The anthology Japan's household registration system and citizenship: Koseki, identification and documentation, David Chapman and Karl Jakob Krogness, eds. (Routledge 2014) provides a first, extensive, and critical overview of Japan's koseki system. Situated from the seventh century Taika Reforms until today at the center of Japanese governance and society, the koseki opens up for comprehensive and deep exploration the Japanese state, family, and individual, as well as questions relating to citizenship, nationality, and identity. The scope of potential koseki-related research is extensive and is relevant for many disciplines including history, sociology, law, ethnography, anthropology, cultural studies, literature and media studies, gender and queer studies. Given the koseki's origins in the household registration regimes of China and its subsequent influence on the household registration systems of Korea and Taiwan during the colonial period, the koseki also opens the way for comparative studies within and beyond East Asia.

Hiroshima City's unprecedented extreme rain and multiple landslides of August 20 took over 70 lives and wrecked several districts. The disaster was big enough to stay in the international news cycle for a few days, in spite of a summer rife with epidemic Ebola as well as worsening economic, environmental, geopolitical and other crises. This article argues that Hiroshima merits a great deal more sustained attention, indeed that it should be deliberately made a turning point in studying climate change and urban resilience. Surveys of the disaster sites, together with other evidence, suggest that Hiroshima's calamity offers multiple warnings about the impacts of accelerating climate change. This has led to a significant flow of human, fiscal and material resources, within Japan, that could be matched and coordinated with urban-resilience programmes in the US and elsewhere.