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Japan's strong economic performance and its disproportionately low profile in international affairs up to the 1990s led many observers to reasonably conclude that the country's foreign policy, including its aid policy, was organized to advance national economic interests. But Japan responded to new international approaches to aid that ran counter to its own by modifying its approach and seeking to establish itself as a leader in the aid field. The formation of an economic development program for Vietnam presented Japan with a test for its newly adopted strategy. This article examines Japan's new aid approach to the world and its goals through a case study of its involvement in Vietnam's economic development program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a Thai perspective on Japan's vision of an East Asian Community. It argues that Japan has so far earned positive responses from Bangkok on three major initiatives—economic partnership agreements (EPAs), capacity building and financial cooperation in the region. In particular the Japan-Thailand EPA and development partnership for capacity building in Southeast Asia have been well received in Bangkok. Such responses, however, are being pursued from Thailand's own perspective of national interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of the United States in the development of Japan's post-war constitution is well documented, less is known of the role of other Allied nations. This article seeks to narrate the role of Australia in this process, giving particular focus to the debate over provisions to provide an avenue for popular expression of approval of the constitution via referendum and/or a Diet review process. This process was approved as an official Far Eastern Commission (FEC) policy, known as the `Provision for Review'. The debate over this issue, and other elements of the constitutional replacement process, help illuminate the workings of the FEC, the relationship and conflict between the various Allied powers over policy and practice, the role of US unilateralism in the Allied control bodies, and the nuances of Australian policy towards Occupied Japan. Additionally and importantly, it demonstrates the appropriation of idealistic terms, especially the expression of the `will of the people', by both sides of the Allied constitutional debate in order to further their own post-war agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Examines the influences of postmodernism, postcolonialism and cultural studies on Japanese studies in Australia. Origins, definitions and relevance of these intellectual movements for Japan; Confusion over the appropriateness of a contemporary approach to the Japan situation; Alterative approaches in Japanese studies.

Analyzes the reporting of the Tokaimura, Japan, nuclear accident in 'Nyuzuwiku,' the Japanese version of the international periodical 'Newsweek.' Evidence of self-censorship; Following of pattern of mainstream print and broadcast media; Assumption of coordinated nature of censorship in the country.

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

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

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

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

An introduction is presented in which the guest editor discusses topics within the issue including the history of Japanese publishing in the late Tokugawa period, the growth of Tokyo, Japan suburbs, and the commonalities between French and Japanese imperialism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corrections to the articles "The common sense that makes the ‘otaku’: rules for consuming popular culture in contemporary Japan," by Thiam Huat Kam, published in the June 2013 issue of "Japan Forum," and "The Anxieties that Make the ‘Otaku’: Capital and the Common Sense of Consumption in Contemporary Japan," by Thiam Huat Kam, published in the May 2013 issue of "Japanese Studies," are presented.

