The International Olympic Committee and local Olympic organizers promised that the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics would change the South American city. Almost all the promises were broken despite Brazil spending at least $13 billion to organize the games, with some estimates suggesting $20 billion. The Olympics turned into lucrative real estate deals for several billionaire developers. It did manage to drive the construction of a $3 billion metro-line extension, but estimates say it cost 25% more than it should have. Mostly the Rio games were scarred by scandals and left a city, starkly divided by rich and poor, pretty much as it was with a few cosmetic changes.

Singapore earned early plaudits for its management of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the government's failure to pay attention to the health of the country's sizable foreign worker population and its refusal to heed the repeated warnings from infectious disease experts and advocacy groups has led to a major outbreak in cramped dormitories and a lockdown of the entire country. Later, as caseloads dropped and citizens received cash handouts, the ruling People's Action Party staged an election in the hopes of receiving an overwhelming electoral mandate, even as infections remained a serious public health concern. The opposition received its best-ever result, further calling Singapore's elitist partystate governance model into question.

The dynamics of Japan's indigenous rights struggles are not well understood, but the 2020 Tokyo games may spark serious debate on restoring and promoting the social, cultural, economic and political rights of the Ainu people. It appears that people from throughout Japan and the world curious about Ainu culture may be disappointed in the Olympic ceremonies and the new Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park that opens in 2020. The Olympic moment offers an opportunity to embrace diversity, but probably will highlight the limits of the Japanese state's willingness to recognise the rights of Ainu as indigenous people.

There are 608 “children’s homes” (児童養護施設 jidō yōgo shisetsu) across Japan that care for children and adolescents whose parents are unable to care for them (even though in many cases, their parents are known and still in contact with them). The causes for separation vary, including financial or psychological pressures, often taking the form of neglect or abuse. Institutionalization of any kind is always difficult for both children and their caretakers. Inside the children’s homes, the situation is difficult due to limited staff and tight budgets. The onset of COVID-19 has meant a dramatic decrease in the support services, staff, and resources that these institutions can provide, putting an already vulnerable population at added risk. Based on interviews with administrators at some of the leading nonprofits working with these children, this article lays out both the immediate difficulties within children’s homes during this difficult time, and the longer-term challenges they face in providing support for these young people.

Issues we are confronted with in the age of the Anthropocene, such as climate change, extinction, and the coronavirus pandemic demand a fundamental rethink of human-nature relationships, but at the same time we are faced with a ‘crisis of imagination’, which is highlighted by the paucity of stories or narratives that enable us to fully engage with these issues. We have a ‘climate crisis’ as well as a ‘crisis of culture’ and both derive from the same source: epistemological limitations in the paradigm of modernity. The most problematic limitation is the fact that our social scientific knowledge has blind spots when it comes to nature and spirituality which makes it almost impossible for us to rethink human-nature relationships in a meaningful way. Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto, however, directly illuminate these blind spots by making nature and spirituality central features in their animation films. This opens up new epistemological and ontological spaces in the hearts and minds of a global audience, making it possible to imagine something new. And that ‘something new’ is ‘postmodern animism’ which emerged from the fusion of a critique of modernity with the intangible cultural heritage of grassroots Japan. Postmodern animism is a philosophy that sees nature as a combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world thus enabling us to engage with climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic in a radically different way. It helps us to conceive a new paradigm that is more suitable for the Anthropocene.

Reeling from a devastating bushfire season, Australia was slow to respond to the Covid-19 threat, but when modelling in mid-March showed the same pattern of growth that had overwhelmed European health systems, a closely knit network of public health experts gained the ear of government and rapid national action was taken closing workplaces and imposing stay at home orders. With investments in localized testing, contact tracing and sequencing to track the genomic fingerprint of cases, by the end of April new cases had been brought to near zero. Australia's successful containment efforts have paralleled those of regional neighbours such as China, South Korea, Vietnam and Japan, in stark contrast to the uncontained spread in the United States, Australia's traditional ally. The Australian government has tried to navigate these geopolitical tensions by moderating the Trump administration's attempts to turn the pandemic into a political battlefield. Renewed outbreaks in Australia at the end of June suggest SARS-CoV-2 will not be totally eliminated in Australia, but continuing control efforts will bring it to ‘virtual elimination’.

Japan has a pervasive and problematic history based on design by consensus and speculative labor for the design of past Olympic Games as much as for the upcoming Games. The 2020 Games have been defined by design competitions, events where individuals volunteer to create visual graphic works without financial reward for the time and labor spent. This devaluation of creative work helps explain why Tokyo is swathed in mediocre Games-related visuals.

