Documents released via MuckRock under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that lax safety standards at the largest USAF base in the Pacific may be to blame for recent contamination of drinking water sources on Okinawa.

The internal reports expose a spate of accidents at Kadena Air Base during the past 15 years which have leaked at least 21,000 liters of fire extinguishing agents - some of them toxic.

Much has been written on the government of Japan's determination to provide a new base for the United States Marine Corps at Henoko on Oura Bay in northern Okinawa and to transfer the existing, obsolescent, dangerous and inconvenient Futenma Air Station to it. When the agreement to “return” the Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station to Japan was first reached (April 12, 1996), it was to occur “within five to seven years.” As the 20th anniversary of that agreement loomed early in 2016, the Marine Corps' “Marine Aviation Plan 2016” amended the already several times pushed back transfer/reversion date to “fiscal year 2025” (October 2024-September 2025). Admiral Harry Harris, Commander-of US Pacific forces presented that date in evidence to Congress early in 2016. But even as that 2025 date was being reluctantly accepted in Washington, at the beginning of March 2016, Japan despatched its top security official, Yachi Shotaro, to Washington to seek the Obama government's understanding (and presumably also its permission) for a further substantial delay. Once the US consented, the Abe government came to an “out-of-court” March 4 agreement (discussed in this paper and in the following opinion essays by Okinawans) with Okinawa Prefecture, that involved a complete and indefinite suspension of site works at Henoko. Lt. General Robert Neller, commander of the US Marine Corps, told a Senate military affairs committee meeting that that suspension could be expected to last a further 12-months. President Obama, advised of the impending delay, merely responded with “So there will be nothing happening for a while then.”

This article explores effects of the Korean Wave in Japan in the areas of gender relations, tourism, and Korea-Japan relations. It first looks at Korean Wave fandom among “middle-aged” women in Japan and maintains that the popularity of Korean male stars reflects women's discontent with hegemonic gender relations in Japan. It then explores tourism's role in building cultural contact between Koreans and Japanese. Finally, it discusses how the Korean Wave created communicative venues for Korean and Japanese despite long-standing historical tensions between Korea and Japan such as the Dokdo-Takeshima conflict.

Japanese mainstream media have stereotyped Japanese Hallyu fans as “middle-aged,” asexual and unhappy women. A right-wing backlash since 2012 further made them targets of xenophobic as well as sexist attacks. After socio-historically contextualizing this constructed fan image, this article probes Kitahara Minori's Good-bye Hallyu to ask, “if Hallyu has empowered the audience, how has it done so?”

This article examines images of migrant workers and brides in recent South Korean films in order to demonstrate how popular media can complicate the issue of multiculturalism in Korea, and to problematize the ethnic and gender hierarchy embedded in multicultural policies and in the social fabric of Korean society.

The transnational dissemination and consumption of contemporary Korean culture, better known as Hallyu, has encouraged a wave of academic writing from various disciplines, forming one of the major new developments in the field of Korean studies (Kim 2014, 12). This issue attempts to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on Hallyu by demonstrating how the consumption of Hallyu delineates multiple borders in various societies-national, cultural, gender, class, and ethnicity-borders that are constantly shifting and transforming.

The majority of studies on regional formation in East Asia (both Northeast and Southeast Asia) have focused on economic integration and institutional build-up initiated by states. Developments in the field of contemporary society and culture, however, have been largely overlooked. This study seeks to shed light on the way popular culture influences our perception of regions by examining some recent developments in the study of translational dissemination of popular culture across Asian societies. The paper argues that popular culture plays a constructive role in shaping the East Asian region by creating transnational markets for cultural commodities and by disseminating communalities of lifestyles and concepts, which are based on the experience of consuming the same cultural products by different people in different parts of East Asia.

Studies of the popularity of Hallyu concentrate almost exclusively upon Northeast Asian nations, disregarding their popularity within Southeast Asia, an area still defined as ‘Asian’ yet often ignored in favor of the more economically prominent East Asian nations. This article attempts to expand discussions of Hallyu through an analysis of the reception of South Korean television dramas among different consumers in Thailand. It draws upon evidence gathered from qualitative interviews with Thai fans to illustrate how diverse consumers use these foreign products as a means to assess and critique their own position within contemporary Thailand and actively engage with changing constructions of Koreanness, Thainess and Asianness as a means to do so.