UI Jun (1932-2006) was well known as an environmental activist and scholar. He was working at the University of Tokyo when Minamata came to light and was frustrated by his colleagues’ disregard for his findings that methyl mercury caused the disease. He went on to research other forms of water pollution, and in 1986 moved to Okinawa where he became a vocal critic of the environmental degradation caused by the U.S. military bases there. This essay, which was published in Japanese in 2003, should be read as a primary source authored by a citizen activist. Note how Ui not only describes some of the environmental issues relevant to the U.S. military presence, but also criticizes how the Japanese government has handled them.

A farmer's poem, “Amid Invisible Terror, We Were Witnesses”, first appeared in the July 18 edition of Shimbun Nomin (Newspaper “Farmer”), a publication of the Japan Family Farmers Movement “Nominren,” and was immediately recited at anti-nuclear rallies across the nation. Maeda Arata, a seventy-five year old farmer, poet and writer, lives in Aizumisato-machi in eastern Fukushima. The poem was written four months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster of March 11, 2011. Now, a year later, the fury and despair that the poem conveys continues to speak for hundreds of thousands of residents who lost their homes, land, family members and livelihood. Nothing is more devastating for farmers than the radioactive contamination and destruction of the food they grow with love and care. On March 29, 2011, a sixty-four year old cabbage farmer in Sukagawa hanged himself, all hope shuttered following the newly announced government restriction on the consumption of cabbage from Fukushima. To Maeda, national policy that deprives farmers of livelihood, and life itself, is reminiscent of the wartime events that sacrificed people's lives for a purported national interest that prioritized colonial subjugation and exploitation of neighbouring countries. Goto Nobuyo, an economist who teaches at Fukushima Medical University, read this poem at a conference on the Fukushima nuclear crisis at UC Berkeley in October 2011, moving the Berkeley modern Japanese historian Andrew Barshay to translate it into English. Goto observed that most of the artistic and literary expressions responding to the Fukushima crisis revolve around uncritical cheerful messages such as “I love Fukushima” and “Ganbare (Chin up) Fukushima!” They suppress, in effect, the widespread anger at TEPCO and the Japanese state, still more the protest movements such as those of Fukushima women demanding the protection of children from radiation, and the anti-nuclear movements that surged over the last year. William Pesek, a Bloomberg columnist described a recent comment by Prime Minister Noda “jawdropping” – one in which he said, “no individual could be held responsible for the nuclear fallout and that everyone should ‘share the pain,‘” in the country where CEOs of big corporations like Olympus, and even a prime minister got jailed for book cooking and bribery. Maeda's literary voice is, therefore, all the more precious, inviting us to reflect on questions of responsibility and appropriate action in the face of Japan's multiple disasters.

In this essay, two U.S.-based visual artists discuss a selection of their works that represents history, memory and the trauma of war. They use different artistic media, aims, and methodologies in dealing with these subjects. However, their conversation converges on common ground as they discuss the role of art and artists in remembering war atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Hiroshima bombings, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, among others. The conversation shows how artists express their interests in history by incorporating empirical and theoretical elements into their artwork, and looks at the way they explore physical, emotional, individual, and collective perspectives of war and trauma through art.

Though these two artists do not have firsthand experiences of war, they are motivated by historical events and historical figures, both distant and recent, that are pertinent to their works. Truong is interested in the way history is produced by individuals. In her video installation, A Measure of Remorse, Truong features an American-born Chinese historian, Iris Chang, and presents the ambiguity of individuals’ acts of speaking about and against the past. Slavick's cartographic drawings, Protesting Cartography, on the other hand, feature images of the U.S. testing ground for weapons and provide both well-known and lesser-known facts about U.S. bombings since Hiroshima. By presenting informative texts alongside images, Slavick aims to educate others about the U.S. military interventions that have taken place since 1945 in 60 different parts of the world. The essay includes a number of Slavick's drawings and a link to an audio clip used in Truong's work - a conversation among Iris Chang; the Ambassador of Japan, Kunihiko Saito; and a journalist, Elizabeth Farnsworth. The conversation was held by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1998.

Like Ui Jun, Miyume TANJI examines the environmental and economic effects of the disproportionately large U.S. military presence on Okinawa from the bottom up—in this case, through the lens of one village on the west coast of Okinawa. Tanji too is concerned with the various influences of the U.S. military on local communities in Okinawa, but subtly pushes back against a narrative of victimization and is ultimately a bit more hopeful in tone than Ui. This is because she focuses on the village of Yomitan, unique among Okinawan villages in its success at not becoming a base-dependent service economy. Tanji offers Yomitan as a model, because it has attempted since the 1970s to resist both the environmental and economic challenges presented by local dependence on U.S. military bases through sustainable and endogenous community development.

