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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]

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]

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]

How is the concept of internationalisation (kokusaika) operationalised by Japanese universities? I address this question by examining one university's engagement with the residents of its international student accommodation facility, ‘Global House’. I argue that the distinctive combination of benevolence and authoritarianism characterising the university's management of Global House, a combination termed ‘paternalism’ in this article, can be understood by reference to the obligations assumed by the university as part of its internationalisation agenda. International student presence must be managed strategically because such students are perceived by their universities as both assets and liabilities, and both constituents and externalities. An appreciation of these competing pressures helps to demystify paternalist approaches to international student management observed in Global House. Paternalism appears at first glance to be a dysfunction of the internationalisation process, but it is better understood as an organisational context for the performance thereof. I use this analysis to argue the need to build a stronger conception of the university as a principal protagonist in, rather than simply an object of, internationalisation. This discussion also highlights the importance of developing alternative accounts of internationalisation—ones that are focused more on contextualised descriptions than prescriptive definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I carry out a close reading of Nakamoto Takako's book, My Diary of the Anpo Struggle (1963). Nakamoto was a writer and activist who was active in leftwing politics, the labour movement and the proletarian literature movement in the 1920s and 1930s and returned to the movement after 1945. Her published diary recounts her participation in the struggle against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and her other political activities. The book is a mixture of personal memory and political history and provides us with a distinctive ‘map’ of one person's emotional geography of Tokyo. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I read the public space and streetscapes of early-Shōwa Tokyo through the lens of proletarian writers. I use the conceptual tools provided by cultural geographers, in particular the concept of emotional geography. Activists of the late 1920s co-opted the streets to distribute leaflets and engage in other forms of agitation. Through their actions they attempted to reinscribe the meaning of the streets, extending even to the ceremonial plazas laid out to showcase imperial power. The risks and exhilarations of such activity are vividly recounted in works including Tokunaga Sunao's ‘The Sunless Street', Sata Ineko's poem ‘Leafleting', and Kobayashi Takiji's posthumously published novella, ‘The Life of a Party Member'. Takiji's novella details the dangerous cat-and-mouse game underground activists played as they worked on behalf of the illegal Communist Party and dodged the surveillance of the secret police. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I consider recent homeless activism in Tokyo's Miyashita Park, including the celebration of ‘vacant lots’ (akichi), and what this can tell us about notions of publicness in Japan. We can provide further depth to the discussion of publicness by situating recent activism in the context of the work of historians such as Amino Yoshihiko and Higashijima Makoto and their recovery of indigenous Japanese conceptions of ‘publicness’ and ‘the public sphere’. The implications of formulations of ‘the public’ based around terms such as ōyake/kō and alternatives including muen are examined, as well as meanings historically ascribed to the Zen concept of ‘lakes and rivers’ (gōko/kōko). I also trace Japanese responses to classical Western notions of the public sphere, as well as some challenges to them in Western scholarship, including the notion of ‘counterpublics’. Whereas in Western modernity the bracketing of social inequalities was considered a prerequisite for the deliberative function of the public sphere, in premodern and early modern Japan there were spaces which allowed for the bracketing of differences even where the function of deliberation was not emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When narrated by children, social issues achieve new emotional meanings. A prime example of such a narration is the transmedia ‘homeless student’ phenomenon. The 2007 autobiographical novel Hōmuresu chūgakusei (Homeless Junior High School Student) by comedian Tamura Hiroshi sold millions of copies and was adapted into television drama, film, manga, children's books and spoofs. Tamura's brother Ken'ichi retold the story in Hōmuresu daigakusei (Homeless University Student), also televised. The Tamuras make visible the homeless who are often overlooked. Yet their goal is not to promote awareness of diverse homelessness during economic recession but instead to inspire readers and make them appreciate the value of home. I read Homeless Junior High School Student alongside texts that present urban homelessness as an antidote to excesses of middle-class society. I question the impact of these uplifting accounts on public perceptions of poverty. I argue that Homeless Junior High School Student and related texts can be read as a dominant strand of popular culture that promotes the family as the backbone of Japan and the sole unit of care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understandings