This translation of photographer and critic Nakahira Takuma's (1938-2015) 1972 essay, “The Illusion Called the Documentary: From the Document to the Monument,” illuminates a crucial shift in Nakahira's understanding of both the profound limitations—as well as the radical potential of—photography. The essay's contemporaneous insights into the role of photography during the infamous Asama-Sansō Incident in 1972 offers a crucial counter-perspective that remains absent from existing accounts of this incident. Nakahira's essay demonstrates a pivotal moment within the development of a radical discourse of media power in the year of Okinawa's Reversion to mainland Japanese rule, shedding light on an undercurrent of critical perspectives that continue to resonate in the contemporary moment.

The late writer and journalist Kase Hideaki was long involved in shaping public opinion in Japan. Espousing a conservative and nationalist worldview, he chaired several major associations that sought to revise Japan's constitution and embellish its history. In an interview shortly before he passed away last November, Kase discussed his upbringing and his political and social outlook. This article offers a brief obituary of Kase and explores his worldview.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a US citizen who was born in Japan, has taught in both countries. Applying his specialized knowledge of Russian history to an analysis of the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, he challenges the prevailing American view that the US decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified. The prevailing view is based on two premises: first, the use of the atomic bombs was the only option available to the US government to avoid launching a costly invasion of the Japanese homeland; and second, the atomic bombings had an immediate and direct impact on Japan's decision to surrender. Dr. Hasegawa rebuts both assumptions. He also assesses a third – and often hidden – justification for dropping the bombs, namely, the American desire for revenge. He argues that, even before the atomic bombings, the United States had already crossed the moral high ground that it had held. He views the US use of atomic bombs as a war crime. But he asserts that this action must be understood in the context of Japan's responsibility for starting the war of aggression and committing atrocities in the Asia–Pacific War.

This article considers the negotiations and historical context of Japan's two major climate change bills. We find that the political approach to emissions reductions has resulted in non-specific, iterative reduction commitments from 1998, while attempts to introduce reduction schemes or taxes and define specific long-term targets, as in 2010, largely failed due to stalwart opposition from the energy and heavy industry sectors. Negotiations were further complicated by inter-ministry conflict, the often-rotating prime ministership, and the uncertain role of nuclear power. While these earlier efforts and changing international standards laid track for legislative revisions in 2021, their ultimate realization remains uncertain.

Takeda Shinpei was invited to create an art installation at Centro Nacional de las Artes, located in Mexico City. This chapter is a vivid telling of Takeda's process working on this piece, part of his Alpha Decay series which foregrounds voice vibrations of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings. Takeda details the ways in which he drew from his own memories of adolescence, reckoned with voices of the “hibakusha,” and channeled these complex and haunting intersections through his body into his art. Takeda thus weaves a powerful yet honest and vulnerable narrative that shares reflections on method and ethical praxis.

Walking in cities has a long history, but its organized form has boomed in recent years. Some walks aim to make a city more “open, accessible, and equitable” (Open City 2023). Top-ranked ones on Tripadvisor tend to focus on culinary, cultural, or historical highlights. Others push planned developments in Orlando and Dubai (Universal Studios 2023; Merex Investment Group 2023). This essay reflects on the experience of making a podcast, historicity, to argue that walking in a city can do more. It can reveal the connections between particular sights and the urban whole, the wealth and power by which a city is riven, and the links between it and the world. It can show how these things have changed over time. And by doing this, it can empower the walker. Understanding how a city got to be the way it is, on the streets, can provide some space to make a self at home. Exposing the multiple streams that lead to the present – and the seams that they have opened up in the urban fabric – makes it possible to imagine how things might be different. Any one podcast or tour can only do so much, however. There will always be more walks to take, streams to discover, and stories to tell.

This article exposes human rights violations committed at Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, identifying their structural causes and discussing Korean society's efforts to address them. From 1975 to 1987, Brothers Home was the largest group residential facility for the homeless, the ill, the disabled, and the poor—a program that was even commended by the Korean government. However, over the years, various human rights abuses led to the death of 657 residents. While these violations remained hidden from public view for almost 25 years, survivors and supporters waged a long battle to bring them to light. Recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated and confirmed the human rights violations as state violence. In this essay, the authors assess the significance this case holds for Korean society.

In these notes, we share our experiences of researching and co-authoring a recent article on the comparative treatment of Japanese residents and internees by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the first decade following World War II. This collaboration started from our surprising realization that despite their shared ideology and friendly relations, Moscow and Beijing adopted different approaches to dealing with Japanese citizens under their control. Here we recount the decade-long path our collaborative research took as we consulted multilingual government archives, survivor interviews, and memoirs to reconstruct the early years of Sino–Soviet cooperation and to argue for a more comprehensive, empirical approach to the evolution of early Cold War international relations in East Asia. The article, ‘“Japan Still Has Cadres Remaining”: Japanese in the USSR and Mainland China, 1945–1956‘, was published by the Journal of Cold War Studies in its Summer 2022 issue.

