Search

Shinzo Abe, Japan's former and longest-serving prime minister was assassinated on 8 July 2022. As the world expressed sorrow of the human tragedy, nationalists in China were celebrating the disappearance of a hardline Chinese hawk with great enthusiasm. When a Chinese journalist sobbed for Abe's death during a live report of the assassination, the surging anti-Japan sentiment exploded and soon developed into a hashtag-based nationalist protest attacking Abe and the journalist. Drawing from cyber nationalism and hashtag activism literature, the author coined a concept 'hashtag nationalism' to analyze this protest, the interactions between state-led nationalism and popular nationalism, and the role of digital media in the public-state relation. This article also generalized three affordances of hashtag – interconnectivity, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity – to approach the role of social media in digital activism from a relational perspective. Finally, the analysis revealed the discursive and networked nature of hashtag nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses how Spanish and Japanese Social Science textbooks represent Europe and Asia discursively, and in what way the national viewpoint from each country is manifested in that representation. We analysed 15 textbooks used in secondary schools, and we focused on Geography and Civic Education subjects. Our analysis was developed mainly at semantic levels, and we examined the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ answering four interrelated questions. We found that in both countries’ textbooks, Europe is in general described in a positive or even idealized way as a developed and rich region, whereas Asia has a reverse negative image. Underlying this opposition, we can observe a Western ethnocentric view which takes Western development as the implicit standard to rank all societies hierarchically and builds discursively the dichotomy between developed and underdeveloped countries. ‘Our’ country’s position in the world is also conditioned by this Western-centred perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paradigmatic case in which an almost permanent impasse exists in coming to terms with a difficult war past and ‘normalizing’ its international relations is that of Japan. Although successive Japanese governments have apologized over the last few decades, these have been countered by periodic episodes within Japan revolving largely around history textbooks, the remembrance of war dead and the quest by nationalists to restore national pride in the past. Regional relations were especially strained during the premiership of Koizumi Juni’chirô and his immediate successor, Abe Shinzô. They improved under Fukuda Yasuo, a moderate on war memory issues, and remained steady under Asô Tarô. Japan’s latest prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio, appears determined to address Japan’s war past more openly and critically than previous LDP figures, no doubt with an eye to improving Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbours. But whatever line he pursues, contestation over war memories will remain an issue. They are driven by deep divisions within Japan at the same time that political leaders seek a more prominent identity for Japan as a ‘normal’ actor in international affairs. This article analyses key aspects of the politics of Japan’s war memories, using insights from collective memory studies and constructivist IR theory. We suggest that the quest for ‘normality’ has generated a set of tensions and contradictions over the issue of war memories, both domestically and internationally, for which there is no resolution in sight. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses how peacekeeping became available to Japan as a policy option during the early 1990s and, thereafter, a part of the national security discourse through the international–domestic contexts interaction approach. The international context refers to the nature (culture) of the international environment at a particular period of time defined by the dominant norms that govern inter-state relations. It also highlights the policy options available to states. The domestic context refers to the nature of the leadership within a state that interprets the international norms and incorporates them into the domestic agenda. Japan’s implementation of the peacekeeping policy was a result of the collective security norms that defined the international environment during the early 1990s and the re-emergence of the revisionists within the Japanese political system — a group that embraced the collective security norms and pushed for the peacekeeping policy in the hope of expanding Japanese security policy in the post-Cold War period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the global circulation of Cultural Studies in the light of its 're-articulation' within the certain local context in Japan. Furthermore, it will not simply raise the question of how to put Cultural Studies into Japanese Studies, but, by taking the detour via the re-articulation of Cultural Studies in Japan, wants to ask what Japanese Studies might 'learn' from this already contextualized formation of Cultural Studies. This approach is important because it will illuminate the opportunities for Japanese Studies (and Area Studies in general) to contribute to the project of 'provincialization' of Anglo-American Cultural Studies by sustaining a constant reflux of theories and approaches from marginalized formations of Cultural Studies into its geographical centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the dispute that involves the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, and Japan over the ownership of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands. It states that this dispute is fueled by the symbolic significance of the islands to the parties involved due to domestic pressures instead of a desire for natural resources. This article suggests that the three countries in the dispute should understand the importance of nationalism for their individual domestic politics.

Comparison of the prehistories of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in the US, and K&obar; Enerugii Butsurigaku Kenkyusho (KEKI in Japan, reveals the working of both internationalism and nationalism in high energy physics. International communication and competition helped to create a number of structural parallels from the 1930s to the 1960s; for example, in the postwar period both countries formed their first inter-university government-supported accelerator laboratories; at the turn of the 1960s nuclear physicists in both countries debated about the choice of design for their next higher energy accelerator; and both chose proton synchrotron designs traceable to a common conceptual root. Although Fermilab and KEK progressed through analogous stages in 1990-65, national circumstances caused these developments to diverge in the late 1960s, resulting in a sizeable cut in scale and costly delays in the establishment of KEK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that internationalization and native place-making exist coterminously as refractive processes and products, and that together they index the ambiguity of Japanese national identity and its tense relationship with cultural identity. Japanese words kokusaika (internationalization) and furusato (native place) appear to represent opposite trajectories, namely a centrifugal movement in the case of internationalization, and a centripetal movement in the case of native place-making. The former is popularly associated with open borders, open-mindedness and, in the context of capitalism and open markets. The latter, on the other hand, is with parochialism, nostalgia and protectionism. Apparently, many scholars have noted the connection between internationalization and native place-making. Japanese sociologist Isamu Kurita is accurate in emphasizing the dialectical relationship between internationalization and furusato. Kurita alludes to Japanese culture and Japanese tradition as self-contained, self-evident wholes that perdure unchanged over time and space, history and geography. According to such a thesis, Japanese culture and tradition are somehow separate from or immune to the same social transformations which have served the Japanese from their cultural traditional roots.

The article discusses the society and politics in Japan in the context of the practice of critique which has been made and what sort of problems and tasks to face. The author points out that in the difficult age of critique in the country, the theoretical and practical task for those who still engage in the critical studies of society and politics should envisage a new paradigm from which philosophers could shed a new critical light on the socio-political conditions of contemporary Japanese society. The author stresses that it is possible for critical discourse to make its voice heard in the public sphere and to show the future direction of society.

The article compares the religion and the modernization of Japan and Turkey. Religious traditionalism in both Japan and Turkey had to be seriously undermined before effective modernization could get under way. Religious or semi-religious secular movements were necessary to channel motivation into rational this-wordly action contributing to modernization. The differences between Turkey and Japan seem to he due to the fact that in Japan the requisite charismatic revolution found its basis in one aspect of the traditional religious heritage whereas in Turkey only a modem secular nationalism effectively challenged the traditional religious structure. In both cases, the crucial role of religious seems to be in relation to innovations in the political structure and not directly in relation to the economic structure.