Two decades after authoritarian breakdown and democratic transition in 1998, how does the trajectory of Indonesian democracy look? By reflecting on the state of Indonesian politics in the last 15 years, this paper will argue that despite many improvements, Indonesian democracy has experienced a slow process of decline and a deepening of illiberal tendencies. This poses a major challenge for the quality of Indonesian democracy in the near future.

In this collection of essays our authors explore a range of issues not covered in Part 1, examining the broader impact of the Olympic Movement, efforts to spin the message and whether hosting the games is worth the extravagant costs. Two authors focus on the Paralympics, another presents excerpts from a graphic guide to the Olympics while others delve into previous Olympics, what they represented and how they influence the 2020 games. There are also several essays on opposition to the Olympics and lingering concerns about how the government has managed the Fukushima nuclear accident. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic casts an ominous shadow over the games, amid concerns that Prime Minister Abe is sacrificing public health through inaction and minimizing risks in order to save the Olympics. - Jeff Kingston, Editor

Sumiteru Taniguchi was one of the “lucky” ones. He lived a long and productive life. He married and fathered two healthy children who gave him four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He had a long career in Japan's postal and telegraph services. As a leader in Japan's anti-nuclear movement, he addressed thousands of audiences and hundreds of thousands of people. Many of the more than 250,000 who lived in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 were not so lucky.

The rather heterogeneous state of populism research on Japan and the potentially populist quality of the new political party Reiwa Shinsengumi are the two key points addressed in this paper. Based on a summary of dominant concepts of populism and the pertinent research on Japan I argue for an ideational approach to make Japan more accessible to comparative efforts. Using Reiwa Shinsengumi as an example, I conclude that there is little populism to be found and suggest that future research needs to look for explanations why Japan is apparently different in this respect from other mature liberal democracies.

Twenty-three years after the announcement of the U.S.-Japan plan for a new U.S. Marine Corps air base at Henoko, the project's completion date continues to fade into the distance as technical challenges mount. For its part, the Japanese government continues to insist that it will be completed in the face of powerful Okinawan opposition and soaring costs.

In addition to a citizen initiative to launch a criminal lawsuit against Tepco and Japanese state executives over their responsibility for the Fukushima nuclear disaster, more than thirty collective civil actions have been launched across the country. Thus far, thirteen verdicts have been handed down, with a large majority of courts ruling against Tepco and the state. Despite disappointingly small amounts of compensation, these verdicts carry important sociological significance as they challenge the government's efforts to restart nuclear power plants. This article provides an overview and typology of the lawsuits, showing that these civil actions build on a legacy of social movements organized by networks of lawyers and activists.

In Japan, sensō koji (war orphans) are often identified as furōji (juvenile vagrants). The dominant image of sensō koji is therefore a street child engaging in a variety of adult survival activities in such cities as Tokyo after the war's end. This essay aims to problematize this myth. In the first part, I reconsider the meaning of koji, sensō koji and furōji as socially “constructed” terms after the onset of the Meiji Era (1868-1912). In the second part, I focus on the voices and experiences of the majority of sensō koji, who were taken into their relatives' homes immediately after the loss of their parents. The war took the lives of many children. Sensō koji survived. However, it was only since the 1970s that they began to speak about their wartime and postwar experiences to fulfill their obligation. Did the wartime state truly “protect” the nation's children? Their ultimate goal seems to be to answer this question.

On 8 August 2016, Emperor Akihito 明仁天皇 (r. 1989-2019) appeared on national TV to address the Japanese people for only the second time in his twenty seven year reign. His first appearance was five years before in March 2011 in response to the devastation of the Great East Japan Earthquake. In 2016, it was the very different matter of abdication that animated him. In a performance that was all the more riveting for being understated, he informed the nation - in suitably oblique fashion - of his desire to abdicate. The problem he confronted was the law. The Imperial Household Law (Kōshitsu tenpan 皇室典範) has no provision for abdication; rather in Chapter 3 it provides for a regency in the event an emperor can no longer continue. Emperor Akihito was challenging the law, and seeking popular support for his challenge. This was a political move of the sort not permitted him under the constitution. So, it is little wonder that Emperor Akihito caused a stir.

Jeff Kingston, Editor of this special issue, assembled a team of contributors from all over the region and is grateful for their working on a tight deadline to assess the pandemic in Asia as of July 2020. In editing this volume he received valuable editorial assistance from Laney Bahan, guidance from Mark Selden and production processing assistance from Joelle Tapas, Hannah LaTourette and Yayoi Koizumi who shepherded the manuscripts from submission to publication with patience and acuity.

Although Hong Kong historically has a weak trade union culture, in mid-2020 activists in the movement turned to demanding union representation and began forming dozens of small unions from the ground up. Within a few months of their existence they were able successfully to mount an important strike protesting against the government's policy to deal with Coronavirus pandemic. But since the passing of the National Security Law in July, the unions' future is fraught with challenges.

