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This paper gives an overview of Zainichi Korean magazines (magazines published by ethnic Koreans living in Japan) from 1980 to the present and examines the directions of major magazines. Zainichi Korean magazines started mostly as outlets for the ethnic Korean community in Japan in the political environment of the 1940s and 50s. Faced with factors such as the division of their Korean homeland and the suppression of Koreans in Japanese society until the 1960s and 1970s, they developed towards conveying a unified voice for the ethnic Korean community in Japan. In the 1980s, the third generation came to account for the majority in the population of the ethnic Korean community in Japan, and their perceptions of the Korean community in Japan, their homeland (Korea), and Japan were different from those of the older generation. The role and stature of Zainichi Korean magazines began to be undermined as an increasing share of the younger generation no longer expected an answer to the question of which source ethnic Koreans in Japan could rely on, now that the age of a collective consciousness had passed. The dwindling role of the Zainichi Korean magazine as an outlet for a collective consciousness was an inevitable trend. As if proving this, in the 1990s Zainichi Korean magazines rapidly lost their cultural dominance in all areas, including literature, politics, history, and popular culture. Since the 2000s, the market for Zainichi Korean magazines has generally been on the decline. Not only is the launch of new magazines dropping rapidly, but they can hardly be said to function as a public forum that can unite the entire Zainichi Korean community. As the specialized nature of the "Zainichi" Korean media is no longer appealing not only to the younger generations but also the older generations, the drift towards breaking away from the Zainichi Korean media is already a fait accompli. Notwithstanding this, many of the Zainichi Korean magazines are still looking for new roles to play in the midst of a changing environment for the Zainichi Korean community, and the future of Zainichi Korean magazines will depend on their decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the Japanese and Taiwanese dancers who—in the 1940s and under the auspices of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation—performed for the Japanese army on the frontlines of combat as a visiting entertainment troupe of comfort (Imon-dan). Imon-dan performers, unlike Ian-fu (comfort women), were professional artists even before the war. During the Sino–Japanese War, the Ministry of the Army deployed entertainment troupes of comfort who were professional performers to entertain soldiers stationed in the Japanese occupation area. Such troupes included Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese dancers because wartime Japan occupied Taiwan and Korea. This paper tracks one route to Burma in 1941 using new information from several people and a video recording. Consequently, the Japanese government used the Imon-dan in this instance to promote Japan's support for Burma's independence. These encounters resulted in modern dancers interacting with Taiwan and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets forth the history of the academic activities of the Asian American Literature Association (AALA) in order to explore the evolution of Asian American Studies in Japan. When the AALA was established in 1989, several scholars had already published research papers on Asian American literature, as had researchers involved energetically in the study of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. Around the time when AALA was established, other research groups focusing on immigration studies were formed. In 1993, several members of the AALA presented their papers at the annual meetings of other associations and, as a result, the activities of the AALA became known to a wider academic community. In 1994, the AALA published its first annual journal and, around 1995, the number of papers on Asian American literature and culture accepted by authoritative journals in Japan began to increase. By the end of the 1990s, Asian American studies made its presence conspicuous in the field of American studies in Japan. Since the turn of the century, a growing number of Asian Americanists in Japan have become engaged in interdisciplinary studies, thus providing new perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically examines South Korea's division system which causes conflicts with Chōsen-seki Zainichi Koreans, focusing on their legal status and identification process. Chōsen-seki is an official designation given to those Koreans who have remained in Japan after liberation and have not acquired South Korean nationality (Kankoku-seki) after Japan recognized South Korea as the "sole legitimate government" on the Korean Peninsula. They are referred to as Chōsen-seki on their foreign registration cards. Chōsen-seki Zainichi Koreans do not necessarily have North Korean nationality and citizenship, but because they have chosen not to acquire South Korean nationality the ROK government considers them pro-North Korea group and routinely demands that they change their registration. This paper will first examine the historical process of division that surrounds the nationality of Zainichi Koreans, and then discuss the problem of exclusive administrative procedure of issuing passport in the postcolonial divided nation. The third section and below will show the point of conflict between the identification of Zainichi Koreans and the divided system, based on some samples of oral interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the neo-liberal 'reforms' of Japanese higher education that have taken the form of incorporating national universities, and are now entering a decisive stage one year afterwards. I will also describe the devastation that has resulted from university incorporation. From these descriptions, I will demonstrate how the incorporation of national universities is a typical example of neo-liberal control in present day Japan. Moreover, we will then be able clearly to see the current situation of the weakening of Japanese intellectuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the post-war occupation period in Japan (1945–1952), a number of political and legal reforms were conducted under the GHQ/SCAP's