The Sewol ferry carrying 476 passengers including a group of high school students on a field trip to Jeju Island capsized on April 16, 2014, and sank to the bottom of the sea off Korea's southern coast. Most of the crew, including the captain, were rescued by the Korean coast guard. Some of the passengers, who happened to be on the deck or escaped soon after the capsizing, were saved by fishing boats and commercial vessels that came before the ROK Coast Guard or Navy. 304 passengers, however, were trapped inside and drowned.

The Japan-Korea solidarity movement to support the democratization of South Korea was active throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Japan among Korean residents (Zainichi) and Japanese intellectuals and activists. Korean activists in the democratization movement have recalled the widespread international support of that era (Chi 2003, 2005; Park 2010; Kim 2010; Oh 2012), and Zainichi and Japanese activists have written about their activities in numerous books and memoirs (Chung 2006; Tomiyama 2009; Shouji 2009; Chung 2012). However, the Japan-Korea solidarity movement has been relatively neglected in both Korean and Japanese scholarship. The few academic articles that mention the movement mainly focus on the activities of Zainichi (Cho 2006) and Christians (Lee 2012). This article extends analysis of the solidarity movement to show how its activities led to a process of self-reflection and self-transformation within Japan.

Three years have passed since the earthquake and consequent tsunami of March 11, 2011, which led to the explosion of a nuclear power plant in Northeastern Japan. Since then, a central concern in managing the damage is how to handle the relocation of people displaced by the destruction of the earthquake-driven tsunami and the dangers of radiation. In December of that year, we wrote up a precise assessment of the damage caused to the housing sector, the system for rehousing victims of the tsunami, and also the nuclear contamination that has spread widely in part of the Fukushima region and neighboring districts. The government reported the existence of 160,000 displaced persons, of whom 100,000 came from within the prefecture and 60,000 outside of it. Since the government adopted a policy favoring the return of the displaced to their home districts, which are still heavily contaminated, the official estimate today is 140,000 refugees: 100,000 within the prefecture and 40,000 outside it. However, these official figures are the fruit of an extremely restrictive registration system, to which a not insignificant number of inhabitants have refused to submit. The displaced population is in fact appreciably greater than the official statistics would have us believe. What is the situation of nuclear refugees in Japan today? What local policies have been put in place to protect the inhabitants during these three years, as the government sought to manage a disaster of global proportions? What are the motivations of the authorities in seeking to compel the population to return to zones that are still partly contaminated, despite the ongoing risks and in the absence of any request to return? These are a few issues that I will seek to clarify in this paper.

Update February 24, 2014.

Since our article appeared, there have been several developments that demand the reader's attention. The scale of electoral interference was found to have been more extensive than we originally reported. Last December, prosecutors investigating the case disclosed that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) had produced over a period of two years leading up to the election some 1900 online posts and approximately 22 million Tweets with political or election-related content-roughly 30% of all election-related content that was generated on Twitter. This was circulated by agents of the NIS's psychological warfare team and hired contractors.

David McNeill introduction, Matsumoto Masayoshi testimony (Japanese and English transcript and video of testimony), translation by Miguel Quintana

For years, Abe Shinzo, Japan's prime minister, has been playing with diplomatic fire over a sordid episode of wartime history that has been at the center of a storm of controversy involving Japan, China, Korea and other outposts of Japan's empire: the herding of thousands of women across Asia into Japanese military brothels. His decision this year to order an investigation into a landmark government apology to the so-called “comfort women” might have helped end the controversy. Instead, it has further ignited it, which may indeed have been Abe's intention – he has campaigned for nearly two decades to undermine the apology.

