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This paper explores the British government's measures for its civilian subjects stranded as 'enemy aliens' in Japanese-controlled areas in the Far East during World War II. The British government tried to protect the interests of these Far Eastern subjects during the war and in the immediate postwar period. Its manner of dealing with the latter's redress movement from the late 1980s was initially reluctant but eventually became relatively adequate, thanks to the twin pressures of domestic public opinion and precedents set by other former Allied governments and the resolute struggles of the ex–Far Eastern subjects themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Asia Pacifi c War (1937-1945), the Japanese Imperial Army forced women in Japanese East Asian colonies to work as so-called “comfort women” (sex workers). The justice movement for these women is an international intersectional alliance of feminists from Japanese ex-colonies in East Asia, the former colonial power Japan, and other societies, such as Australia, Germany, and the USA. This long-term feminist justice movement has campaigned for an apology and compensation from the Japanese government, as well as for recognition of “comfort women‘s” suff ering and of sexual violence in war in cultural memory. Through researching this justice movement from a processual intersectionality perspective, this paper shows that it gained power and legitimacy from refl ecting and working on its internal intersectional inequalities. This included refl ecting on the class hierarchies between many former “comfort women”, who had power of defi nition, and intellectual feminist activists, as well as on the postcolonial divide between former Japanese colonies and the former colonial power Japan, leading it to develop horizontal cooperation and practices. Following an overview, the paper outlines the movements in South Korea, Japan, and Germany, and highlights the different postcolonial constellation between East Asia and Germany, the main actors, and their aims. While the Japanese government rejected the justice movement‘s demands and the right wing mobilised against it, has been able to infl uence cultural memory to widely recognize sexual violence in war and the dignity of the “comfort women”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asia offers a fertile ground for applying dominant theoretical perspectives in International Relations and understanding their relevance and limitations. As this region has seen much conflict and cooperation historically and is re-emerging as a key theater of great power competition in the 21st century even when states maintain high levels of economic interactions, our understanding of the regional order will be enhanced by the theoretical tools available in the larger mainstream IR perspectives. The existence of a peculiar regional order of no war, yet a number of simmering disputes (along with high levels of economic interdependence) can be characterized as cold peace which deserves an explanation. The paper applies two variants of realism—balance of power and hegemonic stability – and the key arguments in liberalism to analyze the cold peace in Northeast Asia and normal peace in Southeast Asia from a historical perspective. It finds both grand theoretical approaches have partial applications for understanding the East Asian order. A hybrid approach is more valuable to better explain regional order during diverse time periods and different sub-regions of East Asia. Although the presence of both hegemony and balance of power can prevent major wars for a period, they do not help resolve the pre-existing disputes. Deepened economic interdependence mitigates some spiraling tendencies as states fearful of losing too much economically do not escalate crises beyond a point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the 20 years before the outbreak of the Pacific War, Great Britain based its grand strategy in the Far East around the presence – and potential – of the Singapore Naval Base. The Americans, for a time, agreed in the project's potential in the face of increasing Japanese belligerence. This analysis examines the place of the Singapore Naval Base in Anglo-American planning for the defence of Southeast Asia. It focuses on British efforts to lobby the Americans to deploy the Pacific Fleet to Singapore to deter Japan, the evolution of American plans for the defence of the Far East, and how all these interacted. It argues that the British desire to use the Pacific Fleet as a deterrent force based at Singapore, and the American assessments of how the Pacific Fleet would actually fight Japan from Singapore, represented a conceptual disconnect they could not overcome until faced with imminent hostilities. Scrutinizing the discussions and plans related to this understudied episode provides additional understanding not only how the aspirant allies viewed the growing threat from Japan, but also how they viewed each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with a discussion of the contradictory trends shaping the global economy in the 2020s, this essay focuses on three technology-intensive sectors: defense, pharmaceuticals, and energy. In the defense sector, the Russian-Ukraine war and the tensions in East Asia ended a long period of slow growth with a 'call to arms' and rearmament across OECD. The challenge of the Western industries now is to accelerate output and capacity in a broad range of subsectors and support the safe supply of weapons and spare parts to the Ukrainian army. Thus, RUW is also a battle between different skills in management, logistics, leadership, and training systems, which offers a rich arena for future research in these fields. In the pharmaceutical sector, the Covid-19 outbreak initiated another call to arms, and the industry was quick to respond by rapidly delivering new, effective vaccines. This coincided with a breakthrough for new approaches to cancer treatment, with a potential for major public health benefits, if the industry can handle the side effects and policymakers design cost-effective delivery systems with wide coverage. Again, this calls for focused research in the fields of management, innovation studies, and economics. The third sector discussed in this essay, electricity production, was caught in a perfect storm by the outbreak of the new war. However, the net effect seems to be a major increase in investments in renewables. This creates new challenges regarding, for example, system stability, combinations of flexible and nuclear-based power sources, and the cost-effective diffusion of renewables to emerging economies, thus another arena for important future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Japan surrendered in 1945, more than 6 million Japanese were stranded in various parts of what had been the imperial domain. From 1945 to 1956, thousands of Japanese found themselves in the USSR and mainland China, unable or unwilling to return. Drawing on Soviet, Chinese, Japanese, and Western archives, this article compares Soviet and Communist Chinese policies toward the stranded Japanese. The distinct pathways adopted by the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties during the Chinese Civil War led to significant differences in their approaches to the day-to-day lives of the Japanese, the methods and messages of propaganda they adopted, and their means of handling the repatriation issue. Soviet and Chinese policies toward the Japanese during this uncertain and unsettled decade were shaped less by Cold War ideological and geopolitical alignments than by the legacies of East Asia's recent wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the history of state intervention in East Asia's varieties of capitalism through a case study of the electric power industry. The reasons for state intervention in China and Japan, their similarities and differences, and their relative importance are described and analysed. The origin and evolution of the different national models of state–business relations in the two countries are influenced by domestic factors such as national defence and internal unification, as well as external circumstances such as colonialism, occupation, and war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]