of urban space in Tokyo underwent two significant revisions in the 1990s, focused on the spaces of the subway and the street. These revisions occurred around the 1995 subway sarin gas incident and in the revival of street protest in new social movements. The article brings together the two spaces by discussing how one group of sarin incident victims staged a commemorative event in 2005 – the Memorial Walking Care – to re-engage with underground sites of traumatic memory by walking a Underground route above them along the streets. It draws on the recognition in Murakami Haruki's Underground of a violence in Japanese society figuratively and literally lurking beneath the feet; and on sociologist Mōri Yoshitaka's theorisation of the street as a potential site for new oppositional politics. Situating the event within the frames of trauma theory and performance studies, I read the Memorial Walking Care as both traumatic repetition of loss and potential working through of trauma. The underground and the street act as spatial and conceptual markers for the difference between these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ōuchida Keiya's Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza, 1970), a film from the Japanese underground cinema movement, documents the gathering of ‘folk guerrillas’ (activists and student protestors) at the underground plaza linking the west and east exits of the vast Shinjuku railway station in February 1969. This essay analyses their protests by highlighting their apparent search for a new performative praxis, amidst evidence of complicated broken threads, misplaced emotions and disconnections between politics and action. Through occupying and restoring other uses of the space, I argue that the protestors desired to remake the city as a forum for ideological confrontation and revolutionary aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article illustrates the contemporary characteristics of the Japanese community in South-East Queensland, Australia. Although traditional migration studies reveal a common tendency for immigrants to congregate and form their own ethnic niche in cities, the contemporary Japanese settlement in South-East Queensland has unique features, as well as theoretical implications for migration study. This ethnic community can be characterized by the absence of a geographic point, what we could call a ‘psychological centre’. Using a term developed by Appadurai and García Canclini, the article describes it as a ‘de-territorialized community’ where migrant networks are established and maintained on an individual basis rather than through the construction of a centralized ethnic urban space and traditional ethnic Japanese community organization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like other Allied powers in Asia, the Netherlands Indies government embarked on the trial of Japanese military personnel accused of war crimes during the occupation of the Indonesian archipelago. Although calls for clemency towards convicted war criminals were heard as early as 1947, the Dutch authorities resisted the suggestion that prisoners be released or repatriated. Many Dutch residents of the former colony remained bitter about Japanese crimes during the occupation. They also blamed Japanese policies for the insurgent Republic of Indonesia, which at times after its independence declaration in August 1945 controlled large parts of the archipelago. Whereas the rise of communist insurgency in other parts of Southeast Asia, and the broader context of the Cold War, rapidly diminished in those regions the importance of keeping war criminals imprisoned, the Dutch saw their war against the Republic as a continuation of the war against Japan and saw the continued detention of war criminals as essential. When military, diplomatic and political weakness forced the Dutch to recognize Indonesian independence in December 1949, one of their last acts was to arrange the transfer of the remaining imprisoned war criminals to Sugamo Prison in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The great majority of Japanese war criminals served part or all of their sentences in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, either because they had been tried in Japan, or after repatriation from overseas. Once convicted, they tended to be invisible in historical accounts of the post-war period, but in fact they were not cut off from Japanese society or politics in the 1950s. Rather, Sugamo's inmates worked hard to win public sympathy, also exerting considerable pressure on the government in an attempt to hasten their own release and to have Japanese prisoners repatriated from overseas gaols. The early 1950s were crucial, not least because the 1952 peace treaty stipulated that the countries that had originally prosecuted them retained the right to decide on prisoners' fates even after Japan regained its sovereignty. Moreover, convicted war criminals were increasingly concentrated in Sugamo, allowing many opportunities for political activity and other campaigning. Though the last war criminals were not freed until 1958, prisoners' activities in the early 1950s played an important part in changing the terms in which discussion of war criminals took place and thus in making it more and more difficult for foreign governments to maintain their original stance on war criminals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1953, the Australian government repatriated convicted Japanese war criminals. These were the last war criminals held by the wartime allies to be returned to Japan. The Australian government's decision to repatriate war criminals was made after a complex series of negotiations with other wartime