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This essay probes the understudied relationship between the hypermediated urban environment and the coding of femininity in the late 1960s and 1970s Japan. Through reading Ōshima Nagisa's Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), this essay explores the unique gender dynamics remapped in the avant‐garde media practice in an era when "urban" and "media" became interconnected and filmic medium was redefined in relation to the vibrant media milieu. This essay is motivated by "the imperishables," a prevalent trope that can be located in a wide array of literary and filmic works in the 1960s and 1970s: the vanishing men and the "plastic" women. Resilient, enduring, prone to violations but always "failing" to disappear from the screen, women's bodies occupy central roles in reorienting the epistemic structures in many prominent radical works that investigate the opaque urban network during Japan's Cold War restructuring. This essay reads cinema as a contentious site where articulations of sociopolitical sentiments and concerns with film's medium specificity find catalytic convergence with the continuous coding of gender. Rather than simply viewing female bodies as representations of social reality or fetishized objects, this article traces how femininity, constructed as both cultural artifact and techno‐aesthetic device, showcases internal dissidence in the leftist urban critique and the emergent somatic politics in the avant‐garde imaginaries of alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how senior educators (n = 5) located in Japan perceive global citizenship education (GCE) as a reflexive dialogic pedagogy in the university undergraduate course 'Dialogues on Global Citizenship Education'. Reflexive dialogue is a form of guided and interactive introspection by which educators encourage learners to speak about their needs and values as viewed interactively through the prism of the topics discussed with their peers. It encompasses educators supporting learners by encouraging them to critically examine the assumptions underlying their actions and the impact of those actions (praxis). It fosters students' ability to examine systems of inequality and the commitment to take action against these systems (critical consciousness). From this perspective, the GCE course presented the educators with an opportunity to engage learners in reflexive dialogue in relation to the most important social issues of our time (e.g. climate change, COVID-19, refugee crisis, immigration, gender inequality, civil rights, racial discrimination). Data were collected by means of questionnaires and responsive interviews with the educators co-teaching the course, then analysed with the use of grounded theory and the constant comparative method. The educators expressed the opinion that the type of reflexive dialogic GCE developed in the course (1) fostered students' conviction in common values, (2) developed students' intellectual humility, (3) nurtured students' appreciation of 'Otherness', (4) advanced students' multiple perspectives and (5) encouraged students' understanding of the complex dynamics related to immigration. Based on the findings, this article concludes by making a proposal for a reflexive dialogic GCE framework informed by the values and knowledge of Freirean critical pedagogy ingrained in praxis and students' critical consciousness development to implement principles of GCE in Japanese and international universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's handling of border control measures during the COVID-19 pandemic has become known as sakoku -approach. Sakoku literally means "closed country" and generally refers to a historic period when the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868) kept Japan's borders shut because international contacts were feared to cause public upheaval and political instability. While these times have long passed, contemporary Japan, too, is known for its tight management of immigration avenues. In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of these avenues were cut off, and despite much criticism, have remained largely inaccessible for two years now. In this paper, we build on concepts from authoritarian populism and the performance of crisis to analyze how and why Japan revived its isolationist strategy. We decipher the discursive framings that Prime Minister Abe applied to illustrate the disruptive influence that open borders would have on Japan's public health, social stability and by extension, on the national body itself. We argue that from the onset of the pandemic on, the ethnic others were portrayed as a risk mainly for two intertwined reasons: Firstly, Japan's pandemic management relies on self-constraint rather than rules and sanctions, and the ethnic others' compliance was not fully trusted. Secondly, this exclusionary strategy fed into populist discourses and was presumed to result in favorable support rates for the administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines policing of the boundary of Japaneseness in contemporary Japan by analyzing the experiences of 15 young individuals. Despite their self-recognition as not having any foreign ancestors, they are often misrecognized as half-Japanese or non-Japanese by others. This article explores the causes and consequences of this categorization and reflects on the implications of ethnic or racial misidentification for the misidentified and for the wider society. The findings confirm that others labeled the participants as hāfu (mixed) or foreign to make sense of the inconsistency between the participants' 'non-Japanese-like' personal features and a narrow notion of Japaneseness. Their lack of Japaneseness meant the participants experienced exclusion owing to the unmarked norms in Japanese society. They were also treated as though they were hāfu or foreign. However, their belief or claim of having only Japanese ancestors often confused others as well as themselves, which resulted in various attempts to make sense of their 'differences'. This article concludes that the marginalization and othering of various ethnic or racial groups in Japan