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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]

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 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]

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 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]

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]

The article presents an introduction to the May 2010 issue, highlighting the history of international diplomatic relations between Japan and Taiwan and previewing featured articles by Matthew Fraleigh, Adam Clulow, and Stephen Turnbull.

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]

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]

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]

Irisawa Yasuo (b. 1931) is one of the most theoretical and experimental poets that postwar Japan has produced. His poetry is highly individual; its themes and techniques place it firmly in the mainstream of contemporary international poetry. Like T. S. Eliot, Irisawa insists on the impersonality of the poet in creative expression. The point of his work is arrived at through implication, through the allusiveness contained in language; in language games reminiscent of James Joyce, and echoes from past time reminiscent of Eliot's work. Irisawa creates ambivalent images tied to the theme of mortality. This paper explores the variety of his narrative techniques, his creation of myths, his use of satire and even nonsense poetry. It considers the theory of the restructuring of language he expounds in Memorandum on the Structure of Poetry: if words are divorced from their daily usage, they may be joined together in new ways to create 'a meaning beyond meaning'. Irisawa does this in abstract conceptions filled with references and allusions to existing literature, as we see in My Izumo, a poem about spiritual identification with the past, which alludes to ancient Japanese works such as Izumo Fudoki and the Kojiki. This article shows how Irisawa's work exemplifies a dominant trend in modern Japanese poetry: the denial of meaning as it is ordinarily interpreted and in its place the use of language to create abstract visions which contain a 'meaning beyond meaning' - Irisawa's central thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s Japan's defense policy has been under incremental significant change, revealed mainly in the legislative field. This paper explores the extent to which Japan's defense policy is changing in military terms. Analysis of Japan's latest security posture in Iraq (2003-2006) brings to light changes in Japan's overall defense policy in terms of defense priorities and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers changes in developmental policy, reform agenda and political leadership within the Liberal Democratic Party since the 1990s. Particular attention is given to the contrasting reform agenda of Koizumi and Abe. The author argues that both leaders represent variants of enhanced authoritarianism; Koizumi pursued a 'Thatcherite' style agenda in efforts to 'modernise' the Japanese economy, while Abe is a more traditional interventionist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the way Japanese historians arrived at an increasingly uniform understanding of Buraku history over the course of the twentieth century. It analyses in detail the continuities and changes in pre-war perspectives on Burakumin and the roles renowned historians like Inoue Kiyoshi played in the development of a particular understanding of Buraku history in the early post-war period. This paper argues that Inoue's intervention in a key debate in the late Occupation years was of critical importance in the emergence of the mainstream narrative of Buraku history still widely subscribed to today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the Japanese empire as experience, not as policy, through a study of the Japanese community in Tianjin, north China, before 1937. Recent scholarship on Japanese settlers in East Asia suggests considerable variation within and between communities and Tianjin's location at a key point of Sino-Japanese conflict arguably encouraged a view of China and the Chinese that mirrored the rhetoric of empire. However, settlers valued personal and economic security and status over more abstract questions of national interest, and settler engagement with empire and with the Japanese influence in China varied according to the perceived impact of political developments on personal interests. This engagement can therefore be understood as an extension of the quest for economic opportunity and social capital that was manifested also in factional struggles in concession organisations and in the highly transactional approach to relations with the Japanese state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes issues of language and communication in Japan in national language policies. It offers a brief overview of historical aspects of language and communication in Japan, including the part played by interpreters and translators who helped modernize the country, then reviews national language policy in today's Japan, considering new trends in English language education as well as the national language (kokugo). The issue of loan words is presented to extrapolate influence of English on the Japanese language. Third, the social reality of language in present day Japan is discussed. Finally, some challenges facing twenty-first century Japan will be addressed, in terms of language, communication and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the representation of foreign residents in Japan in the popular television variety show Kokoga hen dayo nihonjin (This Is So Bizarre, You Japanese) . It discusses ways in which the increasing presence and visibility of foreign residents in the Japanese public space enhances the commercial value of ‘ordinariness’. In this process the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them-within-us’ are sharply re-demarcated in an international framework and the intensifying multicultural situation is subtly turned into a multinational media spectacle, in a way in which the national imagined community is not fundamentally displaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Nakajima Atsushi's celebrated short novel about transformation, ‘Sangetsuki’ (‘Tiger-Poet’). I describe Nakajima's view of literacy and how this view is reflected in ‘Sangetsuki’. For Nakajima, literacy is the fruit of knowledge: once eaten, one can never return to one's original state of happiness. In Nakajima's world, to be literate means to experience agony, which is made even more acute when the inner literate mentality is contained within an outer oral appearance. The tragedy of ‘Sangetsuki’ lies not in the