allies and within the government itself. At play was the need to balance domestic opinion and the interests of the Australian government with a desire to have similar policies on war criminals to those of key allies such as the United States. Moreover, after 1952, Japan and Australia entered a new era of diplomatic and economic relations, far removed from the immediate postwar years. Official sources reveal that the Australian government aimed to strike a balance between maintaining a tough stance on Japanese war criminals and not hampering the emerging new era of foreign relations with Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a key part of contemporary Japanese mass visual culture, manga has increasingly been used to shape popular perceptions of history. In recent years, there has been a great deal of discussion surrounding politically conservative and revisionist manga that distort the military's actions during Japan's wars throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In regard to the issue of enforced military prostitution, victims, activists, and scholars have found the depiction of so-called 'comfort women' as willing prostitutes or participants to be extremely offensive. Compared to these revisionist works, there are other artists who look to address and faithfully represent and depict the military prostitution issue in manga. Unlike their revisionist counterparts, these artists grapple with the inherent sensitivities of such an issue and struggle with ways to communicate the brutality of gendered violence. These works illustrate important similarities and differences in how artists structure and frame historical narratives in manga. More importantly, the works raise questions about the impossibility of adequately conveying the experiences of soldiers and victims during the war. They also serve as a reminder to the diversity of representations in contemporary Japanese discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Philippines was one of the last of the Allied nations to execute Japanese war criminals, it was also one of the first to allow for their repatriation and pardon. This article examines the period between the last execution of Japanese war criminals in January 1951 and the pardon of the remaining criminals in December 1953, in the context of international negotiations regarding the Philippines' position in the lead up to the San Francisco Peace Treaty and beyond. It traces the development and the strategies of the movement for the repatriation of war criminals in Japan. It argues that the repatriation of war criminals from the Philippines (and elsewhere) became an important domestic political issue in Japan in the period between 1951 and 1953, and that the extent of this domestic pressure was also recognised in the Philippines. In both countries, the repatriation of war criminals was linked in public discourse with progress on the negotiation of reparations, the last obstacle to the resumption of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese popular music as embedded in television commercials is taken as a point of departure for understanding consumer aesthetics and practices, and how music and image can touch - or, create a lasting impression on - an audience. This phenomenon, called the tai-appu (tie-up), or an alignment between artists and products, results in an imeji songu (image song). These contracts between manufacturers and artist have been ubiquitous in the Japanese media landscape since the early 1980s. While tie-ups can be considered a kind of celebrity endorsement, common in many consumer cultures, they play a more prominent role in Japanese popular culture, edging out MTV-style videos as the primary method that artists use to promote their music. The success of these mini-videos can be attributed to the tie-ups' multisensory impact (with multiple images, text and sound in movement) and their overall audience accessibility. Understanding these compressed media messages is important due to recent concern about the way advertising invades, rather than enriches, the media landscape. Advertising analyses contribute to our understanding of how a society's economy and culture are inter-related; tie-ups give us particular insight into the connections between culture (music and image), economy (product popularity and sales figures) and society (audience formation and reception), and highlight the importance of sensory experience in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public signs (both advertising and informational) are analyzed here as narrative. This allows us to see the parallels between abbreviated texts in public spaces and extended discourse that has a long history of analysis. It also reveals parallels between literary and linguistic treatment of discourse. Included in the analysis is a description of how reference and indexicality function in the discourse we see all around us on what might be called 'the linguistic landscape', as well as how point of view operations, focalization, and voice are manipulated to authors' specific ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language standardization lies at the heart of Japanese modernity. And numerous aspects of language development intended to fit the modern Japanese state intersect to regiment the linguistic imaginary regarding women's speech. Focus on Yamanote Tokyo-based joseigo ('women's language'), Standard Japanese and certain urban Kansai dialects in popular text and televisual representations of romantic heroines in geographically and linguistically peripheral areas of Japan has been documented, but has left the issue of linguistic masculinity and the romantic hero unexplored. The relation of male speakers