Indonesia remains the country with the largest number of Covid-19 fatalities in Southeast Asia. Observers have focused on the political impact of President Joko Widodo's crisis management. Many argue that the pandemic has exposed the country's democratic decline. This article focuses on the military and analyzes how the army has instrumentalized the coronavirus crisis to boost its agenda. We look into four cases of active army lobbying aimed to expand its missions beyond national defense, arguing that the army has skillfully exploited the Covid-19 crisis to reverse some key post-Suharto military reforms.

This article examines the role of forced labour within the context of Ezo/Hokkaidō's colonization. I draw attention to how in this process, different groups of subaltern people – the indigenous Ainu, political convicts, indentured labourers and Korean workers – contributed to the making of imperial Japan's first colony and the building of the modern Japanese nation state. Yet, even with their shared conditions of working under a Japanese ruling class, these subaltern labourers were not united. My article highlights how their experiences were instead, largely shaped along ethnic, gendered and generational lines.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games are promising comprehensive changes to accessibility for all who will be attending, including athletes, coaches, spectators, volunteers and organizers. The promises of accessibility will have impact on disability sport, society and culture, and the economy. This article examines accessible design features for promotional materials, training venues, hotel accommodations and local transportation, followed by a report on the progress made towards the accessibility goals for the Tokyo 2020 Games

There is a longstanding and fundamental asymmetry in level of mutual understanding between the US and China. Chinese citizens are avid consumers of American media and cultural products, whereas most Americans are woefully unfamiliar with even the basics of Chinese history and culture. This asymmetry has resulted in a situation where the US is in danger of misinterpreting or misunderstanding Chinese motivations in bilateral relations, particularly in times of crisis. This paper recounts how the Covid-19 epidemic of 2020 exacerbated existing tensions between the US and China, and how these escalations in state-to-state conflict were in large part due to America's information deficit with the PRC.

In 1901, British traveller Charles Henry Hawes (1867–1943) made a journey down the Tym' River on the island of Sakhalin, visiting villages occupied by indigenous Nivkh and Uilta people along the river and at its mouth on the Sea of Okhotsk. The island was at that time under Russian control, and had become notorious as a penal settlement, but Japanese influence was also strong: four years after Hawes' visit, following Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the southern half of the island would become the Japanese colony of Karafuto. Hawes had some ethnographic knowledge, but arrived in the island as an interested amateur, more concerned to record his encounters along the route than to develop any particular ethnographic theory. For that reason, he recorded what he saw with an unselective immediacy which sheds light on the fluid and dynamic interactions between indigenous communities, Russian colonisers, Japanese mercantile and fishing interests and other groups. While Hawes' published book, In the Uttermost East, has been used as a source by some scholars of the region, the notebooks that he kept on his travels have lain for years in the Bodleian Library, largely unnoticed by researchers. This article uses these notebooks, Hawes' published work, and photos that he took or collected on his travels, to shed light on aspects of indigenous society in Sakhalin at a crucial moment in its history.

In the unfolding of a global pandemic that has wreaked havoc worldwide, another less obvious pandemic hovers overhead. This is what the United Nations is calling a ‘Shadow Pandemic.‘ A rise in domestic violence within households has been noted in Japan and other countries. The stay-at-home measures to prevent the spread of the infection have essentially kept victims trapped with abusive partners and few means of escaping to the often-closed manga cafes or women's shelters. In this dire time, Japanese laws offer only minimal protection. This article draws on insights from Nakajima Sachiko of NPO Resilience, which aims to spread awareness of domestic violence and the effects of this trauma. She shares her expertise in the field and experiences as a survivor herself on the mechanisms that exist in Japanese laws and society that have created increased vulnerability among victims. Domestic violence in Japan is an area needing stronger attention from the government and legal system.

Persistent in the environment, bio accumulative in animals and humans, and toxic at low levels, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are associated with serious health problems including cancers, hormone imbalance and harm to the immune system. One of the most widespread uses of PFAS has been in aqueous film forming foam (AFFF), a firefighting product linked to extensive contamination at Department of Defense (DoD) installations in the United States. Whereas the DoD has investigated – and in some cases remediated – this problem within the United States, in Japan, host to 78 US military facilities, there has been no such transparency. Civilian checks near DoD bases, notably in Okinawa Prefecture, have detected elevated PFAS levels in waterways, soil, residents' blood and the drinking water supplied to 450,000 people. But US military officials insist there is no proof that its bases are responsible for the environmental problems and they have denied requests from local authorities to conduct on-base checks. This article assesses the most serious environmental threats to Japan and Okinawa associated with PFAS and other chemicals originating at US bases. One method to overcome these obstacles to understanding the threat is the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Internal reports obtained by the author under FOIA reveal that US military operations have been polluting Okinawa and mainland Japan with PFAS via three principal pathways: (1) firefighter training; (2) accidental leaks of AFFF; and (3) disposal of AFFF. Contamination dates from the 1970s and is ongoing; PFAS has spread into neighboring communities, impacting drinking water supplies, and the problem has been exacerbated by negligent handling and disposal of AFFF stocks. This paper concludes with a discussion of how the problem can be further researched and ways to remediate both the contamination and the opacity of US-Japan environmental agreements which allow the US military to suppress information about incessant environmental damage.