The looming shutdown of every single one of Japan's nuclear plants——previously the providers of nearly one-third of the nation's electricity——has accelerated the country's initiatives on conservation, renewable energy sources, and decentralization of electricity supply. It has also injected considerable momentum into Japan's “green cities” initiative.

Reorienting the southern half of the Korean Peninsula away from the former Japanese colonial government's anti-democratic, anti-American and militaristic ideology while establishing orderly government was among the goals of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK, 1945-1948). To help achieve this aim on a wide front and as quickly as possible, USAMGIK's Motion Picture Section in the Department of Public Information arranged the exhibition of hundreds of Hollywood films to promote themes of democracy, capitalism, gender equality and popular American culture and values. While U.S. troops in the field enjoyed the increased availability and calibre of American feature films, the Korean government-in-waiting was affronted by their perceived immorality. Standard Korean film histories focus on the hardships endured by Korean filmmakers, and the conflicts among them, and on Hollywood's monopoly of the screen in the era, a situation which USAMGIK film policy - strikingly similar to the ordinances previously set in place by the Japanese - assisted. This study demonstrates how many of these ‘spectacle ’ films, which have hitherto largely gone unlisted, were designed to inculcate Western notions of liberty among Koreans, while distracting them from a tumultuous political scene. However, the films exhibited did not always live up to this lofty purpose. Along with positive portrayals of the ‘American way of life ’, representations of violent, anti-social and misogynistic behavior were foreign to Korean cultural and aesthetic traditions, and often provoked negative responses from local audiences.

On January 28, a panel of the Tokyo High Court rejected the demands of approximately 400 Tokyo public school teachers for a court declaration that they not be forced to stand before the Hinomaru, Japan's national flag, and sing Kimi ga Yo, Japan's national anthem, at school ceremonies. The High Court ruling overturned a historic Tokyo District Court decision of September 2006 that favored the teachers based on constitutional language which declares “Freedom of thought and conscience shall not be violated.”

This essay introduces and compares works and lives of two war painters, Ogawara Shū (1911-2002) and Fujita Tsuguharu (1886-1998). It also provides a critical perspective on the museological discourse about Fujita and reassesses Ogawara by examining recent exhibits of their works in Hokkaido, Japan. Ogawara, a prewar surrealist painter, collaborated with the military and produced war propaganda paintings in the early 1940s. Fujita was an internationally renowned Japanese artist who resided in Paris since 1913, but came back to Japan and produced propaganda paintings in the 1930s and 40s. After the ear, they were criticized harshly by the public for their war responsibility, and largely forgotten in the Japanese art scene since then: Ogawara isolated himself in Kuchan, Hokkaido while Fujita left Japan permanently and lived in France until he died.

The author analyzes some of the most representative works produced by each artist including war paintings, and compares their different responses to their wartime activities: Ogawara expressed his war responsibility publicly since the 1970s whereas Fujita never commented on it. Apart from presenting each artist's attitude towards his past, the author problematizes the way Fujita and his war paintings were interpreted at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in 2008: he was represented as a “Renaissance humanist” who produced “anti-war” paintings. The author argues that the nationalistic impulse of the contemporary Japanese art community was behind the misrepresentation of Fujita as a “tragic hero” and raises critical questions that need to be investigated further such as the way modernism and nationalism was intertwined in Japan during the war years.

In June 2009, Okinawa became the unexpected political graveyard of Hatoyama Yukio, who quit after months struggling to bear the weight of, then reversing, a pledge he made to its citizens.

In the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami in March of 2011, the environmental risks of atomic power might seem obvious. Nuclear disasters have caused radiation sicknesses and death, poisoned the natural environment and its inhabitants, and jeopardized food safety. The construction of nuclear power plants has involved forest clearing, sea refilling, and other human alterations of the environment. Nuclear power plants themselves require monitoring of gaseous and liquid radioactive effluents and the contamination of nuclear waste. The assumption that Japan, having experienced first-hand the devastating capabilities of atomic power, should have understood these potential dangers has prompted questions about how the country came to allow the construction of nuclear reactors on its soil. How did the atom come to be viewed as safe and productive, rather than dangerous and destructive?

