Conspicuous of late, in light of this historical moment that marks forty years since the ‘restitution’ of the rights to administrative control over Okinawa from the United States to Japan, have been media special reports which, be they designed for publication in print or for broadcast over the airwaves, have featured in their titles the phrase ‘Fukki 40 Nen [40 Years Since Reversion]’. There are, however, no few individuals in Okinawa who harbor a certain hostility to the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, this word ‘reversion’ is deployed without being bracketed in quotation marks, as if it represented a simple matter of fact.

Introduction - The Servile and the Autonomous

As Japan moved to conduct House of Representatives elections in December 2012, attention in Western media and academic circles turned, as it does from time to time, to the question of whether the country was in decline, or even in some sort of crisis. Already five years have passed since the Minister for Economic Policy declared to the National Diet that “in economic terms Japan is no longer a first-class country,” by which she meant that its GDP had shrunk below 10 per cent as a proportion of the world's for the first time in 24 years. It has continued to fall since then. As a proportion of global GDP, Japan was 15 per cent in 1990, fell below 10 per cent in 2008, is expected to fall to 6 per cent in 2030 and 3.2 per cent in 2060, while China's rises steadily, from 2 per cent in 1990 to a predicted 25 per cent in 2030 and 27.8 per cent in 2060. It is that shift in relative weight, perhaps more than anything (national debt, aging, shrinking population) that disturbs Japan.

Thailand has been in crisis since an armed forces coup overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006, ultimately forcing him into exile. Although his opponents used fair means and foul to keep various incarnations of Thaksin's party out of power, his sister Yingluck Shinawatra became Thailand's first female prime minister following a resounding electoral victory for Thaksin's Pheu Thai (For Thai) party in 2011.

This journal article was written by Nakasatomi Hiroshi in 2011 after the Great Tohoku Earthquake and nuclear disaster. Nakasatomi currently lectures in constitutional law at Tokushima University, but at the time of the disaster he was working at Fukushima University, and living in Fukushima City with his family. The article describes the response of Fukushima University to the nuclear disaster, and efforts by students and staff within the University to build more critical awareness of the situation and foster more activist approaches. Following the article, there is a ‘sequel’ piece written by Nakasatomi in 2014 describing criticism he attracted from Fukushima City residents during and after his one-year campaign at the University on nuclear safety after the disaster. In this sequel, he seeks to clarify a misunderstanding about his political stance on the issue of voluntary evacuation, which has circulated on internet forums and damaged his public reputation for the past year. Today, Nakasatomi and his family live in Kyoto, and have become leading figures in the Kansai anti-nuclear power movement, including in a class action civil case against TEPCO. In addition to this, Nakasatomi speaks to civic groups nationally on the issues of constitutional revision that have arisen in Japan over the last 12 months. He is also an active member of the People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence group, which is also the affiliation of the translator.

During the late 1930s, as Japan escalated war preparations with China, and after GovernorGeneral Minami formalized the assimilationist ideology of “Japan and Korea as One Body”, cinema in Korea experienced a fundamental transformation. Korean filmmakers had little choice but to make co-productions that aimed to draw Koreans toward Japanese ways of thinking and living, while promoting a sense of loyalty to the Japanese Empire. Within this colonial context, and especially after the 1940 Korean Film Law facilitated the absorption of the Korean film industry into the Japanese film industry, a particular type of masculine hegemony was encouraged by a comprehensive censorship process. To show how this fluid and dynamic process worked, this article draws on some key theoretical concepts of hegemony to analyze the construction of masculinity in three of the most notable of these wartime co-productions: Angels on the Streets (1941), Spring in the Korean Peninsula (1941), and Suicide Squad at the Watchtower (1943). It analyzes how the colonial authorities sought to reorient Korean audiences toward a particular worldview by means of a process that we call a “cinema of assimilation” - a cultural hegemonic exercise designed to draw Koreans closer to the social, political and economic habits and priorities of their occupiers.

“Oishinbo” is the title of a series of manga (comic), meaning “Gourmet Craze”, created and written by Kariya Tetsu. It has been continuously published since 1983 in a comic magazine “Big Comic Spirits” published by Shogakukan (Tokyo), and enjoyed great popularity in Japan. The series, mainly centered on gourmet food, has been re-published in more than 100 books, and in the past caused controversies regarding its criticisms of food and food regulations.