On March 11th, 2011 at 2:26 p.m. Japan Time, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck a section of ocean floor off the coast of Northeast Honshu. The quake unleashed a giant tsunami that rose to over 10 meters in height. Washing over the Sanriku coastline inland from locations in Aomori prefecture southward, it devastated the villages, towns, and cities in its path in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures, killing initially over 20,000 residents. Thousands more were later reported dead. Coupled with the tsunami-caused near meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, this multifaceted disaster, unparalleled in Japanese history, has changed life in the region forever. The following “Reports From The Field” are an attempt by four American anthropologists intimately familiar with Northeast Japan through decades of fieldwork, to reflect on exactly what happened on 3.11, to assess the nature of the destruction and havoc, and to consider the future of the region, and Japan.

There are two ways in which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second — the Huxleyan—culture become a burlesque…Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Neil Postman (1985)

Minister of Justice opposes capital punishment or does not want to participate in state killing, he or she can prevent executions simply by not signing execution warrants. A few years ago Minister of Justice Hatoyama Kunio of the LDP (who authorized 13 hangings while serving as Minister for less than a year in 2007-08) suggested that the execution process should be made more automatic by abolishing the Minister's discretion to make these life and death decisions. The execution process should be like a “conveyor belt”, he said, and the Minister should not be allowed to turn the switch off.

Dominion From Sea to Sea differs from my other books in that it does not have so much to say about Korea or East Asia. Obviously my books on the Korean War have Korean history as the centerpiece, and even my book of essays, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relation, is a Korea-centric examination of U.S. relations with China, Japan and Korea. Nevertheless, this new book could not have been written without the years of experience since I first landed in Seoul in 1967. East Asia's history in the modern period, and its relationship with the United States, gave me an optic that was indispensable for examining America's relationship not just toward East Asia, but to the world. It is an optic that differs radically from most American orientations toward the foreign.

Since the turn of the millennium, emphasis on bodily perfection has become increasingly central to the media industries of South Korea (henceforth Korea), and a focus on ideal bodies has permeated popular discourse more generally. Although views on physical appearance built on longstanding notions of its importance in announcing status continue to be informed by a patriarchal order, a palpably intensifying commodification of the body in Korea's media-saturated, consumer capitalist culture is giving rise to newer concepts of corporeal self-discipline and reconfiguring not only of how ‘beauty’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are represented, but how the modern national self is understood.

My salary will be reduced 10% on April 1. Are students bitching about my lousy teaching? Have I been less productive on the research front? Less willing to shoulder my share of administrative burdens? All this could be true - or not - but has nothing to do with my pay cut. From slacker to Nobel Prize winner, every one of my colleagues at the University of Tsukuba is seeing his or her salary fall. As are all professors at all of Japan's national universities. And, indeed, everyone in Japan who is paid, directly or indirectly, by the Japanese tax payer - or, more precisely, paid by all the borrowing the Japanese government has been doing since taxes now cover less than half the Japanese government's expenses.

In May 1972, following twenty-seven years of direct American military rule, the Ryukyu Islands reverted to being a Japanese prefecture under the name “Okinawa.” The year 2012 therefore marks its fortieth anniversary. These islands have a complex history and every year is punctuated by anniversaries, many with painful associations. Okinawa today looks back upon a history as an independent kingdom, enjoying close affiliation with Ming and then Qing dynasty China (1372–1874); a semi-independent kingdom affiliated with both China and Japan but effectively ruled from Satsuma in southern Japan (1609–1874); a modern Japanese prefecture (1872–1945); a US military colony, first as conquered territory and from 1952 subject to the determination of the San Francisco treaty (1945-1972); and then, from 1972 to today, once again as a Japanese prefecture but still occupied by US forces. Before the recent and contemporary disputes that are at the center of the US-Japan relationship can be understood, something of this checkered history as a region alternately in and out of “Japan” has to be recounted.

The Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) denotes the geographical area that drains into the Mekong River and its tributaries within the Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam. Hydropower development of the LMB’s water resources is proceeding at a rapid pace (Friend, Arthur, & Keskinen, 2009). In addition to 124 hydropower projects at various stages of development, up to twelve mainstream dams are planned for the LMB (ICEM, 2010; MRC, 2010). This large- scale hydro-development involves countless trade-offs of interests, creating clear winners and losers. One of the most significant tradeoffs is that between the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ sectors.

Japan is committed in principle to addressing global climate change and to bringing Japanese lifestyles, economy, and policies in line with the requirements of environmental sustainability. With the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the country became a global exemplar of efforts to control CO2 emissions. Subsequently, successive national governments have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to mobilize government, business and the citizenry in the interests of environmental protection. With a growing sense of crisis, tied to the reality of rapid climate change, the debate over global energy supplies and the conflicting imperatives of economic growth and environmental sustainability, the question of how to align national policy with ecological stewardship has become ever more essential. Japan's effort commenced with the now- standard approaches to reducing consumption, reusing materials and recycling products, producing some results but falling far behind goals and aspirations. This was followed by efforts to capitalize on the promise of science and technology-driven change. While national policy in Japan as elsewhere lagged behind political rhetoric, community level initiatives have been more effective in advancing the cause of environmental sustainability. Policies adopted and implemented in Osaka and Kitakyushu, two cities formerly synonymous with the environmental disasters of Japan's early industrial economy, illustrate the constructive potential of local solutions in addressing a global challenge, but also the structural obstacles to success.

