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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including oral history and the art of pointillism, watchdog journalism in Japan, the legacy of anthropologist Nancy Abelmann.

Contemporary concerns about the difficulties faced by the Japanese economy following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 soon appeared to be unfounded as the economy recovered relatively quickly. This paper suggests that despite its limited impact on Japan's longer-term economic trajectory this disaster can tell us a great deal about the ways in which individuals, organizations, and officialdom respond to a devastating event, and help us better understand the process of transition from immediate relief to longer-term recovery, not just in Japan, but more broadly. It analyzes the impact of the disaster on market transactions, showing that the scale and nature of market disruption went far beyond direct physical destruction; that the collective and individual responses of government, producers, traders, and consumers had the potential to make matters worse, rather than better; and that the existence of integrated markets spread the effects of the disaster across the Japanese archipelago. It also suggests that reestablishing market stability following the crisis was one of the keys to longer-term recovery, and that further research will help us understand the causal factors in that process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1957, the Japanese affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international anticommunist organization dedicated to the liberal ideals of the "free world," convened a symposium under the title "Tradition and Transition in Japanese Culture" ("Nihon bunka no dentō to hensen"). The event put noted Kyoto School intellectuals who had earlier conceptualized Japan's unique mission within world history during the war years—including Kōsaka Masaaki, Suzuki Shigetaka, and Nishitani Keiji—into dialogue with postwar thinkers who advocated for freedom of thought in opposition to what they viewed as the closed-mindedness of ideology. Drawing on rarely cited archival documents, this article explores how the symposium raised key questions about the fate of world historical thinking in transwar Japan at the same time that it tested the putative universality of postwar liberal ideals against what the symposium participants called the particularity of Japanese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the early years of Ch'oe Nam-sŏn (1890-1957), a leading intellectual in twentieth-century Korea, and the publication of his pioneering magazines, Sonyŏn (1908-1911) and Ch'ŏngch'un (1914-1918), with a special emphasis on his message of nationalism expressed in a global framework. Raised in a prosperous and progressive chungin family with exposure to new knowledge of the world through domestic and foreign publications, Ch'oe pioneered modern Korean magazines in vernacular Korean to help equip Korean youth with both global knowledge and patriotism. While much of the magazines' information originated from Japanese print media, his writings on Korean and Western subjects posed a silent challenge to Japanese dominance. Despite Korea's fall into colonial status in 1910 and the prevalence of Social Darwinism, which viewed the world as a battlefield for survival, he regarded the world as a network of interconnected countries, where Korea was to play a prominent role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the postwar phase of the integration of repatriates into Japanese society, thereby shedding new light on the nationalism of postwar Japan. To this end, it reviews the discourses surrounding the repatriation project and examines the existential consciousness of repatriates in postwar Japanese society. In particular, it examines the novels of Abe Kobo, who suffered from a confused identity after he returned to Japan from Manchuria. After its defeat in World War II, Japan endeavored to build a "New Japan" through re-education and repatriation. The repatriation project became the basis for the national solidarity required for this restructuring. The personal tales of repatriation, which record the experiences of those evacuated from the former colonies, constitute a history of the ordeals suffered by the Japanese victims of the war. However, repatriates felt both bitterness and discrimination directed against them by postwar Japanese society, as though they were strangers in their own country. Furthermore, they sensed the disjunction between the identity of the colonial Japanese and that of the "pure" mainland Japanese, which caused them to experience existential confusion. However, the cause of this sense of incompatibility was the ideology of postwar Japan, which aimed at reintegrating the nationstate. As the public memory of the Japanese as eternal victims spread, the truth was buried. A review of the postwar fate of the repatriates reveals the "crack" inherent in the nationalism of postwar Japan; it thus contributes to the deconstruction of the myth of the "great achievement" of Japanese homogeneity and reveals its illusory nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contradictory discourses on manners, safety and emotion that arose with mass motorization in Japan in the 1960s and which continue through the present. It documents the way in which multiple government entities end up working at cross-purposes in their attempts to cultivate safer drivers and slow the epidemic of traffic accidents. On the one hand, the discourse on driving manners suggests a widespread embrace of the Traffic Bureau's and other government agencies' concern with safety. On the other hand, the emphasis on manners may lead to angrier driving, which promotes accidents according to psychological studies of driving. The picture that emerges is one in which attempts at social control are complicated by the often unpredictable emotional reactions of subjects caught in a web of institutional and ideological processes. By exploring the relationship of emotion to driving school curricula and the discourse on manners, this article extends previous studies of self, social control, and social management in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to explain how, given Japan's “nuclear allergy” following World War II, a small coastal town not far from Hiroshima volunteered to host a nuclear power plant in the early 1980s. Where standard explanations of contentious nuclear power siting decisions have focused on the regional power utilities and the central government, this paper instead examines the importance of historical change and civil society at a local level. Using a microhistorical approach based on interviews and archival materials, and framing our discussion with a popular Japanese television show known as Hatoko's Sea, we illustrate the agency of municipal actors in the decision-making process. In this way, we highlight the significance of long-term economic transformations, demographic decline, and vertical social networks in local invitations to controversial facilities. These perspectives are particularly important in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis, as the outside world seeks to understand how and why Japan embraced atomic energy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines postwar Japanese experiences of kakyo, or "overseas Chinese," focusing on three "sites": the black market, Chinatown, and Kabukicho. It argues that Japanese society assigns to the Chinese immigrant community stereotypical meanings that reflect first and foremost Japanese preoccupations in domestic and international affairs. Nonetheless, it also contends that the immigrants are not completely detached or passive, for they collaborate in the production of the stereotypes while trying to manipulate them to their advantage. By way of conclusion, it discusses some of the latest moves by host society and immigrant community to renegotiate the meaning of kakyo in the early twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps Okinawan songs from both pre- and postwar periods that have narrated Okinawan experiences of war and prayers for peace, arguing that these songs may be heard as sites of memory that trace Okinawa's conflicted positions within the Japanese empire and state, and between the United States and Japan. Especially in the long postwar period, these songs have invoked memories of the past and dreams for the future in making politically significant present-day claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the history of economics education/teaching in Japan. Establishment of the Japanese Society for the History of Economics Thought; List of works published by scholars in the history of economics field; Involvement of Japanese economists with the process of policy making.

