The Deck-Hand's Story

Itagaki Kōzō was an orphan of empire. At the end of the Asia-Pacific War, then aged fifteen, he was stranded in the former Japanese colony of Karafuto (Sakhalin). His father, a coal miner, had died in a mining accident when Itagaki was a child, and his mother had been killed in the brief but fierce fighting that erupted as Soviet forces swept into the southern half of Sakhalin following the USSR's declaration of war on Japan on 8 August 1945. Just as many young men in Japan sought survival after the surrender by taking jobs with the occupying American forces, Itagaki survived by becoming a “houseboy” to a Soviet officer, and his employer, Maxim Tarkin, appears to have been connected to the GPU (the forerunner of the KGB). In 1949, Tarkin left for Moscow via China, and allowed Itagaki to accompany him from Sakhalin as far as Shenyang in northern China, from where Itagaki hoped to be able to find a way to the Japanese homeland he had never seen.

Hayao Miyazaki, who in November, 2013 announced his decision to retire from active film-making, is a name well-known to serious film lovers all over the world. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in August, 2014 announced that he will be awarded an Honorary Oscar (Lifetime Achievement Award) at the Academy's 6th Annual Governors Awards on November 8, 2014. The only other Japanese director to have received this prestigious award was the legendary Akira Kurosawa (in 1990). He will now be in the same league of filmmakers that includes the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Satyajit Ray and the world renowned animator Walt Disney. As a result of his untiring work, he had earlier received several prestigious awards. His Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001; Spirited Away) got the Golden Berlin Bear award at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival, and claimed the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars in 2003. It was the first ‘anime’ film, a distinct film genre of Japanese origin, to win an Academy Award. He created numerous films besides this one that deserve recognition and critical acclaim. They are not just simply films of aesthetic and generic (‘anime’) novelty; they contain the depth of creativity, philosophy and values relevant to modern times as well. It is because of this that we need to look back and consider his achievements in the context of the forthcoming honor to be given to him. This article will specifically try to understand why Miyazaki's films are not just a part of the ‘anime’ phenomenon but also are works of astounding creativity that carry deep social, environmental and aesthetic undercurrents.

This article reflects on the predominance of classical music from Europe and the marginalization of Japan's traditional music, which motivated the author to write her book Not by Love Alone: The Violin in Japan, 1850 – 2010.

TOKYO - In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Aoyama Michio's initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government's Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident.

In the upcoming Tokyo gubernatorial elections, Hosokawa Morihiro could make an astonishing comeback more than a quarter of a century after retiring as Prime Minister. Mainstream and independent media have generally stressed his opposition to nuclear power and his support for green energy alternatives, in contrast to the national government of Abe Shinzō. However, Abe and Hosokawa also represent different poles in another controversial field of politics – the politics of memory including the fraught question of apologies for war and the regional and global implications of their respective stances.

In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called

The imbroglio over the new Sony film The Interview is a sideshow that reveals that the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, has lost the plot with regard to North Korea. The real game is to stop, reverse and end North Korea's nuclear weapons breakout. Its handling of The Interview has managed to distract the US government from this strategic imperative, increase the risk of war, including nuclear war, and made it harder than ever to advance American vital security interests in relation to North Korea's nuclear threat.

Regardless of Prime Minister Abe's attempt to make the case that collective self-defense is constitutional, for some time the Self-Defense Forces have been working to achieve for Japan the status of a “state that can wage war overseas.” Behind this movement wriggles U.S. intent.

“Solely defensive” has been rescinded and the ground prepared for the coming right of collective self-defense. Consider the following examples.

China and Korea watchers jumped to attention when it was announced that Xi Jinping would visit South Korea from July 3-4, rather than visit North Korea first. Although the trip could have been seen as reciprocating ROK President Park Geun-hye's visit to China in June 2013, the Chinese side surely was aware that the trip would be viewed abroad as a departure from standard Chinese protocol and would probably upset Kim Jong-un and his colleagues. But while the trip can be judged a success for China, the North Koreans may have less to worry about than might at first appear.

On 9 October 2011, Fukushima Medical University (FMU) started a two-stage programme of thyroid cancer tests for 368,000 residents in Fukushima Prefecture who were aged 18 or under on 11 March 2011. The first stage was the ‘Preliminary Baseline Survey’ and began on residents in ‘high exposure areas’ and eventually covered all municipalities. The original plan had been to commence three years after the incident, but the testing was brought forward due to parental concerns. In April 2014, FMU started the second stage ‘Full Scale Survey’ of 380,000 residents, now including those who were in utero on 11 March 2011. Participants are to be tested once every two years until they are 20 years old, and then every 5 years for the rest of their lives. The programme uses advanced ultrasound equipment and is unprecedented in scale. It is part of a wider Health Management Survey aimed at estimating the exposure levels and assessing the health status of all Fukushima residents, approximately 2 million people. The first case of thyroid cancer was reported on 12 September 2012 after 80,000 children had been tested. Since then, the numbers have risen steadily. As of writing, 56 have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, 1 with a benign tumour, and a further 47 are suspected of having the cancer. This brings the probable total to 103 out of 296,026 eligible residents examined. Thus far, nearly all initially ‘suspected’ cancers have later been confirmed as malignant.

Hiroshima City's unprecedented extreme rain and multiple landslides of August 20 took over 70 lives and wrecked several districts. The disaster was big enough to stay in the international news cycle for a few days, in spite of a summer rife with epidemic Ebola as well as worsening economic, environmental, geopolitical and other crises. This article argues that Hiroshima merits a great deal more sustained attention, indeed that it should be deliberately made a turning point in studying climate change and urban resilience. Surveys of the disaster sites, together with other evidence, suggest that Hiroshima's calamity offers multiple warnings about the impacts of accelerating climate change. This has led to a significant flow of human, fiscal and material resources, within Japan, that could be matched and coordinated with urban-resilience programmes in the US and elsewhere.