initiatives. Enhancement of women's rights was one of the major targets of GHQ/SCAP's policies, and existing studies have examined if the reforms have actually achieved the democratization of Japanese gender relations. This paper challenges some of the assumptions made in previous studies, and has revealed how images of women and femininity were recreated and consumed during that time. Rather than discussing how GHQ/SCAP democratized Japanese society, this study explores how ‘democracy’ was re-conceptualized in Japanese women's magazines, which were some of the most popular and influential forms of cultural media during the period. The paper demonstrates how the notion of democracy was understood as a way of life, rather than as a particular type of political structure, and how white middle-class American women were illustrated as the model of Japanese women. The author discusses how the Occupation period was a time where the notion of democracy was integrated into women's everyday life sphere, and America became the reference point in the Japanese woman's everyday life politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Nagasaki was reinvented from an imperial city to an “International Cultural, Christian city” and elicits the continuity of Japanese imperialism in postwar Nagasaki as well as the discontinuity between the war and postwar periods in the city. The paper seeks to determine what history and whose memory have been excluded or erased in the process of remaking Nagasaki into an international Christian city; it examines the particular historical and political conditions that enabled Nagai Takashi, Urakami Catholics and Kitamura Seibou’s Memorial Peace Statue to symbolize Nagasaki’s atomic bomb memory and postwar city identity as an “International Christian city” that “prays.” While Nagai is widely known as a spiritual, religious leader in postwar Nagasaki/Japan, and Kitamura’s Peace Memorial statue dominates Nagasaki’s commemoration space, this paper analyses how US dominance over Japan enabled the country to rehabilitate its imperial past and to revive the imperial legacy by appropriating the GHQ’s (General Headquarters of the Allied Powers’) demilitarization and Christianization policies. It argues that Nagasaki’s postwar reconstruction signifies the failure of what Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) calls the “deimperialization” of Japanese consciousness and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, rights advocacy has been gaining traction in Japanese politics. This paper argues for the rationale that led to the current legal development in post-Fukushima Japan—the Nuclear Disaster Victims' Support Act, which emphasizes the right to evacuation—and presents the grassroots struggle against public authorities. The right to evacuation is the right of citizens to avoid exposure to radioactivity by allowing victims—in this case, the victims of Fukushima—to choose their living location, whether that means permanently evacuating to a new area, returning to their original homes after evacuation, or remaining where they are (i.e., not evacuating). In any of these situations, necessary support from the government is guaranteed. I claim that while the right to evacuation represents a vision about how people in Fukushima can choose to survive and develop their own self-determined future, it requires a set of tools to achieve it. As such, this paper also argues the ways in which Japanese civil society groups play a significant role in helping bring the grassroots voices of people in Fukushima to the law-making process, as well as actual implementation. Advocacy to achieve such a fundamental human right is gradually progressing and moving away from the perception of being merely a criticism of government; rather, advocates are presenting alternatives and giving government a chance to change itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the emergence of the so-called ‘liberal historiography’ in the mid 1990s, historical revisionism in Japan has been one of the most hotly debated academic topics in Japanese studies. While the majority of the current scholarship focuses on the structure of the revisionist texts and the individuals behind them, the case study presented in this paper seeks to explore the way young readers in Japan actually receive the revisionist texts, with a particular focus on the revisionist manga. Building on Stuart Hall's conceptualization of the relationship between media producers and the audience, this paper analyzes the results of a survey conducted among students of two Japanese universities. Its main argument can be divided into two parts. In terms of empirical findings it shows that in general the respondents engage in critical reading of those narratives that contradict the dominant discourse. Drawing on these findings the paper argues that academic scrutiny of a certain cultural product needs to take into account the broader discourse when speculating on its possible effects on the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Seattle 1999, plenty of summit protests around WTO, G8/20, IMF, WB, COP, and so on happened in each of the different summit sites in the last decade. Such incidents were amazingly accepted because of their mass actions and widespread networks of activists sustaining a series of mass actions. As some researchers argue, those of generating networks are based on horizontality and autonomy, and they have already prefigured a powerful model for (re)organizing society. However, on the other hand, some researchers also argue the major shortcomings. In theory, the ‘Global Activist Network’ has been constructed since Seattle, although in practice there has still been a serious spatial gap between the Western part of the world and the other side of the world. Actually, the global activist network has excluded Asia. However, in 2008, the G8 summit was held in Japan. This paper, thus, aims to show that the global activist network since Seattle, which was limited to Europe and North America, has expanded to involve Asia through the 2008 G8 summit in Japan. The 2000 G8 in Japan was right after the Seattle in 1999, yet, due to its single-issue and national character of the movements, globally expanding networks didn't reach Japan. However, movements around the 2003 anti-Iraq war brought in the autonomous character of the alter-globalization movement and referred to the legacy of autonomous activisms. During the 2008 G8, some autonomous activists in Japan took over the diversity of tactics and networks of activists inherited since PGA, DAN and ‘Dissent!’