In November 1968, the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Kobe found itself at the center of a major controversy. At the beginning of the month, it had joined with Mitsukoshi stores in Osaka and Tokyo in exhibiting and offering for sale reproductions of a selection of historical maps as part of a special event to mark the centenary of the Meiji Restoration. The idea was to give interested members of the public a chance to imagine, through the maps, what different areas of the country had been like at the time of the Restoration—at that moment, in other words, when Japan as a whole stood at the threshold of modernity.

On May 31, 2016, the Supreme Court of Japan dismissed the final appeal of seventeen Muslim plaintiffs who, along with thousands of other blameless members of Japan's Muslim community, had been subject to comprehensive police surveillance. The Court left standing lower court judgments that confirmed the Tokyo police had in fact executed an intensive surveillance program against the Muslim community and ruled that they exercised lawful authority in doing so.

The essay “Specters of East Asia” is the contribution of playwright, actor, and scholar Choi Jinseok to the volume Still Hear the Wound. It is based on a presentation made by Choi in March, 2007, at the Sakima Art Museum in Okinawa, whose courtyard faces directly onto the U.S. Marine Air Station Futenma, itself bordered by winding roads and chain-link fences. While protests over construction of a new airstrip in the coastal fishing village of Henoko swelled and continued in Okinawa, protests which continue in 2016, the museum hosted workshops in 2004 and 2007 as part of a series of events organized by the Asia, Politics, Art Project founded by poet/philosopher Lee Chonghwa of Seikei University, Tokyo. Its members were scholars, critics, and young artists dedicated to exploring, through art, often marginalized and suppressed memories of colonial violence shared across national boundaries in East Asia.