Radiation makes people invisible. We know that exposure to radiation can be deleterious to one's health; can cause sickness and even death when received in high doses. But it does more. People who have been exposed to radiation, or even those who suspect that they have been exposed to radiation, including those who never experience radiation-related illnesses, may find that their lives are forever changed – that they have assumed a kind of second class citizenship. They may find that their relationships to their families, to their communities, to their hometowns, to their traditional diets and even traditional knowledge systems have been broken. They often spend the remainder of their lives wishing that they could go back, that things would become normal. They slowly realize that they have become expendable and that their government and even their society is no longer invested in their wellbeing.

Regardless of Prime Minister Abe's attempt to make the case that collective self-defense is constitutional, for some time the Self-Defense Forces have been working to achieve for Japan the status of a “state that can wage war overseas.” Behind this movement wriggles U.S. intent.

“Solely defensive” has been rescinded and the ground prepared for the coming right of collective self-defense. Consider the following examples.

By shedding light on the enduring social identities of rural settlement communities, often referred to as “natural villages” (自然村) by the current Chinese government, this article provides a new approach to the formation of China's rural collective land ownership system from the 1950s to the present. It reveals how a unique landholding structure, which I term “bounded collectivism,” was initially formed in southwest China as a result of the contestation and negotiation between the socialist state aiming to establish collective land ownership and rural settlement communities seeking exclusive control over land resources within their borders. Significant elements of that collective land ownership system would be perpetuated while accommodating “natural villages” in the three decades since the abolition of the communes and the creation of a system of household contracts.