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the significance of engaging in Asian American studies in Asia, with examples drawn primarily from Japan. It asks: what happens when this US-based racial minority studies is relocated to the place where Asians do not constitute racial minorities? The paper argues that, on the one hand, the intellectual encounter between Asia and Asian America encourages the US-based minority studies to examine their implications in American imperialism in their perceptions towards Asia. On the other hand, Asian American studies as the racial minority discourse forces ethno-racial majority Asians, with all our ethnic, national, and other differences, to reflect upon the racial, ethnic, and (neo)colonial relations in our own lands while critiquing the inequalities that are taking place in and across Asia. The paper looks at the forms of minority struggles in Japan, zainichi Koreans and Okinawans, in order to propel the US Asian American scholars to decentralize their work and perspectives. It is my hope that this new perspective generated from Asia-based Asian American studies will help construct a place of mutual learning, where we can engage in conversation to ask new questions, to challenge and transform Asian American studies as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) and Nagai Takashi's The Bells of Nagasaki (1949). These two best-selling books published in the US and Japan in the late 1940s portray the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although they appeared in a similar period—a postwar transition and a herald of the Cold War—their reception was strikingly different. Hersey's piece acquired international currency when the representations of the atomic bombings in Japan were censored under the US Occupation. Since then Hiroshima has virtually remained the ‘first and only’ text about the atomic bomb victims widely read in the US. Nagai's memoir, a rare exception allowed to be circulated nationwide under the censorship, and elevated to a canonical voice of Nagasaki's experience, however, has been the subject of controversies in Japan from the 1970s. The paper argues that despite these differences, both works share parallels in narratological strategies, such as historical emplotment, the personalization of the event, compassionate identification, the valorization of the power of the atomic bomb, and the promotion of compartmentalized knowledge. These effects create a psychological deterrent for readers not to confront larger political and ethical problematics of Japanese colonialism and postwar US hegemony in Asia. Their discursive entanglement and ostensible dissociation symbolize the ways in which trans-Pacific knowledge on the atomic bombings has been shaped postwar for many decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tells a story about miscegenation between US military personnel and Okinawan women from 1945-1952, which includes sexual violence, the establishment of 'entertainment districts,' and the emergence of international marriage. Whereas this history has been mobilized by leftists as a truth-weapon in the struggle for political sovereignty from the US military, this paper takes an explicitly genealogical approach. Drawing on Foucault's work on biopower, this paper shows how Okinawans were transformed into 'petitioning subject' - subjects that negotiated the sexual exploitation of their bodies in tandem with the radically changing relationship between their bodies and the territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ambiguous nature of Murakami's criticism toward the postwar Japanese condition - as the artist most effectively captured in his phrase 'A Little Boy,' which was also the title of his curated exhibition at the Japan Society of New York in 2005. As Murakami wrote in his introduction to the catalogue, demilitarized Japan after the Second World War underwent a collective sense of helplessness, and the metaphor of a little boy is intended to describe Japan's supposedly unavoidable reliance on its big brother, America. The name 'Little Boy,' in fact, originates from the code name used by the American military for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The proliferation of 'cuteness' in Japanese contemporary art, which draws upon youth culture, especially otaku culture, evinces a common urge among the postwar generation in Japan to escape from their horrible memories and sense of powerlessness. Murakami's rhetorical analysis of Japan's self-image seems, however, contradictory, given his extremely aggressive business tactics, which can find no counterpart in the Western art world - not even in the efforts of Murakami's predecessor, Andy Warhol. Like My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), whose hyper sexuality defies its pubescent and immature appearance, his art, theory, and art marketing indicate the paradoxical nature of his theory of impotence. By focusing on his manifesto and writings published on the occasion of his 2005 exhibition and his style of managing Kaikai Kiki Ltd., this paper delves into the dual nature of Murakami's interpretation of postwar Japanese art and culture, particularly in relation to those of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the development of J-pop under the post-Fordist condition and its ideological formation over the last two decades. J-pop, invented as a fashionable sub-genre by a FM radio station in the late 1980s, expanded its category throughout the 1990s and covers virtually all musical genres for young people in Japan. However, due to the lasting economic recession, the development of digital technology and the transformation of young people's lifestyle, the record industry faced a serious crisis during the 2000s. The paper explores ideological formations between the success of J-pop and the emergence of freeters' (young part-time workers) culture in Japan, by focusing on their nationalist sentiment and the idea of creativity, and tries to find a new way of reclaiming 'creativity' in DiY (Do it Yourself) music culture today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses one way to articulate queer male identity politics in 1990s Japan through Fran Martin's conceptualization of the 'mask' (Martin 