Yuki Tanaka and Peter J. Kuznick address these questions by focusing on the pivotal decade of the 1950s, when President Eisenhower's “Atoms for Peace” campaign sought to convince skeptics about the potential of peaceful atomic power. Considered together, these two articles also speak to contradictions and resistance in Japanese attitudes toward nuclear power, ironies in the role of the U.S. in influencing such views, and the dynamics of the U.S.-Japan relationship during this immediate postwar decade. Note the absence of discussions about the environmental impact of nuclear power at a time before the expansion of the industry in the 1970s and the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the broadcast of the NHK documentary on Comfort Women, Senso wo do sabaku ka: Towareru senji seiboryoku (How to Put War on Trial: Wartime Sexual Violence Considered) broadcast on January 30, 2001, the recently presented a feature on the program and the controversy over its showing that ensued in Japan.

In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a majority of Japanese people came to see nuclear power as safe and productive even as there were misgivings about nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower's attempts in the 1950s to convince people about the potential of peaceful nuclear power were quite successful and, especially compared to carbon fuels, nuclear energy was considered a relatively inexpensive and environmentally friendly way for Japan to achieve energy self-sufficiency. Robert Jacobs’ essay reminds us of the important distinction between responses to nuclear energy, and to nuclear weapons, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bombings left room for optimism about the future of nuclear energy, but they also reinforced pessimism about the future of nuclear weapons. Jacobs examines how Western editorial cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s that responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave birth to the visual icon of the whole earth. Well before photographs of the whole earth became a part of the cultural lexicon in the late 1960s, these cartoon renderings shaped how the earth came to be viewed and understood as a target and victim of nuclear weapons and war. Jacobs stresses the importance of the visual in environmental history, and underscores themes interwoven through many of these essays including the interconnectedness between present debates and battles over the past, and the multi-national or transnational nature of many environmental issues.

One might expect that the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 would have fundamentally shifted conversations about the environmental safety and desirability of nuclear power; claims made in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the harmless and peaceful atom would have had to evolve to account for the environmental and human devastation caused by these two events. Yet there has been a striking degree of consistency in the scientific arguments made by proponents of nuclear power, as Gayle Greene reveals in this essay. Greene takes aim at the science marshaled by advocates of nuclear power and at media coverage that she suggests has allowed misunderstandings about the safety of nuclear power to endure. Reading this essay alongside the newspaper articles it discusses will illuminate the contours of the scientific debate about the health effects of both nuclear disasters and the kind of low-dose, radiation exposure over time that comes from working in the industry, living close to a reactor, or coming into contact with winds, groundwater, or food contaminated by nuclear waste. Greene reminds us about the historical and contemporary disagreements about the dangers to the environment and people posed by nuclear power, and takes a side in this debate with her plea to appreciate fully the human costs at stake.

Criticism of China in Japan's public space has intensified since the Senkaku collision incident of September 2010. Despite the resulting strain in bilateral relations, however, the Kan Naoto government seems to be laying down plans for détente as described here and here.

On January 11, Japan's Mainichi Shimbun reported that groups in the northern Chinese city of Harbin have announced a six-year plan to preserve historical sites associated with the Japanese Army Unit 731 medical and germ warfare atrocities. According to Unit 731 Exhibition Hall curator Jin Chengmin, local groups will repair the sites, which were converted into factories and schools in the postwar decades, in preparation for a bid to have them registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site alongside Auschwitz and Hiroshima's Peace Memorial, both preserved as examples of human destructiveness and continued appeals for world peace. Elements of the Harbin plan stress both the importance of preserving and disseminating testimony in the face of denial by some Japanese neo-nationalists and the neo-nationalist attempt to avoid linking stories of past victimization with contemporary nationalism or thoughts of vengeance. The site will include both a “Monument of Testimony” inscribed with the confessions of Japanese war criminals and a “Forest of Peace and Friendship” which will stress positive future Sino-Japanese ties. While the plan has existed in embryo since 2006, Jin reports that 288 houses and a middle school were moved from the site between 2009 and 2010, a prelude to the start of restoration work and construction in earnest.

As discussed in Greene's essay, the belief in the safety of nuclear power has historically been quite strong. Jeff Kingston picks up this idea in his piece, characterizing the faith in absolute safety a “myth” that blinded the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese government to the potential dangers of nuclear power. The story that Kingston tells is about how environmental events in the form of an earthquake and tsunami together with human error caused a disaster with grave environmental and human consequences. He argues that the power of an idea, the inadequate knowledge of politicians, and the vested interests of bureaucrats and businessmen resulted in a lack of attention to environmental risks and shortcomings in emergency procedures. Or to put it more pointedly, TEPCO and government regulators failed for a variety of reasons to take seriously the risks of a tsunami or earthquake and to respond adequately to the dangers of radiation. Kingston's essay also prompts us to remember the privileged position from which historians think and write about the past, with the benefit of hindsight, when convincing ideas have been revealed as myth and human failings have been exposed by catastrophe.