to hyōjungo was assumed and 'masculine' speaking practices as broadcast in public space have received little attention despite a popular understanding that certain forms (e.g., ore 'I', and assertive sentence final particle zo) are 'masculine' in effect. Here, we examine images of manly men in contemporary romantic representations set in dialect-speaking areas to illustrate the linkages between the romantic hero and the use of Standard Japanese masculine forms and to offer insight into the underexplored set of possibilities for male speakers circulated in popular media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its premise the conceptualisation of the Internet as a virtual public space, this article focuses on the manner in which language play is manifested through the manipulation of linguistic (and particularly orthographic) conventions in informal Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and in cell phone emails in Japan. The flexibility of the Japanese writing system, with its three official scripts often also combined with Arabic numerals and the Roman alphabet, lends itself very well to ludic use of orthography to create a desired effect. Users therefore play with standard orthographic conventions in cyberspace to an extent not possible for single alphabet users, subverting norms in order to create eye-catching effects which strengthen in-group solidarity through play and in some cases act as markers of subcultural identities. From time to time it is suggested that innovative use of orthography in cyberspace is a product of new electronic technologies. I argue, however, that language play of this kind, far from being new to Japan, builds on an already existing tradition of orthographic creativity facilitated by the nature of the writing system, the only real difference being that the practice has now moved into the much wider public arena of cyberspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years, victims of Japanese wartime enforced labour have published or contributed to collections of memoirs and testimonies. These testimonies and the subsequent historical analyses by researchers since the early 1960s have often been framed against contemporaneous issues. What started out as a way to help stir activism and a historical consciousness among resident Koreans in Japan has morphed into a struggle over textbooks and a fight against historical revisionism. This article identifies some of the historical and methodological issues present in constructing a historical discourse of enforced Korean labour that began in 1939. It reassesses the politicised meaning of the phrase kyōsei renkō (forced recruitment) and argues that both researchers, who acknowledge the wartime system of enforced labour, and revisionists, who deny it, have cogent arguments. These arguments, however, are often narrow in scope and fail to take into account testimonies that present a more complex picture of the period and system in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Japanese popular culture has received much attention both inside and outside the academy. Its success overseas has contributed to theories of transnational cultural flow, 'soft power' and 'Gross National Cool'. At the same time, public opinion of fans, both in Japan and overseas, remains low. This article attempts to rescue fandom from its current association with social ostracism, placing it instead in a logical structure of a historical consumer culture in Japan and in the West. Fandom can be considered a rational consumer strategy, rather than a deviant psychological attribute, when considered within the hyper-developed context of a media-saturated, late-capitalist consumer society. Fandom, when viewed from this perspective, can be distinguished from pathological behaviour and focuses on pleasure, the pursuit of social capital, and individualised identity building, especially in a society where traditional corporate groups such as the family or the workplace no longer offer the same attraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Japanese literature on the current phenomenon of low fertility in Japan, which persists despite the understanding shared by most Japanese that children are valued. By reviewing existing research on low fertility in Japan, the article examines the emergence of low fertility and introduces a new perspective that links the phenomenon to the larger context of social change in Japan. Analysis of the literature reveals that low fertility is paradoxically accompanied by a persistent or enduring desire to have children, as stated by a majority of interviewees. This paradox between desire and behaviour signifies social change that demonstrates both discontinuity and continuity of marriage- and family-related practices and processes in Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key role of temporary help agencies in the expansion of the external market for labor in Japan is the subject of this article. As a result of deregulatory changes in and after 1999 in Japan, the temporary help industry has impacted on changes in firms' reliance on external labor. Based on a survey of and interviews at temporary agency firms, we found considerable heterogeneity among THAs. One segment of large agencies exhibited a strong market orientation in supplying business services, while two other segments of THAs were continuing, to varying degrees, to draw their business from either capital-related or parent companies within their groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greater Osaka, a hub of commerce and industrial production during the interwar period, was the site for rapid development of diaspora communities, whose significant contribution