transformation of the hero from literate to oral, but in the incompleteness of the transformation; the hero retains his human mentality even after his physical appearance has been transformed. I also discuss ‘Sangetsuki’ in relation to the Gothic novel. It has been said that ‘Sangetsuki’ is Nakajima's version of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. However, if we focus on the issue of literacy, it has much more in common with Frankenstein . For the monster in Frankenstein and the hero in ‘Sangetsuki’ share the same suffering: the agony of literacy and the tragedy of discordance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Japan, the need to proceed towards a more sustainable agriculture appears to be a common goal for the Ministry of Agriculture and farmers' organizations. However, agricultural policy aiming at a more sustainable agriculture will only be successful if it corresponds to farmers' values and convictions. Accordingly, the correspondence of young farmers' values and convictions with a new model of sustainable agriculture can help Japanese agriculture move towards sustainability. Nevertheless, mature and elderly farmers (the bulk of the farming sector), concerned principally with agricultural productivity, are more reluctant to redirect farming practices by taking ecological considerations into account. This paper, based on a qualitative methodology, examines the integration of the environment into Japanese agricultural policy, and goes on to analyse Asahikawa farmers' attitudes towards sustainable agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oda Makoto is known in contemporary Japanese society as a prolific novelist, fierce social critic and controversial political activist. After travelling extensively throughout America and East Asia Oda's seminal travel narratives broke Japanese postwar isolationism and reinvented the postwar conceptualisation of the journey. As one of the intellectual founding fathers of the Beheiren movement Oda was an outspoken social critic in the 1960s and 1970s whose legacy of civil disobedience is currently more valid than ever before. This paper demonstrates that Oda is one of the few counter-hegemonic voices that speak out against revisionist national tendencies found in postwar Japanese discourse. Oda employs techniques of estrangement to reconceptualise established cultural tropes such as the mythology of Hiroshima, the higaisha discourse and indigenous Korean alterity. Oda's unravelling of discursive formations is explored through an analysis of three works: Nan demo mite yarō (1961), Hiroshima (1981) and Gyokusai (1999). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Japanese newspaper editorials on the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York to test the validity of the three major assumptions of current critical scholarship. Are Japanese newspaper editorials homogeneous; polarized into a majority Left and a minority Right; or diversified within the framework of this political opposition? The results suggest that all three are partially correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to reassess the dominant images of popular militarism or stoic suffering in wartime Japan, this paper takes a street-level view of provincial society during the major conflict with Russia, 1904–1905. It focuses on three main sites of wartime contact between the community and the military: the rail station, the cinema, and the cemetery. By mining local press reports and especially letters to the press from local people, it exposes the diversity of public attitudes towards the war, the military and those in authority; these attitudes include a healthy cynicism and satire towards elites or propaganda, as well as a readiness to express discontent rather than suffer in silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoters of Meiji Japan's imperialist expansion vied with European and American competitors for control of Korea perhaps more than in any other place in Japan's early empire. Thus, although Korea was not officially colonized until 1910, Meiji officials recognized the need for Japan's new policies toward Korea to make international sense more acutely than in the country's other colonial schemes. Within Japan's expanding empire, therefore, the annexation of Korea most significantly established the perceived legitimacy of Japan as a modern imperial nation. This paper examines this issue by analyzing how the idea of the legitimacy of colonization itself came into being in Meiji Japan. It focuses particularly on the period leading up to annexation during which the development of colonial ‘science’ as an area of specialized knowledge took hold, particularly in relation to Japan's development of Hokkaido. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between about 1890 and 1919, the dominant discourse in Japanese nationalism emphasised Japan's status as a great modern nation, in contrast to earlier concerns about weakness and vulnerability in the face of Western imperialism, and despite continuing insecurities of various kinds. This paper revisits the ‘discourse of national greatness’, focusing on its construction, limitations and consequences. Emphasis on Japanese greatness was evident in the press, in self-presentation at industrial expositions, and in substantial written works by Japanese intellectuals. Several factors explain the rapid spread of such a discourse, including the decline of class and regional identification, the considerable expansion of the press, and the stimulus of war. The consequences of the rise of the notion of Japanese greatness for the later development of Japanese nationalism were profound. They included the further subordination of regionalism, entrenchment of the gendered nature of Japanese nationalism, the further denigration of other Asian peoples and of Japan's own past, reinforcement of the yet fragile cult of the emperor, encouragement to conflate ‘nation’ and ‘state’, and a strong tendency to associate nationalism with military conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intense controversy over Japanese investment in Australia in the late 1980s continues to attract academic attention as a significant episode in Australia-Japan relations. This paper addresses two limitations of the existing literature. Firstly, it situates the controversy in the political economy of foreign investment policy liberalisation. This is important to an understanding of to what degree it was fundamentally a Japan-related or a foreign investment-related issue. How it became both provides insights into the dynamics of Australia--Japan relations in that era. Secondly, why the Australian government reaffirmed its commitment to liberal non-discriminatory policy in the face of popular disquiet is examined directly. This complements