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

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

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

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

This article explores the social construction of ‘family’ among the followers of Tenrikyō, one of the oldest ‘new religions’ in Japan, in relation to its members’ involvement in the Japanese foster family system. Currently, more than 10% of children who are in foster care nationwide are placed in the households of Tenrikyō followers. The majority of these Tenri foster family households also serve as Tenrikyō branch churches. Despite the explicitly religious nature of these foster homes, the municipalities that have exclusive authority over the placement of children in state care willingly utilize these homes. Locating the ‘normative’ family in Japanese society at large as consisting of married parents with consanguine children, this article argues that, undergirded by Tenrikyō’s religious teaching to create a universal brotherhood, Tenri foster homes provide foster children a ‘middle-ground’ family space in which their sense of belonging is defined not exclusively in terms of blood relations. This Tenri construction of family can facilitate foster children’s relationships with their biological parents, which complements the government’s agenda of ‘family reunification’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which topics within the issue are discussed which includes public welfare, families and social marginalization in Japan.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a series of government policies established public hospitals and regulated the quarantine of patients diagnosed with Hansen’s disease (leprosy). Soon after the first public facilities began receiving patients in 1909, residents of the facilities formed literary coteries and began to write a genre that became popularly referred to as ‘leprosy literature’ up until the 1940s. The genre includes poetry, essays, diaries, short fiction, literary criticism, and children’s work. Focusing on output from the Nagashima Aisei-en hospital, this article offers readings of a sample of children’s work written in the context of thetsuzurikataeducational movement, examining writings by both healthy children with institutionalized parents and children diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. It explores the disruption to the biological family and the ways in which an ideology of familialism at Aisei-en created the institutional family. It then highlights the approaches taken by children to negotiate this ideology so as to create ties to both their biological and institutional families. Tracing the categories of the infected and not-yet-infected child, the article underscores the ways in which children understood their isolation experience and the concept of family within the hospital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The special issue ‘Rethinking Race and Racism from Japanese Experiences’ explores how racism operates in modern Japan. This article contributes to that exploration by examining how racism is situated within a nexus of interrelated forms of discrimination and marginalization. In the article I propose the notion of ‘semi-citizenship’ as one framework which can help us to go beyond unfruitful zero-sum-game visions of marginalization put forward by racist groups such as the Zaitokukai in Japan. Rather than envisioning a dichotomous contrast between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’, the idea of semi-citizenship allows us to think of a range of different sets of social positions stretching towards the idealized vision of the ‘full citizen’. We can then start to consider how such social positions are distributed within modern societies, how they are influenced by factors such as ethnicity, gender and physical and mental attributes, and how the distribution changes over time. This approach offers a common ground on which various kinds of marginalization may be related and understood together, potentially providing a basis for collaborative work to create a more equitable Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on education in Japan typically focuses attention on achievements in the classroom. In this study, I cross the border of scholarly attention tobukatsu(extracurricular school clubs), including their demanding schedules and mandatory activities, to analyze their rich roles in preparing students for future jobs. Refocusing attention from the classroom to the playground blurs hierarchies of activity and suggests a more holistic view of education. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in Japan that includes interviews and participant observation, I locate the value ofbukatsuas generating a specific type of embodied cultural capital that is explicitly requested during the hiring process in the adult work world. Thebukatsuexperience reinforces certain attitudes that correspond with thebu(‘warrior’) part of the oldbunburyōdō(‘the way of both pen and sword’) ideal. This research demonstrates the limits of academic credentials (i.e., test scores) in achieving larger societal goals. What seems to matter increasingly in a shrinking job market are dispositions derived from long-term participation in sports organizations, gained specifically through the institution ofbukatsu. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given the clear convergence of practices of nature across the traditional East-West divide examined in these essays, it is not surprising to learn that the consequences of the particular practice of nature characteristic of industrial capitalism also converged around similar problems such as deforestation, smog, and water pollution, all with their attendant ill effects on health and prosperity. If we look at the key period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and in Japan we also find a vast, shared reaction to and critique of the destructive aspect of the great convergence. Here I will focus on a particular instance of this global critical movement found in anarchism, specifically the thought and practice of Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956). Influenced by Edward Carpenter and the Reclus brothers, Elisée and Paul, Ishikawa did not privilege the newly emerging industrial proletariat as the revolutionary subject as did fellow anarchists Ōsugi Sakae and Kōtoku Shūsui. Instead he stayed in the countryside to focus on the separation of humans from nature as the greatest problem of modern societies, eventually developing a theory of ‘dynamic social aesthetics’ (dōtai shakai bigaku) critical of both the ‘cornucopianism’ of infinite exploitation and later the Japanization of nature during the war. In many ways Ishikawa anticipated the recent neo-Lamarckian ‘epigenetics revolution’ and the current call to consider humanity’s unprecedented ability to intervene in its environment a geological force that defines our age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within Japan, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is understood as a national experience that sets the country apart from nations that have been spared such devastation. A special phrase the Japanese use to describe their country is yuitsu hibaku kokka, 'the only country that has experienced atomic bombing'. This phrase has become a powerful cliché for depicting Japan to a national and international audience. Even though Hiroshima was the experience o f a comparatively small group before it spread to a larger collectivity, its transformation into a collective experience is regarded as a natural outcome, explained by the devastating nature of the event. This perspective, however, does not fully explain why people who have different war experiences unconditionally accept as their own experiences ones which they have not personally suffered. This article aims to clarify the process by which the Hiroshima experience was nationalised, and the period of its nationalisation. It also examines whether this transformation means that Hiroshima has become a 'trauma for everybody'. This is achieved through the application of Jeffrey C. Alexander's work on the transformation of Holocaust memories into a collective trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan’s postwar contribution to international political affairs is often described as limited, primarily due to Japan’s focus on reconstructing and expanding its economy. However, this article argues that since the 1970s, Japan has played an active role in shaping the post-Vietnam War order in Southeast Asia. The Japanese actively sought to address the regional power vacuum that had been left by the diminished American presence and the Sino-Soviet attempts to fill it. To do so, in 1977, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo announced a foreign policy initiative, the so-called Fukuda Doctrine. One of its pillars was Japan’s commitment to promoting coexistence and cooperation among ASEAN nations and their communist Indochinese neighbors. Based on declassified documents and other primary sources, this study demonstrates the strategic nature of the Fukuda Doctrine and sheds light on its political, geopolitical, and security objectives. This includes the realization of a Southeast Asian order in which Japan could maintain a position of influence and, through it, enhance its international political role. The strategic implications of this approach explain why Japan continued to pursue the doctrine despite increased regional and global tension following the 1979 outbreak of the Cambodian conflict and renewed Cold War tensions in the early 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the performance of its celebrated actors is often in the limelight, an equally important, but often unremarked, element of the Noh world is the many amateur performers who engage in the practice as a leisure activity. This article explores the shifts in identity that women say occur through Noh practice. I examine the ‘states of being’ that arise through these performances, and explore how women say Noh practice contributes to their life course development. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine how the process of learning Noh intertwines with the everyday lives of women amateurs, and how the rigours and pleasures of learning Noh take on a particular significance as women grow older. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the beginning of the eighteenth century, rural enthusiasts in the arts took part in production of printed materials, often with help from urban professionals and the publishing industry. Their works in print constitute concrete evidence of the diffusion of the arts from urban centres to the provinces during the Tokugawa period. Taking Echigo province as a case study, this essay explores provincial amateurs’ publishing projects, particularly inhaikaiand Chinese poetry. Materials in this province show a steady development of cultural mechanisms that promoted provincial people's participation in book publishing and printmaking as an objective of their literary activities. This study provides evidence of interplay between the growing print culture and people's desire to publish their works in the context of the development of mass culture in Tokugawa society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study focuses on a comparison of the three most popularsakariba(entertainment districts) in Tokyo of the late 1920s and 1930s to highlight the new role of leisure in everyday life as Japan industrialized and urbanized. The comparison of Asakusa, Ginza and Shinjuku shows that even as Japan became a mass society, leisure practices and patterns became stratified and diversified. This stratification and diversification reflected class, age and cultural tastes. The threesakaribadeveloped distinctive characters and attractions for consumers, raising challenges to mass culture critics’ assumption that the rise of mass culture and commodity culture would lead to homogenization of taste and recreational products and a lack of consumer choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During Japan's High Economic Growth Period (1955‒1973), school-affiliated sports clubs served as important socialization mechanisms creating strong, healthy, and disciplined workers who would later serve Japanese companies. Since the 1980s, however, there have been new approaches in the management of companies and sports teams in Japan, especially in terms of a new performance-based hierarchy that places the onus on individuals to think independently and be creative on the court or in the cubicle. While sports clubs continue to habituate members into a particular vocabulary that encourages effort, discipline, and teamwork – language that will continue to be used after they join corporate Japan – changing economic landscapes have ushered in the introduction of new coaching pedagogies to Japanese sports, and therefore new expectations for Japanese athletes. These athletic expectations happen to mirror new expectations of young Japanese workers. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with a university basketball club, this article demonstrates that while sports continue to be perceived as educational tools that build ‘team-players’ to serve companies, they are today being asked to cultivate independent, innovative, and flexible company employees as well; and reconciling these two rather conflicting goals has proved to be easier said than done. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article highlights the important contribution made by Kamichika Ichiko to the interwar publishing scene by providing an overview of the literary journalFujin Bungeilaunched by her and an analysis of three stories it published from leading female writers of the era, Matsuda Tokiko, Hirabayashi Eiko and Asai Hanako.Fujin Bungeiwas a rare oppositional voice within the media that questioned the narrow nationalism sanctioned and promoted by the Japanese state when others had fallen silent or been silenced. Furthermore, its focus on writing by women provided a forum for passionate and provocative works which shed new light on the downfall of the Proletarian Literature Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What keeps learners of Japanese going in formal study? In Australia, few continue to an advanced level of the language, despite large numbers of learners. This study found that compared to discontinuers, continuers showed much higher levels of motivation and integrative orientation, and their attitudes towards learning were much more positive. They showed greater autonomous learning, and engaged in more self-initiated activities outside the classroom. In interviews, advanced learners explained the paths that enabled them to continue, yet indicated that university policies affect continuation through timetable and study program restrictions. The predominant reason to continue was the hope to travel to Japan, but an interest in Japanese culture and in Japanese popular culture (J-pop) products (e.g., anime, manga) also was prominent. The enjoyment of J-pop was implicated at least partially in both retention and attrition in Japanese. It provides the motivation to learn Japanese, and in a cyclical fashion, the learning of Japanese itself is consumed so as to further consume J-pop. It may also be the case that once appetites for language consumption are satisfied, some learners could abandon formal study of Japanese at a relatively early stage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is the ‘1960s' a useful concept for understanding postwar Japanese history and, if so, what kinds of changes resulted and how might we chronologize the period? This article proposes the idea of a ‘long environmental sixties’ in Japan stretching from around 1959 to 1973. The article argues that this period marked important milestones in environmental protest, public opinion, and legislation. By the early 1970s Japan had addressed many of its most pressing industrial pollution problems, in the process placating protest, compensating victims, and establishing an environmental leviathan staffed by hundreds of bureaucrats nationwide. Japan's sixties were a moment of social upheaval, transformation, and new aspirations but, as this article shows, the country's long environmental sixties bequeathed a complex legacy, combining new forms of civic engagement with administrative programs and corporate initiatives to carefully manage the human–environment nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Japanese and Chinese governmental initiatives in Africa since the 1990s have cast a spotlight on the nature of their respective interests and objectives on the continent. In particular, the speed with which China has advanced in Africa has led to observations in the English-language academic literature and media that China and Japan are engaged in a rivalry for resources, power and influence in Africa, and that Japan has been working hard to ‘catch up’ with China. This article questions this ‘strategic rivalry’ view by examining Japanese and Chinese academic studies of each other's activities in Africa and outlining the main themes of Japan's China-in-Africa discourse, and China's Japan-in-Africa discourse. It suggests that there appears to be less interest and anxiety in Japan about China's activities in Africa than some assessments infer, and that, by contrast, China's Japan-in-Africa discourse shows a greater interest in, and in some cases suspicions of, Japan's objectives in Africa. The article also discusses the seemingly distant prospects for cooperation between China and Japan in Africa, in light of these respective discourses, while considering the tentative steps towards coordination in the form of such initiatives as the ‘Trilateral Consultation’ between China, Japan and South Korea and the development of new academic networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At TICAD (Tokyo International Conference on African Development) IV in 2008 Japan began to approach the TICAD process with a stronger focus on its own economic interests rather than as a consultative forum on development cooperation. The Japanese business community had started to explore the economic opportunities available in Africa around 2006, with the result that more Japanese firms were expanding into the region. Consequently, the 2008 TICAD summit was designed to suggest, if not emphasise, Japan's national interest in the context of the African development process. In that sense TICAD IV was the first TICAD that the Japanese private sector took active part in; this resulted in TICAD IV gaining wider media coverage in Japan. Effectively, the significance of Africa for Japan has undergone a historical change, but to some extent this is a product of the recent role of China in Africa's economic development and indeed of the state of relations between China and Japan. TICAD IV may also be seen as an epoch-making event for Japanese ODA policy, which was changing under the new circumstances. Japanese overseas development aid policy is now in transformation and TICAD V, expected in 2013, will follow the line surveyed at the last summit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented which discusses the articles within the issue on the theme of the economic relations between Japan and Africa, with heavy reference to the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) held in Tokyo, Japan since 1993.