This study explores how changes in sibship composition associated with fertility decline may, in conjunction with entrenched family norms and expectations associated with specific sibship positions, impact marriage rates and further reduce fertility. We evaluate this possibility by focusing on Japan, a society characterized by half a century of below-replacement fertility and widely shared family norms that associate eldest (male) children with specific family obligations. Harmonic mean models allow us to quantify the contribution of changes in both marriage market composition with respect to sibship position and sibship-specific pairing propensities to the observed decline in marriage rates between 1980 and 2010. One important finding is that marriage propensities are lower for those pairings involving men and women whose sibship position signals a higher potential of caregiving obligations, especially only-children. Another is that changes in marriage propensities, rather than changing sibship composition, explain most of the observed decline in marriage rates. We also found that marriage propensity changes mitigate the impact of the changing sibship composition to some extent. However, the limited contribution of changing sibship composition to the decline in first-marriage rates provides little support for a self-reinforcing fertility decline via the relationship between changing sibship composition and marriage behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on educational assortative mating has devoted much attention to educational expansion but has been less focused on a concurrent trend of importance: growing differentiation among higher education institutions. In this study, I examine whether the bifurcation between high- and low-tier institutions in the context of high participation in tertiary education may clarify the mixed evidence on educational homogamy trends across countries. I apply log-linear and log-multiplicative models to analyze trends in educational assortative mating in Japan, which is characterized by a clear, widely acknowledged hierarchy of institutional selectivity. I find that the odds of homogamy are higher among graduates of selective universities than among graduates of nonselective universities. Further, assortative mating trends among graduates of selective and nonselective universities have diverged in recent years. This latter finding perhaps reflects that with the more rapid increase in the share of female students enrolled in less selective institutions, their opportunities to "marry up" have decreased. Results point to the importance of the growing heterogeneity of institutional characteristics, which was obscured in earlier studies, for understanding the impact of educational assortative mating on economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using microdata from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, this article examines the relationship between marriage and wealth among women. By exploiting unique data on personal wealth, it also assesses whether the wealth effect of marriage differs depending on whether wealth is measured as household or personal wealth, an issue that very few studies have examined. When wealth is measured as equivalized household net worth, on the assumption that married couples share household resources equally, marriage is found to contribute to women's wealth holdings but only to their nonfinancial net worth; however, the results show signs that marriage also contributes to women's total net worth as marriage durations increase. By contrast, when wealth is measured as personal net worth based on the actual ownership of assets, marriage is found to be negatively and significantly associated with women's wealth holdings. These findings underscore the fact that Japanese women are potentially in a financially vulnerable position even after marriage, which is at least partly driven by married women's career disruptions arising from their family responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the changing ways the Japanese police understood and policed radical politics between 1900 and 1945. Specifically, it traces the process in which the objective of policing transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring "dangerous ideas" that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as "thought crime" by the late 1920s. Once "thought" was identified as an object for policing, Japanese police agencies began to practice a kind of intellectual history—thinking like a state—to distinguish dangerous thought and to understand its origin and its spread during the socioeconomic turbulence of the interwar period. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's theory of police, this article explores how police manuals and other publications categorized certain ideas, texts, enunciations, and slogans and distributed them based on the presumed degree of danger they posed to the imperial polity. It reveals how the expanded classifications and distributions of dangerous thought transformed policing in the 1920s, thereby extending imperial state power into various aspects of social life in interwar Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensively examining the effects of family policies on marriage and fertility rates, previous research has paid little attention to the process of policy implementation and has implicitly assumed that individuals are fully aware of the policy information when making marital and fertility decisions. Challenging this assumption, we theorize policy awareness as an important mechanism for understanding the potential influence of family policies on individuals' marital intentions, an understudied yet crucial determinant of family formation behavior. In an experiment using a national survey of young unmarried individuals in Japan, respondents were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The treatment group was informed about 17 Japanese family policy benefits, but most of the respondents knew none or only a few of these benefits. After exposure to the policy information, the treatment group had significantly higher marital intentions than the control group, which had similar baseline characteristics but no information exposure. Crucially, such positive effects were particularly pronounced among high-educated women and high- and low-educated men, reflecting the differentiated effects of policy awareness under Japan's traditional gender role norms. Overall, these findings highlight the pivotal role of policy awareness during the family formation process and contribute to the debate over whether and how family policies may influence different subpopulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suan does consistently keep such actors in mind: repeatedly hailing contributors whose skilled labor and effacement grant anime its cultural - supposedly "Japanese" - surface unity and international commercial success. Suan identifies media studies, area studies, and performance studies as key interfaces when conducting a formalist examination of anime's transnational features (p. 6). Suan's methodology is guided by the notion that "each anime is its own network of relations" (p. 147). [Extracted from the article]

