On November 30th, 2018 The Japan Times waded into the interminable controversy over Japan's wartime misdeeds with a small editor's note tacked onto the end of a story about conscript labor. The previous day, South Korea's Supreme Court had ruled that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries should compensate Korean forced laborers. That followed a similar ruling against Nippon Steel in October. With another dozen lawsuits pending against about 70 Japanese companies, Japan's most venerable English-language newspaper appeared to question whether these laborers were actually forced to work at all.

My recent book, Maritime Ryukyu, 1050-1650, is a revisionist history of the Ryukyu islands. Adopting the interdisciplinary approaches of recent Japanese scholarship, Maritime Ryukyu presents a new history of the region, treating the Ryukyu islands not as a unitary, natural political community but as locations within a maritime network that extended northward as far as the southern coastal regions of Korea. This article briefly explains my trajectory in writing the book and then summarizes some of the major arguments in Maritime Ryukyu.

News sources revealed in August 2018 that Tokyo Medical University has been systematically tampering with its entrance exam scores to reduce the number of female students at the institution. This scandal led to a government investigation into medical faculties, and initial reports suggest that such gender discrimination is widespread in medical faculty admissions. This issue relates to several stubborn problems facing Japanese society today: It reflects how a more general context of gender discrimination threatens to impede new solutions to the crises facing medicine in Japan as a workplace and as a place of care, and how recent efforts to counter discriminatory practices and encourage “diversity” lack accountability. This article shows how the gender gap in the medical field points to deeper problems in the profession, how recent research suggests that gender diversity may improve medical outcomes in terms of patient care, and how this entrance-exam scandal highlights the inadequacy and lack of accountability behind recent efforts to promote “diversity.”

On the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize through the generosity of her colleagues, students, and friends, the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Prize.