This article deals with the commercial aspect of midwifery in Japan since the Meiji period. In focusing on the important yet often neglected aspect of the history of medically trained midwives, it aims to complement existing scholarship that tends to emphasize the role of midwives in the construction of the modern Japanese state. The article analyzes and contextualizes health-related advertisements published in San'iku shimbun, a newspaper aimed at medically trained midwives. These advertisements encouraged midwives to participate in commercial activities involving the sale and promotion of health commodities. Representations of midwives in the advertisements point towards an important aspect in the professional reality of midwifery: making a living. But the advertisers also implicitly exploited the role ascribed to midwives, as agents of health and hygiene in the context of the modernizing state. Thus the social function of medically trained midwives was informed both by their officially endorsed role in the state's vision of creating healthy citizens and the reality of their position in the medical marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores Japan's initiatives toward the development discourse on Africa through the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), and specifically in regards to a concept that is increasingly becoming a core tenet of the TICAD, the ‘national ownership’ of development. The article examines the literature on development ownership before concentrating more specifically on the Japanese responses to the discourse. The analysis explores Japan's emphasis on the principle of self-help in national development and suggests that the conflation of self-help and ownership in the Japanese discourse of development needs to be disentangled for clarity as the two concepts are not the same. Generally the article endeavours to bring into perspective Japan's attempts to stitch itself more forcefully into the fabric of the discourse on African development with the objective of contributing a more nuanced approach to the global initiative to finding a solution to Africa's development problematic. It is suggested that in doing so Japan is transposing its understanding of development, along with its belief in the state-centric approach to economic growth onto Africa. How the African policymakers have responded to the concept of ‘ownership’ in the context of TICAD is also assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2008 Japan hosted the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) and the Group of Eight (G8) Summit. This coincidence provided a high-profile diplomatic opportunity within both Japan's relations with Africa and its summit diplomacy to shape regional and global agendas respectively and, to these ends, the Japanese government sought to connect the two international meetings. While Japan maintained its commitment to international society by fostering South–South dialogue and high-level contact between the G8 and Africa through these forums, the linkage of the two 2008 events was dominated by Japanese efforts to gain African endorsement for its ‘Cool Earth 50’ policy on global climate change. In the event, African leaders resisted Japan's efforts to place priority on discussion of climate change. The government also hoped that the conjunction of the two meetings would improve perceptions of, and interest in, Africa among the Japanese public, but evidence suggests little was achieved in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]