The article presents a history of developments in the field of econometrics by the government of Japan. According to the article, economics departments were established in Japanese national universities by an act entitled the University Ordinance of 1919-20. The article discusses the influence of institutions such as the Econometric Society, the International Statistical Institute, and visits from economists such as Joseph A. Schumpeter on the development of econometrics in Japan. The article examines Japan's econometric contributions via the so-called cobweb theorem and the stated importance of Japanese students studying economics in the U.S.

On the isolated Bonin (Ogasawara)Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, the English language has been in use for close to two centuries. The first human residents arrived in 1830, and one individual from Massachusetts, in particular, left his progeny and his mark on island society. In this paper, we analyze tape recordings made in the 1970s of a speaker born (in 1881) and raised on the islands and demonstrate that his vowel system remarkably resembles that of Eastern New England, in particular that he maintains a phonemic distinction between north and force vowels. We discuss other conservative dialect features of his speech, such as a nonlabiodental variant of /v/(/[β--β%]),which appears in complementary distribution with the mainsteam [v] variant, and contact features, such as th-stopping. In order to place this language variety, this speaker, and these recordings within their sociohistorical context, we provide a description of these unique islands and their complex linguistic heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considers the views of some Japanese economists on the role of statistics in institutionalizing democracy. Primary way to institutionalize democracy; Inherent international dimension of building the prestige of social science; Reasons for the equal importance of statistics and politics.