to the regional music-culture has been little documented. This article describes three contexts for music-making among the largest ethnic minorities, the Koreans and Okinawans, on the basis of primary textual, oral and musical sources, as well as an emerging body of writings on Okinawan music in Osaka. People from Korea and Okinawa were involved in the broader musical life of the metropolis in diverse ways, as professional performers, and as producers and consumers of recordings. The reception of such 'foreign' music and musicians reflected the status accorded them in the colonial system and its underlying racial ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the specific means by which Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408) came to dominate the most elite circles of traditional authority provides us with important clues about the nature of warrior ascendancy in premodern Japan. Scholars have considered uses of religious symbolism, various kinds of artistic patronage, and, of course, violent coercion. This essay seeks to introduce the significance of location as yet another means by which warriors, Yoshimitsu in particular, sought to elevate their status. There was a clear relationship between location and status in premodern Kyoto and Yoshimitsu carefully exploited it for the sake of advancing his political career. How plots of land had been used in the past and who had used them appear to have contributed to notions about a site's 'locational pedigree'. Acquiring and occupying sites that possess elite locational pedigree enabled Yoshimitsu to emulate outstanding historical figures and, in so doing, elevate his own status. In terms of its potential to empower, location, it is argued, might well be categorized along with ceremony, language, and architecture as a key performative element that was employed and deployed in premodern Japan to authenticate social standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This biographical sketch of Tokugawa Ieyasu aims to construct a cultural profile of the man primarily through a reading of a portrait of him done (after his death) by Kanō Tan'yu, 'Dream Portrait of the Tōshōgu Deity'. The depiction shows his grounding in classical Chinese texts, his collection of Chinese ceramics and other objects, his large collection of swords, and his enduring interest in falconry. Each of these is investigated as a means to illuminating the social networks of patronage and cultural practices through which he established and maintained the power of his clan. These perspectives reveal Ieyasu as a representative sixteenth-century warrior, a product of the particular social and political conditions of his time, whose eventual apotheosis was an ideal which shaped the educations and aspirations of millions of samurai throughout the ensuing Edo period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ogyu Sorai's eighteenth-century theory of rituals pushed to an unsettling conclusion the assumption made popular by many contemporary authors that internalization of social norms is better achieved through the subtle control of bodies and gestures than through coercion, threats or argumentation. Because Sorai's rituals aimed at shaping in everyday life, according to pre-determined status, body gestures, utterances, and all the objects surrounding the body, from clothes to houses, furniture and conveyances, they would have transformed life into a performance of a scripted play. They would also have represented the ideal and absolute form of authority, following Hannah Arendt's famous definition of the concept as that which elicits obedience or conformity without need for coercion or argument. The fluidity inherent in the urban life of Tokugawa Japan, however, made sure that Sorai's utopia would remain just that - and probably explains why Arendt found authority so elusive in our modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guns were surprisingly common in the villages of Tokugawa Japan. This article examines the 'social life' of firearms, focusing particularly on the hinterland of Edo. It traces the evolution of institutions governing peasants' possession of guns and examines prevailing conceptions of the uses of firearms. Building on the work of Tsukamoto Manabu, it argues that for much of the period guns were perceived to be farm implements rather than weapons per se: they were used to frighten or kill animals that damaged crops but not in conflicts among people. Starting in the 1840s, however, guns came to acquire an unequivocal character as weapons. This transformation came in response to anxiety over the proliferation of masterless samurai, unregistered commoners, and other disorderly elements, whose activities were seen as undermining the fabric of rural society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents how Japan's governing elites confronted the enormous tasks of restoring order over the disaster area of the Great Kantō Earthquake and providing relief and recovery assistance to approximately two million people. It also explores how and why numerous commentators evoked the imagery of war in constructing the 1923 catastrophe. They employed comparisons to war not only to describe the totality of destruction meted out by the earthquake and fires, but also to communicate the commitment that they believed the people of Japan would have to make to expedite recovery, rebuild the capital, and reconstruct the nation. Such an effort, many concluded, would require the mobilized efforts of all Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A range of issues confronted government officials in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake, but almost immediately they began efforts