Before dawn on December 28, 2011, with the end of the year looming, the Okinawa Defense Bureau (ODB) delivered a load of cardboard boxes to the office of the Okinawa Prefectural Government. The boxes contained copies of the environmental impact statement (EIS) for a base in the Henoko district of Nago that is planned as the replacement for the US Marines Corps Air Station Futenma.

The Fukushima nuclear accident spurred expectations in the Japanese public and around the world that Japan would pull the plug on nuclear energy. Indeed, in July 2011 Prime Minister Kan Naoto announced that he no longer believed that nuclear reactors could be operated safely in Japan because it is so prone to devastating earthquakes and tsunami; by May 2012 all of Japan's 50 viable reactors were shut down for safety inspections. Plans to boost nuclear energy to 50% of Japan's electricity generating capacity were scrapped and in 2012 the government introduced subsidies to boost renewable energy. Incredibly, an aroused public took to the streets in the largest display of activism since the turbulent 1960s as the summer of discontent featured numerous demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of anti-nuclear protestors. Moreover, public opinion polls indicate that more than 70% of Japanese want to phase out nuclear energy by 2030.

Mapmaking was everywhere at the heart of the colonial enterprise. As David Fedman documents, Japan early on prioritized mastery of the highest international standards of cartography in the colonies and dependencies from Hokkaido and Okinawa to Taiwan, Korea and Manchukuo. Not only did precise maps provide a means for heightening Japanese control, but the very process of map making established the Japanese colonial presence throughout the land. Cartography also provided the basis for establishing land ownership rights, a process that frequently resulted in the dispossession of lands from Korean cultivators and the concentration of ownership rights in Japanese hands. APJ

In this essay, Robert Stolz takes us back to the Meiji period to examine the ideas of an early environmental activist, Tanaka Shōzō. Stolz describes Tanaka as a “modern environmental thinker” whose theory of the relationship between “poison” and “flow” informed his Meiji-era activism against both the Ashio Cooper Mine's pollution of rivers and the Meiji state's designs for flood control on the Kantō plain. Tanaka's concern with humanity's relationship to nature should be read alongside the attitudes of his contemporaries discussed in the Blaxell and Fedman essays. In addition, Stolz's discussion of how Tanaka's ideas might be relevant to present-day controversies over dams enables a consideration of how state efforts to control nature have, and have not, changed over the course of the modern period.

On 29 June, Japan witnessed its largest public protest since the 1960s. This was the latest in a series of Friday night gatherings outside Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's official residence. Well over one hundred thousand people came together to vent their anger at his 16 June decision to order a restart of Units 3 and 4 at the Oi nuclear plant . This article discusses the events of the last several weeks which sparked this massive turnout as well as the nature of the protest. It begins by outlining the Japanese government's recent policies affirming nuclear power, from Noda's nationwide address of 8 June justifying the Oi restarts on the grounds of ‘protecting livelihoods’, and continuing with the move on 20 June to revise the Atomic Energy Basic Law and establish a law to set up a new, yet potentially toothless, nuclear regulatory agency.

While Weathers highlights structural issues facing working women more generally in Japan, Chisa Fujiwara focuses specifically on the plight of single mothers. Fujiwara analyzes the intersections between gender and class in Japan, especially with regard to factors inhibiting single mothers from achieving self-sufficiency. The author aptly notes that in most studies of Japanese society, poverty and social class receive little to no attention. This oversight may result from assumptions that Japan is an affluent, homogeneous nation with a large comfortable middle class and no poverty. Fujiwara explains that 90% of the Japanese population self-identifies with this “middle class myth.” However, she demonstrates that the everyday realities of many individuals, including single mothers, present a challenge to this constructed notion. Along with ethnic and racial diversity, Japan features a far greater spectrum of socio-economic class differences than is often recognized.

After a long summer replete with tensions and incidents in both the South China and East China Seas, the new year failed to bring renewed hopes for a peaceful resolution to the myriad territorial conflicts casting a shadow on the Asia-Pacific Region. Rather the contrary, renewed incidents, naval rearmament, claims and counterclaims, not always veiled threats to resort to force, and decentralized boycott campaigns and cyberspace clashes. One novelty was the decision by the Philippines to try a new tack in its clash with China, resorting to a tool not previously employed by any of the claimants, namely a request for arbitration under UNCLOS (the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). Although this gambit was rejected by China, and the fate of the case is uncertain at the time of writing, we will examine the legal positions of Manila and Beijing in the context of their wider dispute, and the far-reaching implications of the case.

The Chinese energy sector is dominated by coal, which provides nearly 70% of the country's energy compared to a global average of 27%. Furthermore, with energy demand rapidly increasing, so is coal production which was 3.5 billion tonnes in 2011, more than doubling its 2002 level. The International Energy Agency's current policy scenario predicts that total coal demand in China will increase by 1000 Million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) by 2035, up from 2500 Mtoe in 2009. This projected increase is around double the current total consumption levels in the US and would increase CO2 emissions from approximately 4751 Mt to 10000 Mt in 2035, equal to nearly one quarter of the world's projected total at that time.

“Historiography” refers both to the study of history and to the body of research, writing, and debates about a specific historical theme or topic. In historical debates, historians have tended to place priority on written documents, even when dealing with recent events. More recently, however, oral history—interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors and attempts to come to terms with how ordinary people see their own historical experience—has become mainstream among academic historians.