2003). By comparatively examining two key Japanese 'gay' coming-out narratives, the paper shows how a reading of queer subject formation in the decade through a metaphor of 'masking' can shed light on the complex scenarios functioning beneath the surface of identity politics. I argue that the notion of 'masking' is useful in reading the multiple axes incorporated into queer identity formation in Japan in the context of globalization. The paper further refutes any reductive claim that queer identity in Japan can be understood in terms of essentialist epistemological binaries, such as global/local, West/non-West, and Japan/abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite little improvement in the socio-political predicament of Okinawa since its reversion to Japan, culturally there has recently been something of an ‘Okinawa boom’ in mainland Japan. This has involved a huge interest in Okinawa and Okinawan cultures in mainland Japan and an increasing ‘consumption’ of Okinawan goods and cultural artefacts. One of the symptoms of this trend has been the growth in the last five years or so, in the number of films set in Okinawa. Many of these films present conventional stereotypical images of Okinawa and, whether wittingly or not, have contributed to the ‘cosmetic operation’ of Japan’s multiculturalism by providing a utopian vision of Okinawanness and erasing Okinawa’s problems from the screen. However, an Okinawan filmmaker, Takamine Go, critically challenges such stereotypes and Japan’s cosmetic multiculturalism. This paper focuses on Takamine’s Untamagiru (1989) and Tsuru-Henry (1999). It examines the cinematic strategies mobilised by these films – the use of different languages, allegorical implications, complex montages of image and sound, and the departure from conventional narrative realism. These strategies, it will be suggested, not only enable the films to explore complex forms of public memory and history but also to challenge the notion of a homogeneous Japan and its ‘quasi-orientalist’ gaze towards Okinawa. The paper then proceeds to argue that Takamine’s films should not simply be regarded as a ‘regional’ variant of Japanese cinema but as a ‘specifically Okinawan cinema’ that both overlaps with and opposes a ‘national’ Japanese cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the work of the Japanese sociologist Koyama Eizō, this paper critically explores the development of Japanese race studies from the late 1920s to the 1940s. During this period, Japanese intellectual discourses on race developed in the context of the need to manage heterogeneous populations within the Japanese empire and contain the growing mobility of populations in and outside of the territory. Reflecting Koyama’s keen interest in racial/ethnic contacts and interdisciplinary perspectives, his intellectual work symptomatically exemplifies not only the convergence of knowledge production and the dominant imperial regime but also the transpacific implications of Japanese race studies. On the one hand, my study examines Koyama’s preoccupation with racial/ethnic contacts in relation to imperial security and also traces how his study intersected with the discourse of American social scientists who were also interested in Japanese migrations. On the other hand, the study examines how the development of the idea of minzoku in Koyama’s discourse coincided with contemporaneous attempts to mobilize diverse populations in the empire. Thus, my research reveals a complex dynamic of integration and differentiation in discourse on Japanese race studies in the interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the magazines published by ethnic Koreans in Japan from 1945 to 1979. In the 1940s and 1950s, the majority of ethnic Koreans in Japan supported socialist ideology. The poor publishing environment of the 1940s and 1950s, the censorship of the GHQ, the lack of magazine writers, and economic hardship—all these factors contributed to attracting ethnic Koreans living in Japan to Korean organizations. The magazines, many of which were organs of those very organizations, started out by accommodating the urgent and diverse needs of the Korean community in Japan. Following the Korea–Japan Treaty in the 1960s, there was a change in the question of national identity of ethnic Koreans in Japan, which had been determined so far only in relation to North Korea. This political event, which shook the Korean community in Japan, brought attention back to the political sphere, and various Korean magazines published at this time had to focus on these concerns. In the 1970s, a great change came to the Korean community in Japan. As the second and third generations of ethnic Koreans came to account for a large proportion of the population, the change in the political discourse and cultural consciousness within the Korean community in Japan accelerated. Naturally, as with the notions of "national identity" and "homeland," issues surrounding everyday life and social reality emerged as important factors for Koreans in Japan. These aspects are well represented in the Korean magazines published in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan suffered a catastrophic disaster on March 11, 2011. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear radiation leakage from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant devastated the northeastern part of the country and threatened the entire country and beyond with the risk of radiation. Nowadays, movements against nuclear power plants are emerging across the country. The crisis indeed provides a chance for Japan to forge a new energy policy. However, the activists' claims are not narrowly limited to such energy issues. They call for a fundamentally fairer society and propose alternative ways of life, regarding nuclear power plants as symbols supporting the economic development that Japan enjoyed over the post-Second World War period. As an ethnography, this paper documents the 60,000-citizen Goodbye Nuclear Power Plants (Sayonara Genpatsu) rally that mobilized in central Tokyo on September 19, 2011, as well as the Occupy Tokyo action on October 15, 2011, presenting the real voices of the rally participants against nuclear power. In particular, I will focus on the voices of youngprecariatparticipants, the major actors in the anti-nuclear rally who were generated from and revealed as the negative result of Japan's neoliberal