to resume education. This article examines how educators overcame numerous challenges in order to recommence primary school education and return children to makeshift classrooms in the ruins of Tokyo. Education was viewed as an important means to help restore a sense of normality in the lives of displaced school children at this time of extraordinary upheaval. Educators were concerned not only with the material reconstruction and recovery of schools, but also the physical and mental recovery of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article extends existing analyses of communication networks in late Tokugawa Japan; it undertakes a case study of the uses a member of the rural elite made of these new opportunities to maintain a network of personal contacts across significant distances. Suzuki Bokushi lived in Echigo Province and is known for his contribution to the writing of Hokuetsu seppu, a well-known account of the region. The personal network he cultivated comprised practitioners of a wide range of arts and collectors of their work, in both Edo and numerous provincial locations. Bokushi himself was a haikai poet and actively involved in the hisseki (holograph) collection boom which increasingly linked amateurs and professionals from the end of the 1700s. Examination of the evidence reveals an ongoing relaxation of the social divisions that were based in part on distance between centre and periphery in Edo period life. The establishment and consolidation of hikyaku commercial courier services linking Echigo with Edo between the late 1810s and early 1830s made a major contribution to that relaxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australia-Japan Working Holiday Agreement of 1980 represented a leap of faith on the part of both governments in their own people. Unprecedented for Japan, and breaking with Anglophone cultural stereotypes for Australia, neither government could have objectively predicted the enormous success of the agreement, or that it would become a model for many more such agreements. Both governments counted on recognition developing of the cultural benefits of the agreement. Neither could have foreseen that the agreement would eventually have significant labour market effects, mainly positive, though different, in Australia and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of growing interest in the formation of Okinawan identity, little attention has yet been paid to the internal divisions and diversity within the Ryukyu Islands, or to the pre-war history of Okinawa. This article focuses on the Yaeyama archipelago of the southern end of Okinawa prefecture. It explores the way the region shaped its own Yaeyama identity in the early twentieth century by developing Yaeyama Studies separate from Okinawa Studies. The article demonstrates how the Ryukyu Islands have accommodated diverse intellectual movements and how Yaeyama islanders constructed their regional identity as a local subject of Japan rather than as a marginal subject of the Ryukyu Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sakuma Shōzan (1811-1864), a late Edo scholar, urged shogunal authorities to adopt Western science and technology, which he represented as consistent with the Confucian epistemological framework, in particular the rationalist metaphysics of the Zhu Xi school. His ideas are commonly credited as the basis for the key Meiji slogan wakon yōsai, but this article argues against that interpretation, discussing important differences in the way Sakuma conceived the 'national realm'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human trafficking is a worldwide problem that international organisations have attempted to address since the early part of the twentieth century. Today it is a lucrative worldwide business operated by international criminal organisations that generates billions of dollars whilst bringing misery and degradation to the victims. Using a legal thematic this article examines human trafficking for sexual exploitation in Japan. It asks if Japan's domestic legal framework adequately addresses the issue and whether Japan is fulfilling its international legal obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tokyo claims that peace-building has become a key pillar in its foreign policy. A litmus test of this rhetoric is Japan's peace-building efforts in conflict-ridden Mindanao. Japan's partnership with Malaysia, Libya and Brunei (all Organization of Islamic Conference members) to address the conflict between the government of the Republic of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is significant because it is a diplomatic milestone beyond the frameworks of the US - Japan Alliance and the United Nations. If Japan were to succeed in Mindanao, peace-building might well be a promising 'third path' in its international relations - beyond an inward-looking 'one-country' pacifism or over-dependence on its US ally for its foreign policy direction. Interviews with serving diplomats and other key players are used to offer additional insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's self-defining foreign policy role has been evolving on the basis of alliance with the United States since 1945. The author argues that depending on the changing terms of alliance with the United States, Japan has been adjusting its role roughly every 15 years: domestic contestation over alliance (1945 - 1960), free rider or Yoshida doctrine in practice (1960 - 1975), systemic supporter (1975 - 1990), global civilian power (1990 - 2005) and global ordinary power (2005 - 2020). In this article the author argues that the three key conditions for global hegemony, military, currency and demographic hegemony, will be