I first met Mori Masahiro in the spring of 1986, when interviewing scientists for my book Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia. Mori's focus was on robots and Buddhism, which seemed a novel combination to me at the time.

Jeff Kingston, Editor of this special issue, assembled a team of contributors from all over the region and is grateful for their working on a tight deadline to assess the pandemic in Asia as of July 2020. In editing this volume he received valuable editorial assistance from Laney Bahan, guidance from Mark Selden and production processing assistance from Joelle Tapas, Hannah LaTourette and Yayoi Koizumi who shepherded the manuscripts from submission to publication with patience and acuity.

A mega-event like the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics justifies a monumental two-part special issue. This is an inter-disciplinary effort involving Japan specialists from around the globe who locate the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in light of previous Olympics and a wide range of issues pertinent to the Olympic movement and Japan’s global role. The call for papers elicited a rapid and robust response by scholars, translators and writers who have taken to heart my instructions to write accessible, jargon-free essays that distill their knowledge and insights without compromising rigor and reliability. Our targeted audience is educators and their students as well as general readers who need access to high quality, online resources at a time when interest in the Olympics runs high. We also hope that curious visitors and journalists will benefit from and enjoy this compilation as they scrutinize the PR spectacle, messaging and branding, and delve deeper into contemporary Japan’s dilemmas and simmering challenges. - Jeff Kingston, Editor

The US-China relationship continues to sour under the impact of Covid-19, with the Trump administration threatening to cut all ties with China in a move that would divide the world into two competing trade entities.1 It's been a bad year for China, with accusations over the origins of the pandemic coming on top of China's difficulties in managing the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.2 Under these circumstances, the energy perspective provides a fascinating set of insights into the evolving US-China relationship. The economic havoc unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic has been bad enough, with reports of looming industry collapse by the International Energy Agency and others.3 But its economic impact has been exacerbated by an ugly price war in the oil industry, seeing prices tumble alongside a collapse in demand. At one point in April, the oil price reached a widely publicised negative level – an unprecedented phenomenon. Now the price is low but at present relatively stable, following a tripartite agreement between the world's three largest oil suppliers – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia. In the last few days, the oil price has recovered to nearly $30 per barrel, providing some modest relief.4 But the impact on the US has been severe, with the high-cost and highly debt-leveraged shale oil industry, which propelled the US to become the world's largest oil producer, facing near collapse. It has long been the goal of both the Saudi and Russian oil industries to damage the upstart US shale industry, which was protected by relatively high oil prices. Now with this protection withdrawn, combined with collapsing demand, the US industry faces severe problems.

This essay revisits the 1946-7 “Politics and Literature Debate” (Seiji to bungaku ronsō), a pivotal controversy among leftist Japanese writers and intellectuals that is conventionally cited as the starting point of postwar literary history. Situating the debate in tandem with three influential texts published at roughly the same time in the West—Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1951), Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), and The God That Failed (1950), edited by Richard Crossman—the essay argues that the debate should be considered an early instance of the Cold War culture that would emerge globally in the decades that followed.

Compelling women's fiction in Japan hardly began with its two brightest contemporary stars, Kawakami Mieko and Murata Sayaka. Tawada Yoko won the Akutagawa Prize back in 1993 and her work is widely read outside Japan (Tawada has long lived in Germany and writes in German and Japanese). Ogawa Yoko won in 1990 for her novel Pregnancy Diary (Ninshin karendaa, 妊娠 カレンダー). In 2004 the Akutagawa went to two young women, Wataya Risa (19) and Kanehara Hitomi (20). There have been English translations of fiction by Japanese women for decades.

This article focuses on the criminal justice consequences of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima that was precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Through a process of “mandatory prosecution” initiated by Japan's unique Prosecution Review Commissions, three executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company were charged with criminal negligence in 2015-2016. They were acquitted at trial in 2019 when the Tokyo District Court concluded there was insufficient evidence to convict. Following this verdict, Japanese prosecutors essentially said “we told you so – these cases should not have been prosecuted.” But we argue that a courtroom loss does not mean that the case should never have been brought, for the TEPCO trial and the criminal process that preceded it performed some welcome functions. Most notably, this criminal case revealed many facts that were previously unknown, concealed, or denied, and it clarified the truth about the Fukushima meltdown by exposing some of TEPCO's claims as nonsense. At the same time, this case study illustrates the limits of the criminal sanction and the difficulty of controlling corporate crime in the modern world.

This article makes use of network analysis to examine the establishment of the War Convicted Benefit Society (Sensō jukei-sha sewa-kai), an influential advocacy group in the popular movement that pushed for amnesty for Japanese war criminals from 1952 to 1958. By graphing the networks created by members of the Society, I demonstrate that early Occupation policies, precisely those that convicted and purged these old elites and resulted in the detention of many of them in Sugamo prison, actually created a new network of conservative power figures by linking the otherwise unconnected old mid-rank military network and the old colonial/political elite network to rally around their common experience of being “prosecuted.”