Denigrating women who survived comfort station internment is critical to protecting the historical record of the Japanese military and the contemporary reputation of the Japanese government, as Nishino Rumiko and Nogawa Motokazu make clear in these two articles. They describe recent efforts from a range of quarters to ‘injure the victims all over again, rubbing salt in their wounds and violating their human rights’. Recent attacks on survivors include Japanese newspaper companies retracting and publicly disavowing reportage that uses the term ‘sexual slavery’, Japanese politicians equating the fabricated writings of a man (Yoshida Seiji) with the actual historical experience of female victims and the documentary record, and the prime minister tacitly suggesting that claims lodged by survivors in the international sphere hurt the feelings of the Japanese populous and damage its pride.

Compared to its Asian neighbours, Indonesia was late to join the so-called third wave of democratisation that began in southern Europe in the 1970s. After the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime (1967-98) it successfully conducted free and fair elections in 1999, 2004 and 2009, becoming arguably the most politically free country in Southeast Asia. A burgeoning civil society and a relatively open media have helped consolidate democracy but tensions remain between Suharto's legacy and the direction of Indonesia's democratic transition. In particular, Suharto-era oligarchs remain dominant and the armed forces retain significant influence even though their power appears to have declined and is less absolute than in much of Southeast Asia. The pluralism of Indonesia's national motto, Unity in Diversity, is also being jeopardised by the failure to safeguard religious minorities against attacks from hardline Islamists. Against this backdrop Indonesia will administer its fourth round of post-Suharto elections in 2014, with legislative polls in April, followed by direct presidential elections in July.

The last century has been, unfortunately, a century of holocausts. The documentary “The Act of Killing” revives the memory — for both Indonesians and Americans — of one of the greatest: the Indonesian mass slaughter of 1965, whose memory, for a half century, has been perhaps the most effectively suppressed. It is, in fact, virtually impossible to consider the film, or the massacre itself, without also considering, as did my poem Coming to Jakarta, the social functions of first suppressing the most excruciating victim memories, and then painfully beginning to recover them.

Reeling from history's biggest double-blow of natural and nuclear disasters, post 3-11 Japan seemed poised to lead the world's accelerating turn to radical efficiency and renewable energy (the latter accounted for 56% of net additions to global power capacity in 2013). After 3-11, then-Prime Minister Kan Naoto quickly initiated regulatory shackles on the country's nuclear capacity and implemented a feed-in tariff (FIT). These deft moves became core elements in a battering-ram of policy changes and political opposition that forced open a door to profound change in Japan's power mix and its political economy. The country has seen minimal nuclear power generation in the wake of 3-11, and not one kilowatt between September 15 of 2013 and the present. Japan now appears on track towards the restart of at least some of its remaining nuclear capacity. Not without reason, the “smart money” believes Japan's power choices are dominated by fossil fuels and the resumption of considerable nuclear capacity. So it is important to ask whether aggressive efficiency and FIT-incentivized renewable power got through while the door was open or face a suffocating squeeze if significant nuclear generation returns on-line.

In 2010, Rina Bovrisse, then a 36-year old senior retail manager of Prada Japan, lost her job at the Italian fashion company after she accused the company of harassment and discrimination based on age and physical appearance. After a two-year trial in the Tokyo District Court which ended in October 2012, she also lost her claim to financial compensation of 58 million yen on the grounds of sexual harassment (Asien Spiegel, 2013). Bovrisse, who was in charge of approximately 500 employees working in Prada stores in Japan, Guam, and Saipan at that time, was told by Prada Japan Senior Human Resources Manager Takahashi Hiroyuki that she needed to lose weight in order to represent the fashion company. Furthermore, Takahashi had transferred thirteen managers and shop assistants, who were considered “old, fat, ugly” or simply did not have “the Prada look”, to remote locations (Matsutani, 2010). In court, Judge Morioka Reiko ruled that - given Bovrisse's visible position in the fashion company - her employer had every right to tell her to improve her physical appearance, and that this was not a sufficient reason for claiming financial compensation.

This paper uses observations collected “on the ground” inside North Korea to argue that everyday life matters when researching North Korea and that one method of carrying out such research is to travel there as a tourist.

The inception of the U.S.-led nuclear alliance system

From the world's first atomic test on 16 July 1945, uranium, nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons have played a key role in the US-led alliance system. As the former axis powers of Japan, West Germany and Italy as well as other strategically important territories such as South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan, were incorporated in a US foreign policy designed to confront and contain the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, nuclear weapons were deployed with the justification of being necessary to deter large Communist conventional forces. In the New Look doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’ introduced under Eisenhower, Truman's policy of targeting roughly seventy Soviet cities with 133 atomic bombs over thirty days (Operation Fleetwood) was magnified to the use of nuclear weapons like normal munitions and therefore increasing their stockpiles and yield capacity. While the PRC was repeatedly threatened with nuclear strikes from air and missile delivery platforms during the Korean War, as was North Korea, and during the crisis in the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s, by late 1960, a single integrated operational plan (SIOP-62) targeted Soviet, Chinese and satellite cities with the simultaneous launch of all nuclear forces without restraint.

Japan has one of the highest rates of hepatitis C virus infection in the industrialized world. This endemic and the challenges it poses for the future of Japan's healthcare system stem, ironically, from the formation of a modernist settlement beginning in the late 19th century. Modern techno-scientific solutions to political problems inadvertently provided millions of opportunities for hepatitis C to spread in rural communities, among leprosy communities, the traumatized postwar community and into the national blood supply.