economic policy, held since the 2000s. Further, I argue that their mounting anger might be a trigger for new post-neoliberal politics in post-Fukushima Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the official recognition of sex-reassignment surgery in 1996, the concept of Gender Identity Disorder (GID), i.e. a disjuncture between one's biological sex and gender identity, became accepted as medically correct in Japan. Since then, media representations and popular perceptions of gender/sexual variants have tended to revolve around notions of ‘illness’ or ‘disorder’, where they are often perceived as souls ‘trapped’ in the wrong bodies. While some people have benefitted from the medical discourse and are happily settled in their new identities across the gender border, there certainly are gender/sexual non-normative people who do not fit into the pathological category of GID. Using award-winning drama Last Friends as its main text of analysis, this paper seeks to highlight the difficulty, if not impossibility, of classifying one's gender and sexuality into clear-cut polarized categories of male/female, heterosexual/homosexual and homosexual/transsexual. Once the basis of the male/female dichotomy is ruptured, other categories that have this divide as their foundation will also start to destabilize. Coming more than a decade after the re-legalization of sex-reassignment surgery, I argue that Last Friends plays an important role in questioning the gender status-quo and opening up a new path for articulating gender diversity on Japanese mainstream television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 film Lost in Translation has attracted both acclaim and critique concerning its representation of the urban imaginary of Tokyo. Examining both the film representation and the critical responses to the imaginary, this paper discusses how they illuminate some of the emerging issues that Tokyo and Japan face in the era of globalization, such as the loss of the idiosyncratic status of non-Western modernity that Japan has long enjoyed; post-(self)Orientalist cultural othering; and the transnational alliance of media and cultural industries in a global cultural economy of branding the nation through media and consumer cultures, all at the expense of the issue of intensifying migration and multicultural situations in the urban space. It will be suggested that both the film and Japanese critiques of the film are lost in the actuality of Tokyo (indeed, of Japan) and its populace, which is being radically transformed by intensifying transnational flows of people, capital, and media imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self-naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non-normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter-discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous 'name' may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper not only gives an overview of the transgender word in contemporary Japan but also attempts to illustrate the male to female cross‐dressing (MTFCD) community in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which plays an important role in the overall transgender world and how people in the community think and live, by conducting comprehensive fieldwork. The MTFCD community consists of amateur cross‐dressers and their patrons, and it is formed around about ten bars/clubs in Shinjuku. This community differentiates itself from the gay community in their customs and consciousness; they tend to recognize gender based on gender performance rather than biological sex, which is usually accepted for distinguishing sex. Therefore, a MTF cross‐dresser with feminine performance is considered as a ‘woman,’ regardless of one’s physical and biological conditions. Because of this recognition of gender based on gender performance, people in the community are able to develop the ‘quasi‐heterosexual’ relationships as men and ‘women.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama, this paper explores the way in which the fan subculture, in connection with digital technologies, has carved out alternative practices in the circulation, production and consumption of Japanese TV drama. As ‘minority audiences’ who are not targeted as the objects of capitalist interests, online Chinese fans invent spaces for Chinese transnational networking with self-help and sharing, as a way of resisting the aloofness from marketing strategies of Japanese TV distributors in Asia. This case study reveals that the online Chinese fan clubs, the websites for downloads, pirated VCD markets, digital file conversion, and private VCD burning – all of these have linked endless networks for the digitalized circulation and consumption of Japanese TV drama. The online Chinese fans are guerrilla fighters in the politics of autonomy, network and low-cost digital technology; they are attempting to break down time–space constraints and the official distribution hierarchy. Such fan practices shed light on the new trends of audio-visual consumption via digitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cites the implications of the World Cup 2002 to increase the level of nationalism and patriotism in Japan. Observation of critic, Toshimaru Ogura, that sporting events have been closely related to the administration, control and management of the people and to strategies for strengthening the social organization of the collectivity; Emphasis of psychiatrist, Rika Kayama, on the possibility of some more conservative, reactionary results from the World Cup; Disadvantage of using the national flag and hymn during the event to develop other meta-messages with ideological and political implication at the connotative level.

The article provides an introduction to the journal "Inter-Asia Cultural Studies" of November 2003. The first paper, by Park Keunho, "The Vietnam War and the "Miracle of East Asia", focuses on South Korea and examines the relationship between the Vietnam War and the rapid economic development of Asia. "Okinawa's Postwar" by Toriyama Atsushi demonstrates how the mainland Japanese at the end of the Second World War forgot Okinawa and how the US took advantage of such Japanese national amnesia by turning Okinawa into its permanent military base. Tanaka Yasuhiro in his "The Media Representation of Okinawa" illustrates how the image of Okinawa as a southern paradise has been reproduced in the postwar Japanese media.

The collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 plunged East Asia into a state of flux and upheaval, making necessary the redrawing of geopolitical borders and the redefining the "boundaries" of nationality, language, and legal status. As part of this broader process, Koreans in occupied postwar Japan, via the platform of the magazine Democratic Korea (Minshu Chōsen), advocated for a joint process of decolonization and deimperialization whereby both Koreans and Japanese could construct a society free of imperial hierarchies. U.S. Military Occupation policy and censorship, however, thwarted these efforts and disallowed the possibility for the inclusion of a Korean subjectivity within the space of the Japanese nation. Facing intense political pressure, Koreans in Japan started to shift toward a "non-national" Zainichi Korean subjectivity distinct from the two Korean-nation states established in 1948. Further, through analyzing the case of Koreans in occupied Japan, this article sheds light on the broader impact of occupation censorship on postwar Japanese society and how the post-imperial transition to a nation-state model was a tumultuous one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prime Minister Abe's return to power in Japan dealt a blow to the anti-nuclear movement and returned the country to broadly pro-nuclear policies. Meanwhile, eight years on, although the effects of the Fukushima disaster are still being felt, Japan's anti-nuclear movement has struggled to move forward or effect changes in policy. This article argues that prospects for change will not emerge until Japan's anti-nuclear movement is able to look beyond its national borders and articulate a perspective on nuclear power that takes into account other countries within East Asia. The 3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake revealed heretofore hidden aspects of the Japanese state and society. The truth is that Japan's postwar state (Sengo-kokka) is actually a nuclear power state (Genpatsu-kokka), a byproduct of the US-Japan alliance under the East Asian Cold War system, which insulated nuclear policy from the standard operation of democratic politics. As a product of the Cold War, the issue of nuclear power and development extends beyond Japan's national borders and relates to the questions of US superpower sponsorship and the armistice system in East Asia that pertain broadly to the politics of East Asia. It is important to understand that Japan's nuclear energy is a product of the Cold War in East Asia, and the armistice system that constitutes the international system in East Asia must be discarded if Japan is to become a post-nuclear energy state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of wartime Japan often focus on the Japanese home islands after Japan's surrender to Allied forces on 15 August 1945. Japanese citizens living in Korea, Manchuria, and elsewhere in the far-flung Japanese Empire are usually left out of the historiographical record. In a new book about the evacuees—hikiagesha—from the defunct Empire, Shimokawa Masaharu presents a vivid, harrowing portrait of the suffering of those who had to make their way back to Japan after the end of the Greater East Asia War. In particular, Shimokawa focuses on Izumi Sei'ichi, who established a sanatorium and abortuary in Fukuoka for women who had been raped by enemy soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwanese film KANO recounts the passage of a mixed-race baseball team to Japan’s Koshien Tournament during the colonial era of the 1930s. Its release evoked in both Taiwan and Japan critical responses in view of its rosy depiction of colonial modernity. Through analysing the film’s text and reviews in both Taiwan and Japan, we identify KANO as a “post-national” cinematic event. Its inviting nostalgic invocation of Japanese colonialism at the civilian level has launched divergent discourses on colonial legacies in the contemporary re/making of national identities, reflecting on the post-colonial socio-cultural conditions facing both Taiwan and Japan. We found that KANO in Taiwan instigated a re-examination of the state’s role in crafting the foundational myth of baseball as a “national” sport. Furthermore, the film brought on schemes of othering in which two national others were distinguished to manifest Taiwan subjectivity: Japanese colonialism versus Chinese nationalism. On the other hand, KANO in Japan was stripped of its colonial connotation. Its honouring of juvenile devotion to baseball was employed as a psychic introjection of Japanese-ness, which many considered losing in the globalizing social milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the postwar democracy in Japan in terms of a certain involvement between universalism and colonialism. Recently, some scholars have criticized the legislation of a new national security law in Japan as destroying the legacy of the postwar democracy. It seems, however, not to be allowed to regard this legislation as a fundamental turnover of the basic position in international policy of postwar Japan. As is well known, the Japanese government in the postwar era has kept its pacifism, whose ideal is explicitly expressed and realized by article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. Although the security law legislated in 2015 could be seen as breaking this ideal of pacifism, the Japanese government’s official statement declared that the new security law inherited pacifism under the name of “provocative contribution to peace.” This article tries to reinterpret the postwar democracy from this point. By critically reading ongoing debates regarding the issue of wartime comfort women and Nambara Shigeru’s democratic thoughts, it seems a certain war, which has been a fundamental root of the postwar democracy in Japan – that is, “a war against the enemy of all” – has sustained itself in an interwoven relation between universalism and colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features the life and works of photographer Taira Koushichi. It notes that Koushichi who died of liver cancer, donated over 150,000 photos and negatives to the Nago Museum in Okinawa, Japan. It highlights how he started his career in photography in the early 1960s and his published books including his first photography book "Okinawa: Millions of County People's Distress and Resistance." It presents several photographs of Koushichi.