The COVID-19 situation in Thailand may be less worrisome in comparison with other countries, but it would be a mistake to celebrate this as the outcome of effective state policy. On the contrary, the Thai case debunks an assertion that an authoritarian approach manages COVID-19 better. Instead, it demonstrates the failure of the government in tackling the pandemic as a result of its shortsighted top-down approach, incapable state agencies, and the lack of investment in healthcare and medical science. Furthermore, COVID-19 has drawn Thailand even closer to China for assistance in this time of pandemic crisis, carrying the potential to shift the balance of power further against the United States.

When the state of emergency was declared in Tokyo, it was less a mandatory order than a request for cooperation and for jishuku (self-restraint). Along with the ambiguous status of such a request in a time of pandemic, this confusion was further compounded by uneven enforcement. While wealthier, middle class areas were left relatively unpatrolled, the areas around the redlight district of Kabuki-chō in Shinjuku, Tokyo, were very strictly monitored despite the lack of any conclusive data at that time regarding the infection patterns or rates. In targeting workers in the “night business,” the Tokyo Metropolitan Government reenacted centuries old prejudices against those working the sex trades. This paper focuses on how the advent of COVID-19 affected the lives of people working in the settai (business entertainment) industry, in particular hostesses in hostess bars, kyabajō (hostesses in clubs), and male hosts. Their voices tell us how, through the government's actions as well as mass media and social media discourse surrounding their work, these laborers were stigmatized, resulting in a worsening of their already precarious positions as they have been expected to do difficult and increasingly dangerous work, almost always without any contract or insurance protection, in a time of pandemic.

Taiwan was the first country to anticipate the threat of COVID-19, to send a medical team to investigate the initial outbreak in China, and to implement a comprehensive and successful public health response that avoided repeated infections or catastrophic lockdowns. Counter-intuitively, Taiwan's success was achieved in part due to its exclusion from international bodies such as the World Health Organization, which led it to adopt a highly vigilant approach to health threats, especially those that emerge in China, whose irredentist claims impinge on Taiwan's participation in the international community and constitute an existential military threat. Taiwan's response to COVID-19 was recast by its diplomatic representatives into “The Taiwan Model”, a formulation used to pursue increased international recognition and participation.

The 2020 Olympics will be held in a Japan that confronts challenges that are a world apart from the Japan of the 1964 Olympics. None is more profound than Japan's demographic dilemma. The population pyramid has been inverted from what it was half a century ago when Japan was a vigorous nation bursting with vitality and hope. The upbeat messaging in 2020 can't obscure questions about how Japan will cope with serious economic and security challenges.

The Summer Olympic Games is the most watched sports mega-event in the world. It is also the costliest, the most politically precarious, and the most strangely constructed sports mega-event on the planet. At the 2020 Games in Tokyo, athletes and spectators alike will be focused on the elite bodies in motion, in agonistic contests and aesthetic displays of excellence and effort. Behind the scenes, however, is a less apparent but deeply powerful institutional and ideological apparatus—the Olympic Movement—that sets the stage, establishes the rules, and reaps many of the benefits of this quadrennial spectacle. My essay offers an anatomy of the Olympic Movement (OM) through the five ways in which it has come to dominate global sport: through the International Olympic Committee as the apex of a transnational governance structure; through the OM management of the Olympic brand as the most lucrative in global sports; through Olympism as the OM's philosophy of universal sports humanism; through OM's power to define and defend multiple subjectivities—Olympic sports, Olympic genders, Olympic citizens, and Olympic bodies; and through the ability of the OM to orchestrate the rhythms of global sport through Olympic temporal regimes. It would appear from these powers that the OM is unassailable and unaccountable, yet the essay concludes by arguing that the OM is an example (perhaps a rare example) of how powerful interests can be made vulnerable to what we can call “rhetorical self-entrapment” and the revenge of unintended effects.

The triad of robust state capacity, strong social trust, and competent leadership has been proposed as essential for a successful national response to the COVID-19 crisis. The flow of information among individuals and entities responsible for the response, and from them to the public, is the thread which unites and activates this triad itself. Effective response depends on timely and unambiguous information being openly available to government bodies, leaders, and society alike. Although Japan's pandemic experience at the time of writing has been mercifully mild, the official Japanese response has objectively been quite flawed on many counts. What can be observed about the accessibility and transparency of the information concerning the pandemic that has been provided to the Japanese public?