This essay proposes that "milk kinship," which upper-class individuals in premodern Japan formed with their milk kin—a menoto (wet nurse) and a menotogo (foster sibling)—occupies the core of an institutionalized erotic fosterage. In this "menoto system," the surrogate mother's lactating body and erotic-affective labor became the connective tissue to bind two interclass families, creating a symbiosis that fortified the existing sociopolitical power structures. Around the tenth century, many vernacular tales started to feature menoto characters. While a typical menoto is the protagonist's homely, asexual, motherly confidante, her derivative construct—the menotogo of the protagonist—is often cast in an erotic light. In the four texts examined in this essay, menotogo valorize their erotic agencies to benefit their charges through sexual-affective labor or through an indirect method. The latter entails the formation of a "love square" in which two menotogo become lovers and then help their respective charges do the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Asia-Pacific War between 1931-1945 and the testimonies from Japanese war criminals from the war. Topics discussed include the victims of imperial Japanese sexual slavery, the historical revisionism of the Japanese state, and the challenges that the veterans face in listening to the experiences of the victims of their war crimes.

The article offers information on the postal life insurance in Japan, the security it provides to people and the social unrest in the country. Topics discussed include the role of entrepreneur Fukuzawa Yukichi in spreading European models of insurance in Japan; the changes brought to Japanese social order by the Russo-Japanese War; and the riots and protests that followed the end of the war. Also mentioned are the social problems and social insurance in Japan.

In addition to other forms of precarity, food insecurity—citizens not having access to nutritious food—is an issue of growing concern in contemporary Japan. This article explores societal responses and documents a strong growth of volunteerism in the form of food banks and kodomo shokudō (children's cafeterias) that offer cheap or free meals to children in need. Both types of programs have become more common since the mid-2000s and are filling a void left by the government. This article explores the tensions in these private programs by drawing on the concept of ethical citizenship, which suggests that volunteerism is entrenched in neoliberalization. The programs are constructed in terms of moral matters, such as creating ibasho (space) for citizens’ mutual help and reducing food loss by “bringing back mottainai” (wasting nothing). This championing of community power risks masking the fact that food insecurity is in part a result of the failure of public safety nets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yoshikuni Igarashi argues that this transformation toward a mass consumer society spurred a crisis of masculinity, as men found themselves occupying a consumer role that was anathema to traditional models of masculinity defined through production. I Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism i presents a fascinating cultural history of Japan's era of high economic growth. Igarashi connects this to discourse on the emergence of a collective perception of Japan as a uniformly middle-class nation and how consumerism was foundational to this new national identity. [Extracted from the article]

The article offers information on the Japanese comic Usury manga and the morality of money in contemporary Japan. Topics discussed include Usury manga reflect Japanese society’s moral confusion over money caused by the personal debt crisis; debt-related crimes became a narrative staple in popular novels, manga and television; and debt developed with the use of money as a means of payment dictate the temporal and spatial separation between buying and selling.

The scholarly narrative of spoken Chinese studies in Tokugawa Japan is dominated by Ogyū Sorai, who founded a translation society in 1711 and urged Japanese intellectuals to learn contemporary spoken Chinese in order to draw closer to the language of the Chinese classics. This article explores the decades prior to this, when Sorai served the powerful daimyo Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. By investigating Yoshiyasu's contact with Chinese monks and the surprising but previously untested claim that he could understand spoken Chinese, I explore the cultivation of spoken Chinese learning and the patronage of Chinese émigrés by members of Japan’s warrior elite in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Prior to the scholarly interest in vernacular Chinese and the popularity of Ming and Qing literature in Japan from the Kyōhō period (1716–35) onwards, Chinese orality served as a tangible link to the Chinese tradition for Yoshiyasu and other powerful daimyo, functioning as a sign of their fitness for power in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following Japan's invasion of China in 1937, Japanese bureaucratic and intellectual elites constructed a volatile image of the munitions worker as trickster. Within this discursive realm, the worker became an object of hope, fear, and rage for the guardians of an idealized home front struggling to bolster war production while still adhering to wartime goals of national austerity. In the cultural fantasies and nightmares of the Japanese home front, the munitions worker fluctuated between the valorized “industrial warrior” laboring for the nation and a violent delinquent ready to wreak havoc on society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on a media coverage of police violence at the political rally known as the Red Flag incident in Tokyo, Japan on June 22, 1908. Topics discussed include anarchy in japan, high treason incident int he country which let to arrest of several socialists including female socialists in Meiji period in Japan and socialism in the country.