This study analyzes Japanese and Korean ethno-national (minzoku-kokumin) education in postwar Japan. During a period of political unrest in Japan (1945–1955), some of the Korean residents and Japanese worked together to overcome the culture of Imperial Japan and its assimilative education. They also regarded themselves as people colonized by the United States, and pursued a political-cultural movement for their liberation and independence from American imperialism. The Koreans in Japan rejected compulsory education in the Japanese language. As a result, since 1956, Korean schools (Chōsengakkō), funded and supported by North Korea, were founded all across Japan. Their ethno-national education was in fact incorporated into North Korean politics, and has been considered in many studies as having overcome Japanese assimilation and ethnic inequalities. Such a view was a result of many academicZainichiKorean studies that come from an “insider's perspective” to criticize Japanese colonialism and discrimination. In order to go beyond this insider's view, I focus on the political alliance betweenZainichiKoreans and the Japanese people in their pursuit of ethno-national education. Since 2010, the Japanese state funding for Korean schools has become a major controversy in Japan. By tracing the historical background, this article intends to explain why this political issue has arisen. The ultimate purpose of this article is to suggest an ethical perspective to resolve the current political conflict regarding Korean schools in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the trend of new realism art as double projects in the Japanese postwar era. It highlights that artists began to paint realism art, motivated not only by communism but by the hopes of building a new nation. It further informs about some artists who joined the revolutionary act commanded by the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in the rural areas in Japan.

This essay was written under the impact of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe to locate the nuclear power issue in a context broader than energy and environment. “Peaceful use of nuclear energy” was brought in by the US in the mid-1950s as part of its “psy” warfare to cleanse atomic power of the horrifying image of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki massacre. “Peaceful use” as such was accepted as a symbol of progress even by left-wing intellectuals. However, the Japanese ruling groups situated such use in their long-term military context. In the ensuing decades, the government carried out huge national nuclear programs and said they were genuinely for energy supply. But in 1965–72, the government undertook serious studies on Japan's nuclear arms, concluding that although Japan would stay non-nuclear “for the time being,” it would keep its techno-economic capacity ready to produce nuclear bombs any time they were needed. This essay examines Japan's nuclear power in reference to the major defining factors of the postwar Japanese statehood—the US–Japan security alliance(Anpo), Okinawa as the pivot ofAnpo, the rightists' ambition to revive the glory of the prewar Empire, and Japan's position in the US–China relationship. TheFukushimadisaster and Okinawa's resistance to military colony status rocked this whole structure, bankrupting the postwar statehood. People are now urged to define what comes next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first great wave of American influence on Japanese popular music came before the Second World War, and coincided with the rapid expansion of Japan's record industry that began in the late 1920s. Imports of American records, sheet music, and movies, together with Japanese performances and recordings of American songs, brought a wide range of American music into the complex emerging mixture of Japanese popular music. Among these American imports were numerous songs and musical elements that referred to places or cultures considered exotic from the standpoint of mainstream America. I focus on three songs and the roles they played in the development of Japanese popular music exoticism. American-made exoticisms were not simply imposed upon Japan, however. Japanese culture producers actively initiated and carried out the process by selecting American songs, adapting them to the needs of their audience and drawing selected elements from them to be recombined with material from other sources, both Japanese and foreign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Takeuchi Yoshimi was a leading thinker in Postwar Japan. The originality of his work has been rediscovered in the past decade. Based on the present author's Asia as Method—toward De-Imperialization (2010) as a point of dialogue, this essay rereads Takeuchi's intuitive formulation of ‘Asia as Method’ in the 1960 and tries to pinpoint different characteristics of knowledge conditions between now and then. It discovers that the ‘Inter-Asia methodology’ imagined in Takeuchi's time is still a viable proposition to be implemented today, if we hope to break away with the dominant mode of thought that has been trapped in the colonial structure of academic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an insight into the theorization of sōgō geijutsu or the work of total art during the postwar decades in Japan, primarily through the language of Hanada Kiyoteru, a notable communist critic during the 1950s, as a way to present a discursive precursor to what would be explored as intermedia in the 1960s. It is an attempt to trace the debates that were seen in journal Sōgō Bunka, which was established immediately after the war, and how the question of collectivity and collective production of art was discussed among the contributing critics, artists, and intellectuals. Totality as some may know already, is a problematic term that comes close to the wartime notion of ‘totality’, as it was employed for Japanese government's ideological deployment for its war efforts. Although the term has accrued a sinister ring, the critics mentioned in the article, especially Hanada, were determined to reclaim the term as a way of devising a postwar aesthetic-political platform. One important component of sōgō geijutsu was popular art and its relationship to the masses, as it was designed to relocate avant-garde art practices to the juncture of popular space and political praxis, while critiquing the modernist avant-garde art associated with high art. In addition to providing a fuller historiography of intermedia (or transmedia) in Japan, interrogating sōgō geijutsu also serves to shed some light on the complex and multivalent discourse of locating a ‘people’ and their communicative action. Through this history, the term totality gains a greater texture, no longer dismissible as a mere vestige of fascism in the minds of the Japanese artists and critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on print artist Ueno Makoto's palm-sized series on the areas of Nagasaki, Japan, that had been hit by the atomic bomb during the World War II. Makoto worked on a series of small prints, each corresponding to one day of his trip. This set of small images included nearly all of the themes that appear over his lifetime of work.