met by the United States to varying degrees until the second quarter of this century. The author speculates that Japan's foreign policy role will evolve on the assumption of a continuing United States leadership role, albeit with far more dependence on market conditions and power calculations abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having maintained a low-key relationship since early postwar, Japan today shows increasing interest in India as a rising economic and regional power. The two nations are now developing ties in many areas consequent with India's ascent, most importantly in politico-strategic matters. This strategic development is intriguing as Tokyo was one of the most critical voices condemning New Delhi's decision to conduct nuclear testing in 1998, when the relationship reached its nadir. So why this strategic repositioning and why now? This article explores Japan's move towards India as an attempt to balance and bandwagon strategically. Japan's strategic thinking now recognises India as potential balance for Japan against China while Japan bandwagons with the United States in response to both India and China as rising Asian powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural trade policy is a branch of Japanese trade policy where domestic political considerations have traditionally held sway. Recent trends, however, suggest that Japanese policy on Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), including the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Australia, is being directly influenced by the government's foreign policy goals. Despite Australia's standing as a major agricultural exporter that potentially threatens Japan's highly protected agricultural sector, the Koizumi and Abe administrations attached higher priority to several important foreign policy ambitions in agreeing to begin negotiations on an FTA with Australia. These goals were: exercising economic and trade leadership and influence in the Asia-Pacific region, enhancing political relations with long-standing trade partners, and ensuring energy and resource security. Sino-Japanese competition figured as a significant factor in shaping all these objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Gulf War syndrome', which put Japan's 'comprehensive security' in a dilemma, triggered a reconsideration of Japan's overall security policy. The heated arguments centring on Japan's 'international contribution' during the first Gulf War (1990-91) eventually led to the conception of 'human security'. It is against this new security policy that Japan addressed the East Timor issue (1999). Notably unlike mainstream liberal democratic institution building, which emphasizes the importance of the growth of democratic traditions and the rule of law, Japan's policy of human security is centred on capacity-building and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the uneasy juxtaposition between the user access and user reality of 'barrier-free design' (bariafurii desain) in urban Japan. It argues that the growing number of accessibility features in Japanese public spaces has not necessarily resulted in a 'barrier-free' society. While these visible reminders raise public awareness about the difficulties physical and intellectual disabilities present to individuals, people with disabilities and their carers still live in physically narrowed spaces, primarily because of the reality of the urban landscape and pressure from the number of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chu, usually translated as loyalty, is supposed to have been the paramount virtue of samurai, inspiring them to the selfless service of their daimyo. Analyzing the understandings of this notion among samurai thinkers of seventeenth and eighteenth century Japan, this article stresses that, far from there being one understanding of chu, many interpretations were competing with each other; it examines the various dynamics that can explain this fragmentation. One, opening the possibility of higher values, was the necessity of justifying the demands of chu. Another was the competition from other moral notions, such as the concern for one's reputation. The problems that chu inevitably encountered in practice - the dilemma of conflicting loyalties, or the rivalry from non moral goods like wealth and power - were also powerful factors. Yet another dynamic was the weakening of the private feudal bonds and the subsequent recognition of the contractual nature of many social relationships. The cumulative effect of those dynamics explains that in the end chu could even become an object of incomprehension or derision. Ultimately chu only survived because it was enlisted to construct a relationship that could withstand any test, being, quite unlike that of samurai and daimyo, purely imaginary and empty: that between the Emperor and his subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An indication of the cultural effects of the recession and the end of the Cold War in Japan during the 1990s is the development of the thought of Karatani Kojin. The author traces this development, focusing on the shift from an emphasis on a 'lack of exteriority' in early texts to the idea of 'transcritique' in his recent works. The aim is to elucidate what occasions the shift in his thinking and to what degree the concern with exteriority is retained in the notion of transcritique. The author pays particular attention to Karatani's discussion of the 'centreless' shape of Japanese power and the possibilities of resistance it offers. He also uses the concept of trauma in order to locate Karatani's philosophy in relation to two competing ideas of 'recovery' in contemporary Japan, one nursed by