With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: what could feasibly have been published under the title “Making Machinists” was instead marketed as “Fabricating Consumers.” What does it mean to talk about consumers in 1950s Japan, a time and place of hard work, thrift, and restraint? For Gordon an important premise was the role of women in the postwar economy. This provides a point of departure from which to explore the ideologies and practices of production and consumption across the Cold War dividing line between “consumerist” and “productionist” regimes in East Asia. The Cold War was a time of sharp differences between the two societies, but also a time of shared preoccupations with productivity and national growth. In their different political contexts, Japanese and Chinese women were acting out many of the same roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These intriguing articles explore the production, the selling, and the use in East Asia of two transformative modern machines. They look primarily at China but both give significant attention to Japan. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to comment on them. I will spend more time with Antonia Finnane's article, “Cold War Sewing Machines,” as it treats an object near and dear to me (Gordon 2012). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Robert Bellah's engagement with Japan in formulating his communitarian critique of American individualism. Bellah's early contribution to post–World War II modernization studies, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan, embraced the Weberian framework of social development, but it also described a system that departed from Weber's narrative of liberalization and rationalization in important ways. Bellah argued that in early modern Japan, the profit motive was contained by social obligations and ethical rules. Through his explorations of Japan, Bellah articulated a critique of liberal individualism, drawing on Japanese cultural nationalism in his search for a modern, capitalist system that could be contained by overarching cultural and moral values. One finds a surprising resonance between Bellah's ideal of American “civil religion” and the ideas of interwar philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō and Watsuji's own critique of liberalism and popular democracy as lacking cultural foundations. Bellah's engagement with Watsuji reveals the tensions within Bellah's thought and in his subsequent call for community in America as a means of overcoming the excesses of American individualism. This article considers both the contributions and the limits of Bellah's attempt to invoke Japan as an alternative modernity in Japan studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author compares hiring and training of migrant care workers in Japan and Taiwan to understand how intimate labor is culturally defined. Topics discussed include migrant care workers known as deferential surrogates in Taiwan and migrant nurses as professional others in Japan; Japan's Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) program to explore how intimate labor of geriatric care are regulated, Taiwan's guest worker program and hiring of labor by government agencies of Japan.