This essay intervenes in the political contradiction between the pro-base and anti-base positions in Okinawa while at the same time seeking to provide an alternative to the binary at the level of everyday cultural sensibilities. I will accomplish this task by exploring the activities of charismatic Okinawan musician-artist-activist Cocco. More specifically, locating Cocco's music within – and also outside – a long, complicated genealogy of Okinawan popular music, I will trace how she has grounded the formal political problems of the US military in Okinawa's everyday dilemmas concerning money, memory, and globalization. In my view, Cocco has done so in a way that prods us to move beyond the pro-base/anti-base binary and to navigate an uncharted realm of culture, power, and history. I will also pay attention to how the audience in Okinawa and beyond, as a co-producer of Cocco's music community, has participated in this process. In so doing, I will show how Cocco's music has brought to light possibilities of transforming the existing political inequalities from below, possibilities that may be destined to disappear as soon as they are materialized as an explicit political program. I will articulate these possibilities with reference to what French writer-critic-philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1908–2003) once called the ‘unavowable community’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how the Grand Shrine of Ise has successfully distanced itself from its prewar and wartime associations with Japanese imperialism and nationalism to become an untroubling site of Japanese cultural identity. Building on Jonathan Reynolds' essay which traces Ise's transformation to become a sign of Japanese aesthetics, this essay extends the examination of Ise's rehabilitation to two other trajectories. First, it examines SCAP's attempts to dismantle State Shintō and suggests that while Occupation authorities were successful in separating Shintō from the state, they left Ise Shrine uninterrogated, which allowed it to escape censure and continue into the postwar period relatively intact. The second trajectory is Japan's involvement in the preservation of World Heritage, which I suggest provides a new, international stage that furthers Ise Shrine's rehabilitation in entirely new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the advancement of cultural studies in Japan. It states that cultural studies were obstructed by several boundaries among national knowledge and culture, and academic knowledge and world. It mentions that a large number of Japanese scholars were provided training on cultural study within their home country. It further states that cultural studies were given importance among Japanese academics in the 1990s.

The article discusses the significance of fall of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan. LDP government had ruled Japan for almost 50 years, however, in the elections held in August 2009, the party was uprooted from power and the coalition between Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and New Komei Party clinched power. The author observes that the development has brought a drastic change to the politics and social structure of Japan which has ushered in new possibilities as well as new dangers.

The article reports on the Yan'an woodcuts and the role they played during China's war of resistance against Japan. These wood engravings are used by patriotic youth, who committed themselves to the revolutionary movement for national liberation, as a weapon in the struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Argues the case regarding the failure of Japanese right-wing politicians to negotiate their negative views about Africa/ns/Blacks to a non-racist position. Role of the media as a source of ideas about race; Standard of the official policy of Japan towards Africa to be based on a dual policy of White Africa and Black Africa; Failure of the Japanese government to pronounce an official racial policy towards Africans or Blacks.

Presents intellectual discourses on the World Cup and nationalism in Japan. Benefit of the World Cup for Japanese to learn to love the country with enthusiasm through the event; Argument of sociologist, Miyada Shinji that the World Cup should not be overestimated as young people wanted no more than an ordinary festival; Increase in appreciation of young people towards Japanese nationalism.

In this article, the author recalls his memories of this grandfather. His grandfather was killed one mother after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima,Japan during World War, 1939-1945. Being drawn by some unknown forces, the author found myself inside the Hiroshima memoryscape. At an early age, the author became grateful that he was alive and healthy, although he could never eliminate completely concerns about developing some unknown radiation sickness in the future. His feeling of gratefulness, combined with a naive sense of justice, led him to decide that he would dedicate myself to work for peace.

This article focuses on Americanization in Japan after the Second World War and Asia during the Cold War. Japan's defeat in 1945 and subsequent occupation by US forces influenced the development of postwar mass culture in that country. It would seem that the cultural policies pursued mainly by the American Civil Information and Education Bureau (CIE) during the occupation had the effect of spreading Americanism from its earlier prewar base among the urban middle classes to the nation as a whole. The emphasis of America's policy toward Asia shifted from democratization and the elimination of Japanese imperialism to the construction of an anticommunist stronghold in Asia.

This article focuses on the U.S. military bases presence in Okinawa, Japan in the aftermath of Second World War. Okinawa came under American military occupation as the result of a land battle that began at the end of March 1945, and lasted for more than three months. Having pushed the Japanese army back to the southern tip of the Japanese mainland, the American military established bases on the island in preparation for its planned invasion of Japan. For the United States, the unpredictable movements of the inhabitants were a source of fear.