In this introduction to an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa's travel memoir A Dosimeter on the Narrow Road to Oku, I give an outline of Sukegawa's biography, his reasons for undertaking a journey by bicycle in 2012 along Matsuo Basho's route in The Narrow Road to Oku, and the reasons for my own particular interest in this text. The translation covers the section of his journey from Fukagawa to Nasu. It won the 2021 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature, Thought, and Society.

In France and Germany, it would have been unthinkable for a cabinet member of the Vichy government or the Nazi regime to become a national leader after the war. This was not the case in Japan with Kishi Nobusuke, who served as Minister of Trade and Industry in the wartime Tōjō cabinet. Astonishingly, Kishi became Prime Minister in February 1957. Similarly, Emperor Hirohito's war guilt and responsibility were never questioned at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, despite the abundance of crystal-clear evidence. In this article, I discuss how closely the U.S. and Japanese governments have been collaborating for the last 78 years since the end of the Asia-Pacific War in August 1945, supporting one another to whitewash each other's war crimes and responsibility in every possible way.

In September 2022, the curtains at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia opened for the last time. Given the hundreds of millions spent, long delays, few trials, and non-stop controversies, many people wonder if the tribunal was worth the time, money, and effort. This essay describes three perspectives on the tribunals, two negative (purist and progressivist perspectives) and one more positive (the pragmatist perspective). The author then discusses why, despite the tribunal's shortcomings, he agreed to testify as an expert witness, an experience recounted in his recently published book, Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell University Press, 2022).

The recent popularity of the film Oppenheimer has revived the discussion of the making and use of the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945. Meanwhile, Russia's war against Ukraine since February 2022 and ongoing threats to democracy in the United States have made the use of nuclear weapons an urgent issue once again. In this timely context, the author draws on his research expertise to comment on the dangers of false narratives around nuclear weapons in light of recent events.

While the passage of the 2018 Gender Parity Law was a step in the right direction, progress on women's political empowerment in Japan has been slow. With a combined effort from advocacy groups, political parties, and the international community to include more women on ballots and support them to electoral success, Japan can move the needle on gender equity in politics.

This essay discusses Hun Sen's rise and longevity by examining the former Khmer Rouge battalion leader's emergence from the fall of Democratic Kampuchea in 1979 and subsequent steady consolidation of political power in the years since he took over as Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (1985–89) and the State of Cambodia (1989–93). The essay explores how he accomplished an autocratic coup de grâce by ousting political rivals and then attempted to forge autocratic legitimation via self-mythologization and appeals to royal imagery. Through these means and heavy-handed repression, Hun Sen today has come to hold virtually unchecked, unmediated political power over a country that is still searching for the truth in its fraught post-independence history.

Claims of sexual abuse against the pop Svengali are symbolic of an entertainment industry that views pop stars as disposable objects and sublimates their sexuality and individuality to the demands of fame.

In the face of a high aging population, decline in the rates of marriage and childbirth, and post-growth economic shifts, sociality is downsizing in Japan away from the family to more single lifestyles. The effects of this on the necro-landscape are examined here in terms of what happens to those who die all alone, untended by others (“lonely death”) as well as new practices emerging to replace the family grave and family caregivers with an alternative social model (what is called “promiscuous care”). The essay argues that, at both ends of this spectrum, smell can be used to register both the unsociality of a bad death, as well as the shifting sociality of new ways of handling the dead. (This short article is based on Being Dead Otherwise, recently published by Duke University Press).

Muslim migrants in Japan suffer from the lack of access to burial grounds when 99.9% of the nation is cremated. Muslims are usually met with opposition from the local community where cemetery construction is planned. Using ethnographic data, the study shows how Muslim associations inadvertently fail to respect the codes of Japanese rurality when seeking a cemetery in a community to which they do not have membership, leading to a conflict. This paper closes with policy prescriptions for the central government in ensuring the cultural rights of immigrant minorities in Japan.

Paper City (2021), directed by Adrian Francis, is a documentary film that highlights the 70th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945. The film presents three elderly survivors' oral accounts of the firebombing and observes their work as memory activists in a long campaign to compel the Japanese government to publicly memorialize the event in a way commensurate with its enormous devastation. Reflecting on issues of memory and forgetting, Francis intends the film as a way of passing survivors' experiences to audiences, who can help to transfer memory to others and to generations beyond.