Editor's Introduction: In mid-August 2015, Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo gave a high-profile speech looking back at the Japanese surrender of 1945. Three weeks later, also to mark the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia, China's Communist Party head and president Xi Jinping presided over a lavish parade in the heart of Beijing, which featured missiles and other Chinese military hardware as well as large contingents of People's Liberation Army soldiers and small contingents of troops from various other countries. Following up on a trio of essays in the August issue of the JAS, which looked ahead to events such as these, we now publish this special “Asia Beyond the Headlines” section made up of four essays that explore the meaning, for different individual or sets of countries, of Abe's speech and Xi's spectacle. This quartet of commentaries, by three political scientists and one historian, is designed to complement the last issue's contributions by historians Carol Gluck, Rana Mitter, and Charles Armstrong, as well as the historical photograph from seventy years ago that appears on the cover of this issue.The set begins with an essay by historian John Delury, a scholar trained in Chinese history and currently teaching in Seoul, who has written on varied aspects of East Asian international relations and notes, among other things, the curious fact that the representative from South Korea rather than from North Korea got the warmer reception from Xi during the recent Beijing spectacle. Following this comes Sheila A. Smith, a scholar based at a Washington, D.C., think tank, reflecting on the current state of the complex bilateral relationship between Tokyo and Beijing. Appearing next is a commentary by Maria Repnikova, a specialist in both Chinese and Russian affairs who was trained in political science and holds a postdoctoral fellowship in a school of communications. She writes on the increasingly close ties yet lingering tensions between Beijing and Moscow, as well as the way that official media has celebrated, while some users of social media have mocked, the symbolism of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping presiding over recent victory day parades in their respective capitals. The series concludes with a commentary by Srinath Raghavan, a London-trained scholar now based at a New Delhi policy institute. He completes our survey of commemoration of the end of World War II with a look at the way recent parades revealed the Indian government's tricky position vis-à-vis Moscow and Beijing, as well as the relatively scant attention that India's significant contributions to World War II received, at home and internationally, during the season of commemorative speeches and displays. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture during the late 1960s era of high-speed growth; moreover, it contends that there was a surprisingly receptive audience for such criticism among the rank-and-file “salarymen” of the urban Japanese middle class. Finally, the precisely informed humor found in these comics also suggests that their target audience possessed detailed familiarity with contemporary events on the continent and interpreted those events through a deeply embedded cultural framework of ambivalence concerning modern Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the destinations of environmentally induced migrants has found simultaneous migration to both nearby and long-distance destinations, most likely caused by the comingling of evacuee and permanent migrant data. Using a unique data set of separate evacuee and migration destinations, we compare and contrast the pre-, peri-, and post-disaster migration systems of permanent migrants and temporary evacuees of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. We construct and compare prefecture-to-prefecture migration matrices for Japanese prefectures to investigate the similarity of migration systems. We find evidence supporting the presence of two separate migration systems-one for evacuees, who seem to emphasize short distance migration, and one for more permanent migrants, who emphasize migration to destinations with preexisting ties. Additionally, our results show that permanent migration in the peri- and post-periods is largely identical to the preexisting migration system. Our results demonstrate stability in migration systems concerning migration after a major environmental event.

In the article, the author discusses issues in the labor sector in Japan as of August 2015, particularly the plights of the white-collar workers who use the Internet cafés as their temporary homes while working in the city. Also cited are the plights of the not in education, employment, or training (NEET) and other workers due to the policies of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Keidanren (Japanese Business Federation) and the Nikkeiren (Japanese Federation of Business Managers).

