted modus operandi that had been applied to Korea in 1592 and Ryukyu in 1609. This was an approach based on the tributary model. Instead Taiwan's fragmentary structure of aboriginal tribes laid it open to a more western-style form of development involving the establishment of a military base and colonisation, a means that was to be exploited by the Dutch in Taiwan a decade later to the astonishment and rancour of the Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1874 Taiwan Expedition was a watershed event for early Meiji journalism, for it was during this conflict that Kishida Ginkō (1833-1905) became Japan's first war reporter. At a time when newspapers had only started to become a feature of daily life in Japan, Ginkō's pioneering coverage of the Taiwan campaign was an important demonstration of the newspaper's potential to the Meiji authorities, and his coverage likewise gave many readers their first concrete understandings of the reporter at work. This paper examines Ginkō's extensive writings on Taiwan with the goal of illuminating how the campaign, its setting, and the Taiwanese aborigines were understood by and represented to the Meiji reading public. It shows that more than simply conveying information about the Expedition to the reading public, Ginkō's reportage strove to situate the project as part of a broader colonial agenda that would impart 'civilization' to the indigenous population. In columns that stressed Japan's long-term strategic interests in the area, Ginkō called upon his readers to imagine themselves as part of the enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1624, the Dutch East India Company established a colony on Taiwan. When Dutch authorities moved to tax and restrict Japanese traders, who had been sailing to the island for a number of years, they encountered immediate resistance spearheaded by Suetsugu Heizō, a Nagasaki official and merchant heavily invested in the Taiwan route. As part of his struggle against the Dutch, Heizō attempted to drag the Japanese state into the conflict by engineering a fake embassy formed of 16 aboriginal men recruited from a village in Taiwan and transported to the center of Tokugawa power in Edo. This paper explores the embassy and uses it to consider why powerful Asian states like Tokugawa Japan displayed so little interest in overseas expansion, creating a vacuum of power that European overseas enterprises rushed enthusiastically to fill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the 1890s, Protestant churches in Tokyo offered a new kind of social space that encouraged an open, verbal communication of ideas about a modern and improved Japan. Such churches differed dramatically from the majority of Japanese secular and religious gathering spaces that were directly influenced by their strong ties to state authority. At church, pastors and respected lay speakers told listeners to individually imagine the nation and their appropriate places within it. Speaking and listening with the men were many educated, socially minded women who had just been barred from various forms of public life. These men and women used the church space to imagine and realize alternative versions of a new Japan. To analyze the discursive distinctiveness of Tokyo's Protestant churches, this paper examines laymen's speeches made before the Women's Group of Tokyo's most socially active church, Hongō, sermons in Tokyo's two largest Kumiai (Congregationalist) churches, Hongō and Reinanzaka, and the accounts of attendees influenced by both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Speaking as a tōjisha' has become an important strategy in establishing 'correct knowledge' about sexual minority cultures in contemporary Japan. Originally developed in a legal context where it referred to the 'parties' in court proceedings, in the 1970s tōjisha was taken up by citizens' groups campaigning for the right of self determination for the 'parties concerned' facing discrimination and has become a central concept for all minority self-advocacy groups. In the 1990s the discourse of tōjisha sei (tōjisha-ness) was adopted by gay rights groups and by spokespersons for lesbian and transgender communities in a battle to change public perceptions of sexual minorities through insisting on their right to speak about themselves in their own voices. This paper considers two unforeseen outcomes of the primacy of the tōjisha in current LGBTQ discourse. Firstly, through insisting on attending to the voice of each individual, it has proven difficult to establish common links among discriminated communities (or within communities) because of widely diverging perspectives. Also, given the broad variety in many individuals' experience of non-normative sexuality, having to identify and speak as a tōjisha has engendered normalizing effects. The current primacy of the tōjisha reinforces developmental narratives of sexual-identity formation (only the 'out' homosexual is truly authentic) and in so doing inadvertently silences those unable or unwilling to prioritize the sexual in their presentation of self, or whose modes of self-expression fall outside current orthodoxies that provide the boundaries for sexual-minority identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is the eighteenth and nineteenth century popular discourse on women's tea practice in guides for women's edification. It argues that in these commercially produced texts we find evidence of the dissemination of information on tea culture to a new social group, namely, wealthy commoner women. Thus, we see that with economic growth came new opportunities for commoner women to participate in cultural practices associated with the elite. Tea was a particularly significant cultural practice as it taught women etiquette and manners. Through learning tea, commoner women could learn to comport themselves in a manner associated with those of higher status. It was a way of displaying their, and their family's, accumulation of capital, both social and economic, and also a way to potentially raise their status through marriage. This early modern discourse on women's tea laid the foundations for the growth of women's tea in modern Japan, a development made possible by the flexibility of the status system as it affected women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will illustrate naturally occurring thanking episodes among Japanese students at a university campus in Tokyo, and compare them with the conventional Japanese thanking ritual (o-rei). This comparison illustrates the diverse and changing nature of the thanking repertoire in Japanese. The qualitative analysis of the data illustrates striking differences between o-rei rituals and expressions used by Japanese university students in thanking episodes. The students' speech repertoire contains some innovative speech formulae; yet, none of the data suggest that the students are influenced by the established communication practice of debt-credit balancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's constitutional revision and resultant remilitarization can affect the balance of power in the international system beyond its national borders. This paper critically analyzes the constitutional revision debate in contemporary Japan and the implications for Japan's foreign relations if or when it becomes constitutional for the island nation to possess military forces. It argues that justification for constitutional revision is based on political myth rather than historical reality and rational analysis, and also that a militarized Japan will not enhance its independence or international prestige. Rather, there is the great fear that a new Japan will be further subordinated to the United States as a critical part of the latter's global strategy and defense mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the impact of recent upgrades in security ties between Australia and Japan and their implications for the bilateral relationship. In particular, the development and future of the Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation (JDSC) is assessed. It is argued that former Prime Ministers Abe and Howard encouraged the enhancement of security ties to unprecedented new highs, but that the rise of China and leadership change in Japan and Australia in 2007 will make the prospects of a full security treaty unlikely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'human security' was created by the UNDP in 1994 when the international community became aware of emerging transnational threats following the Cold War. Since then, the Canadian government has developed the idea into an emerging norm of 'responsibility to protect' which requires the international community to rethink traditional notions of state sovereignty and seriously consider guidelines that encourage humanitarian intervention, an approach that has been widely endorsed. The Japanese government, in contrast, has promoted the idea of human security as poverty reduction and human empowerment. This paper examines the limits of Japan's human security policy by examining its background in the geopolitics of the Asian region and its consequent grounding in the principles of state sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs. It concludes by suggesting that the success of Canada's human security policy reflects the transformation of the security paradigm after the Cold War and that Japan has not yet become fully aware of this profound transformation in its own security considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]