the recession in the 1990s and another by the defeat of the protest movements of the 1960s. The notion of transcritique, the author suggests, is Karatani's response to the wave of neoliberal globalization after the end of the Cold War and the need to think through the implications of this process for the problem of how to counteract 'centreless' power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces the Japanese political cartoons that satirized Japan–Korea relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By situating the cartoons within the development of print media and by re-presenting the popular gaze on Korea in particular and Asia in general, this essay argues that cartoon journalism made an artistic discovery in which equivalence between imperialist relations and everyday life was created. By the time of the annexation of Korea in 1910, it was widely believed in Japan that ‘pre-modern’ Korea must be absorbed into the control of ‘modern’ Japan. Setting the firm ground for the state to carry out imperialist projects, such popular consensus furnished continuous attention and participation on empire-building from Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Singapore is the very first it has forged with any country. Tokyo has at least two motivations: to avoid losing out to Beijing strategically and economically as the Chinese seek to forge an FTA with the Southeast Asian countries, and using Singapore (which lacks an agricultural sector) as the thin end of the wedge to push for FTAs with other countries. Japanese and Chinese competition to clinch and implement FTAs in Southeast Asia may well lead to a nascent East Asian regionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reading of Nojima Yasuzō's nudes explores the relationship between aesthetic form and cultural context in works of pictorialist photography that have attained exalted status in Japan. It argues that Nojima's unconventionally ‘straight’ and unidealized images of women of more ‘ordinary’ appearance exoticize the supposed rawness and vitality of the lower class Japanese woman in a manner consistent with broader primitivist fantasies in circulation in Taishō and early Shōwa society. The article shows that Nojima's formal and intellectual influences included modernist yōga , French Impressionist and Postimpressionist art, and mingei , but argues that these only served as starting points in the invention of a subject and visual style that are unique in pre-1945 art photography. Nojima's unusual—and somewhat ambiguous—emphasis upon the subjectivity of the ‘nude’ sitter is given particular attention in the analysis. It concludes by comparing this approach to that of contemporary Japanese photographer Araki Nobuyoshi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses that the concept of East Asian Community (EAC) which serves as a platform for the cooperation and contention between Japan and China. The two countries had betterment towards relations and interest in the region. Although China sees a positive attributes towards the proposal of Japan's EAC, it had doubted that the country use this as strategy hedging against China. The worsening relations between the two countries will be a challenge in building and restoring cooperation.

Recent writing in English shows a range of new approaches to and interpretations of Japanese colonialism between 1931 and 1945. Earlier bodies of work tended to focus on the aims, strategies and structures of Japanese rule throughout the empire, especially the formal empire. Newer studies have not abandoned these concerns, especially in relation to geographical areas, notably Manchuria, that have only just begun to emerge or re-emerge in English-language writing on Japanese colonial practice. At the same time, however, there is now much greater recognition among historians of Japan that the colonial relationship is shaped by the colonised as well as the colonisers; that life in the metropolis itself is affected deeply by its colonies; and that mainstream studies of modern Japanese history should include Japan's formal and informal colonies as a matter of course. In this essay I identify three major trends in works that have appeared in the last five years or so: a spurt of interest in Manchuria and other areas of northern China, a reconsideration of the major stages of empire, and an expanded understanding of what constituted colonialism and who participated in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major objective of this study is to investigate whether Chinese-background learners (CBLs) use effective strategies to learn Japanese kanji words. How do these learners use their L1 knowledge in memorising and guessing Japanese kanji words? Five native Chinese speakers enrolled in a beginner Japanese course at an Australian university were asked to take a kanji writing test, and were interviewed individually immediately after it. The findings are as follows: (1) it is an effective strategy to use the Chinese meaning and sound that comes with the orthography in memorising Japanese kanji words; (2) in memorising Japanese kanji words, the degree of orthographical similarity between Japanese and Chinese is not always directly proportional to the difficulty of memorisation; and (3) the semantic aspect of lexical information is more important and more frequently used than the phonetic when CBLs guess Japanese kanji words. These findings indicate that CBLs associate Japanese kanji words with the Chinese to effectively memorise and guess kanji words. CBLs tend to assist memorisation by making various kinds of associations even for those words which do not share orthography with Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]