This article provides a genealogy of the argument for kengai isetsu, or the relocation of US military bases outside of Okinawa to another part of Japan. It shows how kengai isetsu has been reduced to a politics of NIMBY, or “Not In My Back Yard” when understood through a politically conservative vs. progressive grid of intelligibility. Instead, a colonial vs. anticolonial reading informed by postcolonial studies is offered to show how kengai isetsu reveals Okinawa as the lynchpin holding together the US-Japanese security relationship. In particular, this paper problematizes the reluctance on the part of international and Japanese progressive activists and intellectuals to criticize Japan's role in maintaining US military bases in Okinawa because of the deeply entrenched desire to posit Japan as a passive victim of American power, thereby maintaining the Eurocentric position of the US as the more aggressive agent.

If acknowledged at all, Japan's indigenous population the Ainu are usually represented as a rural, exotic group, bound to ancestral homes in Hokkaido and the Northern territories. Yet, large numbers of Ainu, perhaps even the majority of their population, now live in urban centres outside Hokkaido. The recent documentary TOKYO Ainu challenges traditional, detrimental representations of Ainu culture as solely rural and sedentary, and records the complex contemporaneous reality of urban indigeneity lived by those Ainu within Greater Tokyo. This article firstly reports the main themes of the film. It then compares the relative success of TOKYO Ainu in broadening discourse and understanding of Ainu identity to the Japanese government's recent living conditions survey released this year.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, one cannot help but ask why Japanese authorities long promoted an ambitious nuclear program that included over fifty reactors spread all over one of the most seismically active geological zones in the world, vulnerable not only to earthquakes but also to devastating tsunamis. However, other technological systems have been adopted in Japan and elsewhere despite their inherent dangers and high cost, and have come to be taken for granted as intrinsic to modern life. A comparison of nuclear power and the system of automobility raises the question of how people come to embrace different kinds of technological and social systems, and what sort of event or tipping point may push people in new directions. No one ever asks why the Japanese government has promoted the system of mass automobility. Yet since the 1960s, more than 500,000 people in Japan have died in traffic accidents (National Police Agency 2011). This is far more than the number of those who have died as a result of natural disasters over the same period of time. The number of Japanese injured in traffic accidents over those decades reaches almost 40 million (ibid.).

November 1 marks the passage of day 300 of the aerial sit-in strike being waged by Kim Jinsuk. The former employee of Hanjin and current Direction Committee member for the Busan chapter of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and other union members face subzero temperatures and enforcement fines of one million won per day. Currently, management and labor are reviewing a parliamentary proposal to reinstate laid-off workers, as numbers continue to grow supporting “A World without Redundancy Dismissals & Precarious Work.” The case, and the solidarity movement it prompted, illuminates issues of precarious, contract and migrant labor in South Korea, the Philippines, Germany the United States and beyond.

Japan's tragic March 11 earthquake, tsunami and its continuing nuclear crisis struck in the midst of the world's unfolding financial, economic, environmental and energy crises. The Fukushima Shock is drastically reshaping Japan's energy policy and politics. This opportunity for change is being seized by a rapidly expanding coalition of large Japanese and foreign firms, small and medium businesses, subnational governments, farmers, NPOs, and others. Their interests are united and focused by the feed-in tariff policy championed by former PM Kan Naoto. They are further channeled and reinforced by the YEN 23 trillion commitment for the 10-year rebuild of Tohoku, a project committed to renewables and smart-city infrastructure. Meanwhile, Japan's central government is adrift, its fiscal and regulatory tools blunted by a continuing rearguard action to undermine renewables and keep nuclear as the main pillar of Japan's power economy. The clash between contending energy regimes is being played out at the international level as well, and remains very fluid and difficult to predict. What is certain is that it involves strikingly different political coalitions and implies equally contrasting infrastructure choices, institutions and ideas. In Japan, the challenge is whether to protect a monopolized, centralized, expensive, and probably cul de sac power economy or opt to innovate a potentially world-beating decentralized smart-power economy. The evidence suggests Japan risks forfeiting an historic opportunity if renewable power generation does not become the main pillar of an emerging, smart power economy.