Japan of 2014 is clearly a troubled nation — and I will remind the reader about only a few key components of its peculiar situation. The country is still rich by any global standard but its national debt is far higher than that in any other affluent country, and rising, and in 2014 its economy has been chronically close to, or actually in, a deflationary recession. Japan is still the world's third largest economy, but after decades of huge trade surpluses it is now running substantial trade deficits. The cause of these deficits goes beyond the post-Fukushima need for higher imports of oil and gas: offshoring of Japan's manufacturing has seen widespread loss of capacities and jobs, and many jobs have become part-time and temporary. Japan is still home to famous global brands (Toyota, Honda, Nikon) but performance of some of these companies has been tainted by poor quality products and corporate scandals (financial fraud by Olympus, massive recalls of Toyota cars, Takata's deficient airbags installed in millions of vehicles) and some firms that were previously pioneers of widely admired technical advances and the envy of corporate managers (Sony, Panasonic, Fujitsu) now face chronic difficulties, if they are not nearly bankrupt.

Korean translation available

Chan, Koon-chung. 2012. Zhongguo tianchao zhuyi yu Xianggang (China's Heavenly Doctrine and Hong Kong). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Chin Wan. 2011. Xianggang Chengbang lun (On Hong Kong as a city state). Hong Kong: Enrich Publishing.

Jiang Shigong. 2008. Zhongguo Xianggang: wenhua yu zhengzhi de shiye (China's Hong Kong: cultural and political perspectives). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

This article highlights Japan's National Resilience (“Kokudo Kyoujinka”) strategy, a very important, multi-trillion-yen initiative that was (incredibly) ignored during the campaign preceding the December 14 election and continues to be. Like most countries' efforts to bolster resilience against accelerating climate change and other patent threats, the content of Japan's plan is a work in progress. But the scale and scope of Japan's strategy is unparalleled, as it is slated to grow from YEN 3.6 trillion in FY 2014 to YEN 4.54 trillion in FY 2015. Properly done, it could be of immense benefit to Japan's resilience and sustainable growth prospects as well as to the global community. However, in the absence of any clear direction to Abenomics, Japan's initiative could be largely squandered on roads and other concrete-intensive projects. Moreover, the programme's core agencies, especially the newly established Association for Resilience Japan, could be conscripted in Japan's revisionists' fight for constitutional reform and the attack on pacificism and critical thinking in civil society.

The nuclear disaster in Fukushima which followed in the wake of the 3/11 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami has given rise to one of the most significant public health crises in modern world history, with profound implications for how nuclear energy is perceived. This paper analyzes the most dire phase of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, showing how the level of risk was assessed by nuclear experts and state-level actors who worked largely out of view of public scrutiny. In addition to examining how the accident progression in the reactors was addressed and conveyed to the general public, the paper addresses how the exclusionary zones were determined by Japanese and foreign governments in Japan. As the crisis unfolded and efforts to bring the reactors under control were initially proving ineffective, concerns increased that the dispersion of radioactive fallout was unmitigated, and with radiation monitoring by the U.S. military indicating levels significantly beyond TEPCO's conservative assessments, the United States broke with Japan, recommending an 80km exclusionary zone, and initiating military assisted departures for embassy staff and Department of Defense dependents from Japan. These actions deviated significantly from Japan's assessments (which had established a 30km evacuation zone), creating a dynamic where the U.S. provided technical consultation for the nuclear response while striving to maintain a delicate diplomatic balance as they attempted to impose a qualitatively different crisis management response. Because this crisis had significant implications for Japan's international relations, diplomatic considerations have helped to suppress the complex, often fractious relations between Japan and foreign governments - especially the United States - whose collective efforts eventually turned the tide from managing the nuclear meltdowns to ameliorating their long-term consequences. Based on interviews with political officials in both the Japanese government and foreign embassies in Japan, and nuclear experts and military officers who worked the crisis, the paper analyzes how technical assessments drove decision making and were translated into political policy.

Reinhart and Rogoff's influential book, This Time is Different (2009), argues that financial crises over the past eight centuries have had similar causes and consequences across diverse societies. The authors make an important empirical contribution to our knowledge of financial crises by showing that excessive borrowing, debt-fuelled asset values, and exuberance about ever-increasing prices are central elements in all of them. They also remind us that we tend to forget past crises, and hence dismantle regulatory and other safeguards implemented in their wake, leaving ourselves ripe for the next bubble. But they do not discuss the diverse ways in which governments have intervened in financial markets to deal with financial crises. Since these crises seem inevitable, and financial sectors are becoming increasingly large shares of national economies (Capelle-Blanchard and Tadjeddine 2010), it is important for social scientists to examine the politics of how they are managed.