the existing rich literature on the negative reactions to Japanese investment and may help to provide a fuller picture of the domestic sources of stability in Australia--Japan relations in that period. It also highlights the historical magnitude of the Howard government's recent apparent abrogation of the non-discriminatory principle in foreign investment policy with the Australia--US Free Trade Agreement of February 2004 and the questions so raised about the Australia--Japan bilateral relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the textual transformation of noblewomen/poets such as Izumi Shikibu into yūjo or courtesans and bodhisattvas. In trying to make sense of this remarkable reconfiguration, it looks at the many contending Buddhist discourses that shaped medieval texts. It argues that while the practice of poetry, in the hands of male poets, becomes a revered michi which is seen as being concomitant with the Buddhist Way, the noblewoman's poetry is not granted the same status. Women are seen as inherently sinful and lustful and hence their poetry cannot be easily assimilated to the goal of enlightenment. It is by recasting the noblewoman as yūjo , thereby foregrounding and indeed exaggerating her sexuality, that medieval texts, drawing on tantric and other practices, are able to salvage both the noblewoman and her poetry . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period after 9/11 has been labeled the new post Cold War or 'post post Cold War': 1 an era of increased asymmetrical threats and terrorism, deeper global cooperation concerning counter-terrorism and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), growing US unilateralism as well as isolation and the birth of the Bush Doctrine. Beyond 9/11, what is the meaning of the new post Cold War for the US-Japan alliance? This paper will address this question from the perspectives of both the United States and Japan in this new era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines four pre-war examples of gastronomic fiction: Murai Gensai's Kuidōraku , Kōda Rohan's 'Chinsenkai', Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's 'Bishoku kurabu', and Okamoto Kanoko's 'Shokuma'. Notably, these stories of gastronomic quest are not necessarily about what Brillat-Savarin called gourmandise, in contrast to gluttony and voracity. In many cases the quest goes totally against Brillat-Savarin's 'physiology' and heads towards destruction--of the body, the economy, and romantic and other relationships. The majority of pre-war Japanese gastronomic fiction seems to ignore or reject heterosexual love. The passion for food may be associated with eroticism; but the stronger that passion is, and the more ardent the gastronomic quest, the less the space that remains for romantic love affairs. In other words, 'romancing food' tends to go against, rather than favour, romantic love. I shall argue that the homosocial nature of pre-war Japanese gourmandise and literature has brought this about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the changing image of the city in the poetry, prose and critical essays of the free verse poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942). Sakutarō's growing disillusionment with Japan's modernisation and slavish imitation of Western models is reflected in changes in his poetic representations of the city, from a modern, sophisticated utopia, through the liberating home of the crowd, and the symbol of the existential despair of modern man, to the hallucination of a fevered imagination. The progressive disenchantment with the city in Sakutarō's poetry is accompanied by a corresponding rise in his estimation of the countryside. We can also see the city as a metaphor for modernity and the West on the one hand, and the countryside a trope for Japan and tradition on the other. In calling for a fusion of elements derived from both Western and Japanese culture Hagiwara Sakutarō sought to negotiate a distinctive Japanese modernity in the interwar period, but was, in the end, profoundly disappointed with the colourless intellectual desert he saw emerging from the blend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents six anti-military base citizens' groups on Okinawa, Japan to demonstrate the existence of an anti-military base social movement on Okinawa. The author contends that three 'incidents' involving the US military on Okinawa--the 1995 Kin Town rape, the 1997 Nago City Heliport transfer proposal, and the 2001 Chatan Town rape--have solidified the groups into a social movement. This has occurred with the incorporation of broader perspectives into the anti-military base campaign including environmentalism, feminism, and anti-militarism. The author concludes that comparison of the Okinawan anti-base social movement with other social movements and the application of social movement theory to the Okinawan example will facilitate theorising about the future direction of the Okinawan anti-military base social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English-derived vocabulary in Japan serves both referential and pragmatic functions. It is used to label the world and to shape it in particular ways. This paper examines the ways speakers in one rural community in Japan use English-derived lexical items to manage personal impressions and social distance, to negotiate socially sensitive topics, and to express subtle approval or disapproval of the West and Western cultural influences in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Received theories of globalization are mostly spun out of armchair speculation without hard empirical data. They also tend to be Western centered. Based on a considerable amount of empirical, ethnographic data made available by fellow Japan specialists, several concepts have been identified to help account for Japan's globalization. For example, some cultural products tend to maintain their authenticity while others are easily creolized. At times, claimants of 'authenticity' fight a tug of war with creolizers. Cultural similarity is an important but incomplete explanation for the heavier density of Japanization in Northeast Asia, but Japanization, as synonym for Japan's globalization, is going on throughout the world. As Japan 'Japanizes; that is, 'creolizes' the West, this Japanized West is diffused to the rest of Asia in the Asianization process. Most of these and other concepts discussed in this paper are applicable without, or with slight, obvious modifications to an analysis of globalization from other centers such as the United States, Great Britain, or China. The study of Japan's globalization can offer useful ways of understanding globalization elsewhere and thus contribute to the general theory of globalization. [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.

