Although international consensus has it that the Japanese people are unusually reluctant to face their own wartime past, this generalization has never been entirely true, as regular readers of The Asia Pacific Journal already know. Like human beings everywhere, since 1945 Japanese have debated the lessons of war and disagreed about its meaning among themselves. And, also like people everywhere, many Japanese regret both official policies and widespread individual behaviors of the past. They not only desire reconciliation with Koreans, Chinese, and other Asians, but also recognize that, as Japanese, they cannot dictate its terms. Some have already entered into cross-national dialogue about the war and the colonial violence that reached its crescendo during the war years. Moreover, precisely because reflection on such issues is uncomfortable, they struggle over how to do so, often turning to oblique or refracted approaches, what Dora Apel calls “the sideways glance,” such as through literary or artistic expression. Both this ambivalence and these strategies are human rather than Japanese traits.

Major Owen Sweet's campaign against prostitutes began shortly after his arrival in Jolo, in the southern Philippines, in May 1899. The situation was urgent. Four months into a war against the Philippine Republic, the 23rd Infantry had taken control of the area from Spanish forces, but, as Sweet lamented, his troops had fallen “heir to the lax moral conditions incident to the Philippines and Oriental countries generally.” Lacking barracks space, his soldiers had been forced to live “in close contact” with “mixed races,” and Sweet had been “confronted with the same status of immoralities and the lawless community” as commanders had in Manila, Iloilo, Cebu and elsewhere. A “personal” investigation in November involving a “house to house examination and inspection” had revealed gambling houses, grog-shops, saloons, “joints where the vilest drugs were dispensed,” and “several resorts of prostitution” inhabited primarily by Chinese and Japanese, but also Filipinos, Moros, and “other immoral women scattered throughout the villages.” Sweet feared that these conditions might spark local tensions, opening a second, Muslim-American front that the Americans could not afford.

This essay addresses the role of individual actors in unofficial diplomacy, and the contributions of non-governmental projects in building international relations in post-WWII Asia. I treat the case of one Christian female as an illustration of the role of progressive intellectuals working outside official circles—a much neglected aspect of Japan's mid-twentieth century foreign relations.

The Japanese government claims (widely criticized - see here) that the Fukushima reactors have been stabilized and the threat of further hydrogen explosions removed, but now the Japanese public faces a new source of concern.

Meat from more than 500 cattle fed with irradiated straw from the area around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been sold to Japanese consumers. The beef was tainted with radioactive Cesium released from Fukushima Daiichi and contaminating straw by up to 500 times standard levels. With beef prices in the vicinity of Fukushima plummeting, farmers raced to market their cattle in the months following the nuclear meltdown. Previous findings of radioactive contamination were reported for spinach, milk, fish and tea leaves.