Victory for Abe Shinzo and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in two consecutive general elections opened the way for Japan to move closer to the policies of the United States and, at the same time, throw off some of the restraints imposed by the postwar peace constitution and the San Francisco Treaty system.

On 3 April 2013, the People's Daily published a commentary on the violent death of two protesting farmers in Henan, crushed in two separate incidents by vehicles used to clear their land for development. ‘Besides the open questions about the administrative violations,’ wrote the author, ‘there remain other things to be asked: has the expropriation followed the appropriate procedures? Is it legal to build a hotel or any permanent structure on basic agricultural land? And if there are problems, who is going to evaluate them, who is taking responsibility?’ For people to feel that they have obtained justice, the article argued, ‘the greatest efforts should be made to protect the life of every citizen’. These episodes were followed just a few days later by a major incident in which 300 employees of Bureau No.13 of the Ministry of Railways attacked farmers who were picketing land earmarked for expropriation.

After a short introduction contextualizing revisionist history in Japan and controversies over the representation of imperial and wartime violence in Japanese textbooks, this piece presents translations of a wide variety of student writing projects and classroom resources from progressive educators. Focusing exclusively on textbooks results in a limited view of what actually goes on in Japanese classrooms. This collection highlights some of the ways that critical educators have resisted revisionism and brought vivid discussion of controversial issues to the classroom.

Between 2002 and 2013, the Visualizing Cultures (VC) project at M.I.T. produced a number of “image-driven” online units addressing Japan and China in the modern world. Co-directed by John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, VC tapped a wide range of hitherto largely inaccessible visual resources of an historical nature. Each topical treatment-which can run from one to as many as four separate units-formats and analyzes these graphics in ways that, ideally, open new windows of understanding for scholars, teachers, and students. VC endorses the “creative commons” ideal, meaning that everything on the site, including all images, can be downloaded and reproduced for educational (but not commercial) uses.

The “Specially Designated Secrets Protection Law” poses a severe threat to news reporting and press freedom in Japan. Government officials have not shied away from intimidating reporters in the past. The new law will grant them greater power to do so. Passage of the law fulfills a longstanding government objective to gain additional leverage over the news media. The new law could have a withering effect on news reporting and thus on the people's knowledge of the actions of their government.

This article examines how tropes of silence and seclusion were utilized both at the dawn of the Japanese imperial house and in its current iteration. Attempts to subjugate women and to subvert subjugation by women exist in the origin myths of Japan, and are repeated in the Heisei era.

As the third anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster approaches, a string of new projects analyzing its causes and impact are underway. Al-Jazeera America is among the first out of the blocks with a four-part documentary, broadcast on its “America Tonight” segment in early January 2014. Among the questions it explores in the video below: Does the lingering aftermath of the crisis pose any danger to people living on the West Coast of North America?

Radiation makes people invisible. We know that exposure to radiation can be deleterious to one's health; can cause sickness and even death when received in high doses. But it does more. People who have been exposed to radiation, or even those who suspect that they have been exposed to radiation, including those who never experience radiation-related illnesses, may find that their lives are forever changed – that they have assumed a kind of second class citizenship. They may find that their relationships to their families, to their communities, to their hometowns, to their traditional diets and even traditional knowledge systems have been broken. They often spend the remainder of their lives wishing that they could go back, that things would become normal. They slowly realize that they have become expendable and that their government and even their society is no longer invested in their wellbeing.

Along the coast of Manila Bay in the Philippines, behind the grand Manila Hotel, there is a slum district called Baseco. Hidden by towering container yards and cargo ships, this shantytown had been virtually unknown until a few years ago when a television report broadcast nationwide put a red pin on the map of Manila.