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Japan famously muddled through the 2020 Summer Olympics – triumphant as a host in that the Games were held, after a year-long delay, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic that had threatened to shutter the event entirely. The successes were qualified, with spectator-less matches and races leading to eerily quiet medals ceremonies, at least compared with normal years of cheering fans, enthusiasts, and tourists. Nowhere was the strangeness of the event more apparent than in the Opening Ceremony, filled with a combination of subdued but technologically adept spectacle, artistic representations of grief and loss, and the an unnervingly empty Olympic Stadium. This paper examines the politics of the Ceremony, and in particular the apparent early plans for a more standard, lightly nationalistic display of local history and culture, and toward a set of acknowledgments of a global crisis that transcended borders. In doing so, it calls attention to the complex political goals on display, as well as the challenges of benefiting politically from an event whose meaning in the midst of loss had been called broadly into question. Drawing from political science and literary theory, the paper emphasizes that while spectacle can matter, it risks, a dense environment of media reflection, being seen as little more than a gimmick. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as they are to the events themselves, the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics have become central to academic research on the Games and their political, social, and cultural roles. And so the recent string of Olympic Games held in East Asia – two of them under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic – offer the opportunity to think both about region-specific meanings associated with these highly scripted affairs and about the ways they might destabilize broader judgments about the Olympics and their implications. This paper introduces the contributions to this special volume on the Opening Ceremonies at Asia's recent Olympic Games, aiming to draw attention not only to the specific contributions of each paper but also to the themes that they collectively engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After suggesting numerous times that it intended to make the Meiji Restoration's 150th anniversary a central concern in 2018, the government of the late Abe Shinzō held only a brief, restrained ceremony one afternoon in Tokyo, leaving much of the more celebratory work to local governments at sites associated with Meiji leaders. In contrast. Japan studies centers and scholars around the world held events marking the Restoration and reflecting on its role in our understanding and imagining of modern Japan. This essay argues that the changing political and scholarly significance of the Restoration provides different opportunities and constraints to those seeking to reflect on its current meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the famously nationalistic Japanese author Hyakuta Naoki published his best-selling novel A Man Called Pirate (Kaizoku to yobareta otoko) in 2012, which subsequently became both a manga and a major film, he renewed interest in the midcentury oil baron Idemitsu Sazō, using him as the model for the novel's lead character. Hyakuta claims to have aimed to inspire the country, reeling from decades of slow growth as well as the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, by featuring a visionary Japanese leader motivated primarily by love for his employees and his country. This article traces the efforts across these media to render Idemitsu as a credible character, particularly in dealing with his real-life family as well as his "family" of employees. It argues that the partial disappearance of the "real" Idemitsu in these versions of Hyakuta's novel allowed the production of a more believable one—made believable in part because of the essential Japanese values that he ostensibly represents, even as the constraints on these representations hint at fissures and tensions in contemporary political use of biographical fiction and film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN THE AFTERMATH of the September 11 terror attacks on the United States, observers of Japanese politics were astonished to see the decisiveness with which Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi acted [...]

Japan's Foreign Aid: Old Continuities and New Directions. Edited by David Arase. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2005. 312 pp. 75.00 £. Cloth and paperback. Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) [...]

This article analyzes the distribution of costs in Japan's counterterrorism since the September 11 attacks on the United States. Working closely with its alliance partner, the United States, the administration of Koizumi Junichirō dispatched troops both to the Indian Ocean and to Iraq, simultaneously depicting the risk of Islamist terrorism as a kind of depoliticized global threat, one unconnected to actual political decisions. In so doing, the government emphasized that counterterrorism would focus not on limiting state activities that might make Japan a target but rather on insulating Japan from potential terrorists. In practice, this meant tighter screening and monitoring of foreigners, as illustrated by the fingerprinting and photographing of aliens on entering Japan. This article reflects on the changes that have taken place in Japan's response to terrorism since the 1977 hijacking of a Japan Air Lines (JAL) flight, when the government of Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo paid a $6 million ransom, released some Japanese Red Army (JRA) prisoners and secured the release of the passengers and crew based on the then popular humanitarian sentiment that 'a human life is heavier than the earth'. Tracing how global counterterrorism conventions have increasingly sought to limit potential disorder and how the Japanese government's own efforts have since moved toward conformity with these international standards, this article demonstrates how terrorism, despite its inherently political nature, can be delinked in political discourse from political choices and turned instead into a secular risk whose costs can be apportioned according to different political logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is hardly to argue that a dull but meditative Opening Ceremony would be a better or more accurate representation of Japan than will be whatever razzle and dazzle the designers conjure - just that for all the talk of how an Opening Ceremony is an opportunity for a nation or a city to introduce itself to the world, to communicate its appeal or the rich culture of its residents, the actual space for doing so is highly constrained. And, like recent and highly acclaimed opening ceremonies in Beijing (2008) and London (2012), the Olympic opening ceremonies themselves will be helmed by a popular film director. After the Opening Ceremony, there will be initial stories in the Japanese press reporting enthusiastically about press reports from overseas praising the talent and spectacle of the opening ceremonies, followed by speculation about how they will have shaped, along with the polite and organized demeanor of the host city's residents and the Games's staff, a positive image of Japan. "Kuru Japan, Atarashii Nihon no Bunkaryoku" [Cool Japan - The Cultural Power of a New Japan], October 27: 13. [Extracted from the article]

Recent scholarship on crime, law, and society in China and Japan has addressed the politics of globalization and legal reform in both countries, but political context is not self-revealing. The literature on China has focused too often on the role of the police in an authoritarian state without sufficiently taking into account the changing balance of power among judicial actors, which may be more important for understanding the shape and direction of Chinese legal reform. In contrast, the literature in Japan has recently begun to grapple with the new politicization of criminal justice but could do more to show how these concerns are intimately connected to deeper unease about the country's future. In suggesting new ways of analyzing the politics of criminal justice in China and Japan, this article also argues for increased attention to the social consequences of crime's increasing political saliency, including patterns of marginalization and constructions of deviancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]