helped avoid challenging the notion of Japaneseness. Therefore, to tackle exclusion, diversity among 'majority Japanese' needs to be acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late capitalist imaginaries of Japan include characterisations of an insecure political economy with significant alterations to traditional norms, interpersonal relationships, and identities. Since Japan’s neoliberal reform in the 1990s an insidious narrative of the hikikomori, characterised by perceived personal failure, social reclusiveness, and mental illness, has become commonplace in the mediascape. This paper offers a discussion on othering as emerging in prevailing cultural and counter-cultural narratives of hikikomori, and in an attempt to challenge traditional orthodoxies around the individual and society, explores the opportunities provided by possible alternatives. In trying to unlock the complexity of self-reclusion, this paper argues that it is impossible to understand this phenomenon in normative terms and highlights the ways in which these manifestations of self as other are being contested and challenged in cultural media texts. In problematising the pre-eminence of a distinct set of narratives that interact to discursively frame hikikomori, our intention is not to add to the existing explanatory claims, but rather to offer alternate approaches for understanding the social location of hikikomori within the public imaginary. Hikikomori exists in a liminal space of public understanding and private experience of self; simultaneously socially integrated yet set apart from society. Its existence, or more specifically the social reactions to its existence, highlights a need for a reconfiguration of traditional notions of the individual and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expression of time is widely believed today to be one of the unique features of traditional Japanese architecture. This article argues, however, that many of the apparently temporal features to have been identified in traditional Japanese buildings were actually accommodations of change rather than conscious expressions of time, and similar characteristics are found in buildings from other cultures. It is suggested that the interpretation of traditional Japanese architecture as having been based on time as opposed to space was part of a long-standing impulse, both within and beyond Japan, to cast Japanese culture in contrast to the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on performances of Korean folk culture in Japanese schools and communities to analyse how minority identities are constructed. Korean minority education in Japan has taken up the challenge of reversing the stigma attached to former colonial subjects, employing a range of tangible props what Twine (1999) calls ‘racial literacy’ which prepares racial minority children to cope with and challenge racism at large. While embodying identity expression through Korean folk dance performances is an effective strategy, it faces constraints from larger social forces. Korean dance and music performances do little to challenge the dominance of mainstream values. These performances are embedded in everyday family, school, and community practices and paradoxically reproduce existing gender roles, broader pedagogical ideologies, and social structures. This ethnographic case study disentangles contradictions in minority education and shows commitment to alterity accompanies disavowal of alterity in relation to the hegemonic Japanese culture and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Tokyo has been a space where numerous forms of sexual subcultures and their histories have been born. This paper discusses one possible way of understanding queer space in Tokyo. Examining the discourses concerning Shinjuku Ni-chōme, a queer neighbourhood in Tokyo, I argue that this queer space functions as a discursive site of containment as well as resistance to hetero-normative narratives of the metropolis. Drawing on queer theories that focus on the notion of space, in this paper I demonstrate that queer space is often marginalised by mainstream society, but at the same time it can be a critical site through which to investigate hetero-normativity. I suggest that queers themselves sometimes deploy their own delegitimised status to construct a queer counter-public space that intervenes in and disorients the linear narrative of hetero-normative views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Japanese feminist philosophy has in the last 15 years focused on the theme of ‘sexual slavery’, especially on the issue of ‘comfort women’. The issue of ‘comfort women’ was not only a highly charged social and political issue, but also the turning point in conceptualizing the category of ‘the other’ from the viewpoint of East Asian feminist philosophy. It enabled Asian women philosophers to rethink the feminine solidarity and also to create a new forum for a transnational feminist philosophy in East Asia. For this purpose of feminist philosophy in networking, a group of East Asian women philosopher is working together on the task of Asian philosophy of gender as well as on a new line in the philosophy of ‘the other’. In my paper, I would like to describe the conceptual framework of this feminist philosophy in networking and want to try to redefine the concept of gender from East Asian feminist philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the ways in which people talk about others of different culture or ethnic origin. I analyse interview talk of the British W.W.II veterans about their experiences at the prisoners of war camp in Japan and recent activities of reconciliation. Proposed is a discursive approach to the study of culture and cross-cultural communication, in comparison to work in cultural anthropology and ethnographic conversation analysis. The discussion is guided by two analytic concepts--membership categorisation and ethnification processes. The paper concludes that the ways in which cultural knowledge is constructed, established and shared are discursive accomplishments of a social action of accounting for the war-time past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]