Focuses on the unified local elections in Tokyo, Japan in 1999. Policies of national politicians in relation to Japan's recession-bound economy; Increase in electoral support for Communist Party; Costs of party support.

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]

Reports on proceedings of the 2001 biennial conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia (JSAA), held in Sydney, New South Wales, from June 27 to 30, 2001. Venue of the conference; Number of delegates at the conference; Themes of keynote addresses delivered at the conference; Issues discussed by panelists; Initiatives taken by JSAA2001.

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]

Over the past quarter of a century, research on the connection between empire and environment has flourished worldwide. Most writings, though, have focused on the history of European empire-building or American westward expansion; few have anything significant to say about the Japanese empire. The present essay aims to address this lacuna by exploring interrelated changes to the forest landscape in imperial Japan’s colonies of Korea, Taiwan and Karafuto and in peripheral areas of ‘Japan proper’(naichi). This exploration provides a basis for addressing the questions: How might our images of the Japanese imperial expansion be challenged if we consider its history from the vantage point of forests? What light does the natural and cultural history of forests in the Japanese empire shed on wider debates about imperialism, environmentalism and modernity? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), now in its fifth iteration, has significantly evolved both in its content and as a process. Over the years, successive conferences have placed emphasis on various aspects of African development, and there have also been attempts to make the conference and its spin-offs more inclusive. The fourth TICAD, held in 2008, signalled the most significant effort by the Japanese authorities to improve the effectiveness and impact of the TICAD process. This was against the background of Japan's continued economic troubles and increased domestic pressure to more efficiently use Japan's dwindling aid resources. As a result, while the product of deliberation with African stakeholders, the TICAD IV outcomes reflect many of Japan's domestic and strategic priorities. This essay takes stock of the principal outcomes of TICAD IV and their implications for Japan's economic cooperation with the Southern African region. It does so from the position that Japan's broad economic links with Southern Africa have followed a distinct pattern over the past 10 to 15 years. The essay reviews general tendencies in Japanese aid and investments to Southern Africa against the backdrop of developments in Japan's wider Africa policy. It discusses some of the prominent outflows of TICAD IV and concludes with an assessment of their implications for the subregion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the May 2011 issue of "Japanese Studies" is presented which discusses the reaction of humans to the feel of robots.