This essay examines Japanese-Chinese arranged cross-border marriages and investigates the ways in which participants legitimate and render such marriages comprehensible in light of national and local histories. Marriageability in this context is produced not through conceptions of “exotic difference” but instead distinct discourses of “familiarity.” On the one hand, Chinese participants tactically narrate “blood ties” (xueyuan guanxi 血缘关系) to interpret current marriage migration as following relational bonds and thus a “natural” phenomenon. On the other hand, Japanese participants stress Chinese women's “familiarity” (shinkin kan 親近感) with Japan, a familiarity that is claimed to stem from positive historical ties forged by colonialism, and thus effaces Japanese wartime culpability. In short, multiple layered notions of familiarity, shaped by the colonial legacy in East Asia, are at work in rendering these transnational intimate relations possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The unlikely story of Berthe Rosalie Kitazawa Fouque, a Franco-Japanese businesswoman active in New Caledonia from 1937 to 1941, offers a novel way to connect the economic, political, and social histories of the Second World War in the South Pacific. Her story also illustrates a largely forgotten episode of French colonial history: the successful assimilation and integration of a New Caledonian Japanese community from 1892 to 1941. As the unlikely emissary for one of Japan's most powerful industrial interests, Kitazawa Fouque temporarily acted as a privileged intermediary between the Japanese military-industrial complex, the French colonial administration, and the New Caledonian Japanese population. The reasons for her initial success and ultimate failure illuminate the shifting boundaries of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and class in the Franco-Japanese cultural encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of Islam for prewar Japanese pan-Asianists. Yet, by considering Islam solely as a political factor, this strand of scholarship has largely overlooked the religious dimension of Japanese pan-Asianism. The existence of six different complete translations of the Qur'ān into Japanese, however, amply bespeaks a genuinely religious interest in Islam, an impression that is corroborated by a look at the sociopolitical contexts of the translations and the biographical backgrounds of the translators. While explicitly anti-modern, anti-Western, and anti-Christian notions were at work in these broadly pan-Asianist Japanese appropriations of Islam, an analysis of the terminology used in the translations shows that, ironically, Christian precedents were not easily overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the 1903 Human Pavilion's Ainu Fushine Kōzō, who advanced a notion of imperial subjecthood, where one could be Ainu and a loyal subject of the Japanese empire. Fushine urged that the Ainu be treated equitably not because all races were equal, a rather modern and Western notion, but because he viewed imperial subjecthood as predicated upon military conscription and being children of the emperor. I examine the removal of the Okinawan women, Nakamura Kame and Uehara Ushi, from the display, amidst a larger debate where competing visions of imperial subjecthood and what it meant to be civilized were tied up with the charge that the pavilion was a humanitarian concern (jindō mondai). The Human Pavilion became a nexus between colonial and imperial subjects, which, rather than reifying distinctions between the two, called into question the coherence of civilizational taxonomies in Japan and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Japan experienced a surge in the evocation of the word “mottainai,” most simply translated as “wasteful.” Children's literature, mass-market nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, songs, government ministries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations deliberately used and defined the term as they took up the question of what was to be deemed wasteful. This essay examines how discourses that were ostensibly about wastefulness constituted an articulation of values, a search for meaning and identity, and a certain conception of affluence in millennial Japan. It suggests that this idea of mottainai reflected wide-ranging principles and beliefs that were thought to define what it meant to be Japanese in the twenty-first century, at a time when there settled in an uneasy acceptance of economic stagnation and a desire to find meaning in an economically anemic, yet still affluent, Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time, an earthquake with an epicenter 130 kilometers east of Sendai off the Pacific coast of northern Japan shook the Tohoku region more violently than any tremor in a thousand years. The quake was approximately 9.0 in magnitude, and it in turn triggered a set of tsunami hurtling across the Pacific Ocean, striking first the coast of Tohoku with waves of unprecedented height and strength, along a coastline stretching roughly 400 kilometers. In Fukushima, 180 kilometers west-southwest of the epicenter, 15-meter waves roared over seawalls supposedly protecting a nuclear reactor built just a few meters from the ocean's edge, starting a chain of events that resulted in an explosion the following day that began the release of radioactive materials (which continues still), sparking high anxiety if not palpable panic in Tokyo, the center of which is 240 kilometers to the south-southwest of the Fukushima nuclear complex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the mid-1870s, fearing the legal innovations of a “civilized” state, geisha and their employers recast Tokugawa-era practices of civic engagement and educational attainment in the language of enlightenment. Proprietors built schools intended to transform geisha into productive and moral mothers, and geisha donated to local educational institutions and suggested that their own studies would lead to self-sufficiency and freedom. These efforts associated geisha with the values of productivity and enlightenment, although similar strategies proved less successful for prostitutes. However, by the 1880s, both geisha and prostitutes were increasingly denied access to education and excluded from ideals of enlightened femininity that were predicated on marriage. This article considers how a group of unlikely actors deployed the Tokugawa past to become civilized, and in the process promoted ideas about the purpose of women's education that would later be expressed by an icon of Meiji modernity: the “good wife, wise mother.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An interview with Tabe Mitsuko, one of the principal members of Kyushu-ha, an avant-garde artist collective founded in Fukuoka in 1957 is presented. She learned to painting while working for the Iwataya Department Store in Fukuoka which started Saibi-kai, a hobby circle for employees for publicity purposes. She uses to sketch the street of Hakata and did landscapes and figurative paintings based on daily-life objects. She noted that Saibi-kai was a small with approximately 7 to 8 people.

The article explores a more complex picture of wartime art collectivism through the lens wartime artist groups namely the war artists collective, women's artists collective and nonexhibiting artists collective. These 3 types of collectives show the multiple ways in which alliances between state and artists collectives can be promoted under "art in the service of the war." It notes that the war had no significant change in the basic structure and function of art collectives in Japan.

The article examines the questions related to the topic of collectivism by focusing on 20th century Japan and elucidating the intricate workings of collectivism in 20th century Japanese art. It introduces an operational view of collectivism and a consciously 21st century perspective to periodize 20th century Japanese art and notes that a study of 20th-century collectivism is incomplete without a fuller account of dantai's collectivism. It aims to examine dantai's locally specific nature.