Over the last decade, the world of fissionable material has experienced a quiet revolution. Plutonium, once the lethal darling of nations seeking a secure source of fuel for their nuclear reactors (and their nuclear weapons) has fallen from favor. Uranium has replaced plutonium as the feedstock of choice for the world's nuclear haves. And business is booming.

Asian powers like China and India, concerned about energy security and environmental degradation—and despite the disaster at Fukushima—are turning to nuclear power. The demand for uranium is expected to grow by over 40% over the next five years.

While the media are rushing to announce the “full stop” of Japan's nuclear power production 2039, little attention has been paid to two much less publicized moves. The first is the restarting of Japan's nuclear export industry, especially its targeting of former colonial areas in South East Asia. The second is even more discreet. It is the revision of the Atomic Energy Basic Law loosening constraints on weapons development and breaking the long-standing pledge that nuclear technology be used exclusively for peaceful ends. The amendment may be related to the apparently contradictory announcement that the Japanese government will stop nuclear production but continue to reprocess spent fuel. We propose to analyse both of these recent developments.

Sex in Japan's Globalization, 1870-1930, from which the following discussion is adapted and developed, deals with poor rural women who migrated overseas to work as sex labourers. The core of the book is a historical study of the gendered and class impact of Japan's first encounter with globalisation that began in the 1860s. The women who worked in overseas brothels, I argue, must be first understood as peasants liberated from the land by Meiji land and tax policies, who became “free labour” searching for work in the colonial cities of Asia. Prostitution was one form of labour in the integration of Japanese women into the global work force. However, sex work as “labour” clashed with the simultaneous modernization goals of the Meiji state and social reformers who sought to embed cultural standards of ideal womanhood throughout Japanese society and to project the image of Japanese modernity internationally.

Here is not the place for a comprehensive account of the deepening crisis of Japan-Okinawa-US relations. The forthcoming study by Satoko Oka Norimatsu and myself attempts to do that in a systematic way (Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa vs Japan and the United States, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.)

Here, however, we present two Okinawan accounts of the events on which the year 2011 ended: one by Okinawa's leading environmentalist, specialist in environmental assessment law and till 2010 president of Okinawa University, the other by the long-time chronicler of the Okinawan resistance movement and Nago city resident. Both are core members of that movement. They write of the astonishing events that marked the end of 2011.

From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”

While much has been written recently on Okinawan emigration abroad, The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within is the first book in English on the Okinawan diaspora in Japan. It draws on a two-year study in residence, 1999-2001, with follow-up research in 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008. For the purpose of this study, I defined Okinawans living on the mainland as anyone with at least one grandparent or two great-grandparents from Okinawa. The majority of respondents were either first-generation migrants or the children of two migrant parents. I conducted interviews, administered a survey questionnaire, and collected writings by and about Okinawans on the mainland.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the fate of nuclear power appeared to hang in the balance as generating states scrambled to conduct safety checks on their existing nuclear reactors and newly-restarted nuclear programmes. A number of these states have since elected to phase out their nuclear power plants.

In Japan, March is the month when the “awakening of insects” (keichitsu) and the vernal equinox (shunbun) are observed, the latter a national holiday. March is also the month when unthinkable things have happened, from the deadly Subway Sarin Gas Attack in Tokyo launched by the Aum Shinrikyo sect on 20 March 1995, to the magnitude 9.0 earthquake of 2:46 p.m. on 11 March 2011 followed by a mega-tsunami that shredded the northeast coast and precipitated the meltdown of several Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear reactors. The coastal areas closest to the epicenter of the quake shifted four meters eastward and sank 1.2 meters; the main island of Honshu sank by an average of 2.4 centimeters. According to a National Policy Agency Report, as of March 2012, 15,854 people were killed, 26,992 injured, and 3,155 remain missing; 129,225 buildings were smashed to bits, and over a million seriously damaged. 325,000 people are still living in prefab barracks, and only about six percent of the 23 tons of debris have been disposed. The seventeenth and first anniversaries of the subway attack and devastating earthquake were commemorated this past March.

Thousands of barrels of Agent Orange were unloaded on Okinawa Island and stored at the port of Naha, and at the U.S. military's Kadena and Camp Schwab bases between 1965 and 1966, an American veteran who served in Okinawa claims.

In a Jacksonville Florida interview in early April with The Japan Times and Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV network based in Okinawa, former infantryman Larry Carlson, 67, also said that Okinawan stevedores were exposed to the highly toxic herbicide as they labored in the holds of ships, and that he witnessed it being sprayed at Kadena Air Base.

Relatively few creators of Japanese popular culture works about the Asia-Pacific War are military veterans. More Japanese experienced the bombings of Japanese cities and accompanying hardship than fought overseas and survived to return to Japan. Japanese who experienced traumatic events such as the atomic bombings or the destruction of Tokyo and Osaka through firebombing used popular media such as anime, manga, and film to come to terms with their experiences. Typically they have not dwelt only on that experience.