After months of sturm und drang, on September 14 the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) announced a new energy policy. As the Asahi correctly argues, the policy is chock full of contradictions and escape clauses. Even so, the policy will almost certainly - perhaps in the course of this month - be adopted as is by the cabinet and frame the new “energy basic plan” put out by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). The energy policy's main components, so far as much of the domestic and international debate are concerned, are a commitment to withdraw from nuclear energy by the 2030s and emphasize renewable energy. An example of international reaction is the September 14 Financial Times’ declaration that Japan's “decision to phase out nuclear power has sent shockwaves through the energy industry, and could affect everything from global gas prices to the business of making and selling solar panels.”

The murders committed by AUM Shinrikyo guru Asahara Shoko and his henchmen may be the most malevolent crimes in Japanese history. March 20, 1995 was Japan's 9/11, and but for a little dumb luck—including the failure to puncture all the bags of sarin that were planted in the subway trains—the death toll could have been much higher than 13 and the number of persons injured might have reached five digits instead of the true total of 6300.

Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Nakazawa Keiji's (1939-) manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen, 1973-85) is one of the most powerful graphic novels ever produced. Running over 2000 pages, the manga is loosely based on the experiences of the author, who lost his father, sister, and younger bother to the bomb. Barefoot Gen has been enduringly popular and sold millions of copies. It has been adapted into other media numerous times including two harrowing animated films, which opened in Japan in 1983 and 1986 and are available in English translation from Geneon, a live action film trilogy in the 1970s, and a 2007 TV drama.

Almost immediately after 9/11, cultural tropes that had long been associated with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relocated to new roles as descriptors of the attack on New York City. Where once terms like “ground zero” referred to the detonation points of the nuclear weapons that were dropped in Japan, Ground Zero now refers to the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood in lower Manhattan. This appropriation of framing mechanisms from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to New York City was nothing new: it held true to an American tradition that began in August of 1945. When Americans felt that bifurcated sense of victory and vulnerability upon the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, it was a short journey for the word Hiroshima to take on a second, shadow meaning in American culture–it became shorthand for fears of an inevitable nuclear attack on America itself–and almost always the target of this imagined attack was New York City. While Lifton and Mitchell claim that, “Hidden from the beginning, Hiroshima quickly disappeared into the depths of American awareness,” we have found instead that it became ubiquitous in American culture and remained so throughout the Cold War and beyond, particularly as shorthand for America as nuclear victim, not nuclear perpetrator. This same inclination can be seen in early press coverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan last year. A great deal of press coverage in the United States was focused on the dangers of radioactive contamination on the American West coast, on America as vulnerable and a victim. This inversion of the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took a firm hold on the American imagination once the former Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons of their own in late 1949. However, even with the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks reinvented notions of an American Hiroshima as the inevitable follow-up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The challenges of nuclear proliferation, conflict and terrorism, poverty and inequality, climate change and the deteriorating environment, are inextricably linked in our current world, and can only be tackled by a broad and unified effort to achieve peace in its fullest sense. Yet the perception of peace is much less vivid in popular imagination than that of war, and the growing body of serious peace studies is less accessible than it should be. Peace is often written off - especially by war historians - as a difficult concept to define, as a dull subject compared to war, or simply as ‘the absence of war’, a mere interval between wars which are claimed to be the driving motor of history. In my new book, The Glorious Art of Peace: From the Iliad to Iraq, I argue to the contrary that from ancient times onwards there has been a rich discourse about the meaning of peace and how to secure it, that there is a wealth of ideas and debate which continues to be relevant, and that The Art of Peace is as complex as the Art of War. Human civilisation could not have developed without long periods of productive peace, which have allowed for the emergence of stable agriculture, the growth of urban society, and the expansion of peaceful trade and intercourse between societies. Peace, as the great humanist thinker Erasmus (1466-1536) put it, is ‘the mother and nurse of all that is good for man’.

This chapter entitled “Sex and Censorship During the Occupation of Japan” is excerpted from Mark McLelland's Love, Sex and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation (Palgrave MacMillan 2012). The book examines the radical changes that took place in Japanese ideas about sex, romance and male-female relations in the wake of Japan's defeat and occupation by Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. Although there have been other studies that have focused on sexual and romantic relationships between Japanese women and US military personnel, little attention has been given to how the Occupation impacted upon the courtship practices of Japanese men and women. This book adds an important dimension so far lacking in studies of Japan's sexual mores during the Occupation period.

On 31 May 2012, Professor Mizukami Tetsuo (Institute for Peace and Community Studies, Rikkyo University) hosted two lectures on the problems associated with reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. The speakers were Professor Frank von Hippel (Princeton University), former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology and co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), and Professor Gordon MacKerron, Director and Head of SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research) at the University of Sussex.

Julia Adeney Thomas takes us beyond Japan to the nearby Korean peninsula to consider the broadly significant issue of the relationship between human beings and nature through the particular and unusual case of a space with minimal human intervention: the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. Thomas focuses on this strip of land—over 2 miles wide and about 160 miles long—that runs roughly along the 38th parallel that separates North and South Korea. Heavily militarized along each border, this buffer zone of 64 million square feet is hostile to and barren of much human life. This has made it a space unique in its relative absence of human intervention that has become, quite by accident, a refuge for wildlife. In contrast to the other essays discussed in this volume, Thomas explores a lack of human intention and action vis-à-vis the environment, and asks how deliberate human action might now preserve an ecosystem that was created without design. Also, in a more methodological vein, she poses questions about how the complexities and contingencies of environmental history challenge the foundations of the discipline of history.