The following passages are excerpted from Prof. Uesugi Satoshi's important consideration of inherent paradoxes in Japanese society today involving, on the one hand, an intense determination to resolve North Korea's “abduction” of Japanese nationals during the late 1970s and 80s, and on the other hand, an equally apparent determination to downplay the “abduction” elements of Japan's state sponsored system of wartime sexual slavery, commonly known as the “comfort women.” In his lengthy article, Uesugi examines aspects of the recent controversy over the Asahi newspaper's coverage of the comfort women issue, as well as its August 2014 retractions of various articles it previously published. The former Asahi journalist, Uemura Takashi, who wrote those newspaper articles decades ago, has contributed his story to the Asia-Pacific Journal. We draw attention below to Uesugi's emphasis on the contradictions in mediating “abduction” that are at play today, highlighting especially his attention to the legal definition of the crime of abduction. His essay in full in Japanese is linked at the end, as are materials on the issues from a 2007 press conference organized by the Center for Research and Documentation of which he is secretary general.

Uemura Takashi, a former reporter of the Asahi Shimbun, is currently an adjunct lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo. In 1991, while a reporter for the Asahi, he wrote two articles on Kim Hak-sun, the first “comfort woman” to come forward to tell her story (1991). Because of these two articles, Uemura has been the target of denunciations by nationalists. He has been labeled “the reporter who fabricated the ‘comfort woman’ issue” and denounced by nationalists as a “traitor.” Such bashing took a critical turn for the worse in 2014, to the extent that he and his family risk losing their right to a livelihood.

This article examines disaster risk governance for island case studies, focusing on Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS). SIDS examples are used to examine two main areas in line with this special issue's themes: power and knowledge in disaster risk governance. The interactions between those themes are explored for three SIDS governance scales: regional, national, and sub-national. Linking the theoretical discussion with empirical examples demonstrates how bypassing government can be suitable for disaster risk governance.

Given the numerous news reports and articles describing unprecedented rates of self-inflicted deaths among U.S. active-duty personnel, with figures by 2012 exceeding those of soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan, military suicide has become an issue of burning relevance for today's U.S. military Rising rates have also been recorded in other countries, including Japan, where the number of suicides among members of the Self-Defence Forces has remained higher than the national or civilian average since 2003. Moreover, in the case of Japan, it would not be the first time that officials were confronted with data indicating an increase in suicides among military personnel.

On January 28, 1905, the Japanese Cabinet formally adopted a resolution incorporating the island of Dokdo/Takeshima as Japanese territory. Justifying the incorporation based on the claim that Dokdo/Takeshima was “an uninhabited island with no evidence that can be recognizable as having been occupied by another country (無人島ハ他國ニ於テ之ヲ占領シタリト認ムヘキ形迹ナク …”, the Japanese government then renamed the island Takeshima (竹島) and placed its jurisdiction under Shimane Prefecture, which in turn put it under the magistracy of Oki Island. This action by the Japanese government was strongly disputed by the Republic of Korea, igniting a bitter controversy between the two Asian neighbors. Following Japan's defeat in the Pacific War in 1945, Korea, claiming historical rights, regained its control over the island. Japan regards this as an illegal occupation based on its 1905 incorporation. This article offers a historical perspective on the Dokdo/Takeshima controversy by examining the historical claims made by both Japan and South Korea.

Angus McDougall, an Australian serviceman, was captured by the Japanese in the early stages of the Asia-Pacific War and sent to Changi prisoner of war camp. From there he, like over 40,000 others, was transported by rail to Banpong in Thailand on his way to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. The journey was gruelling. POWs were packed 28 or more to a truck in goods wagons. The trucks were far too small to carry such a number, the heat was intense, and food and water were scarce. Interviewed about his experiences many decades later, McDougall echoes other survivors in describing the journey as “hell”.

In early May 2015, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) reported that the 23 sites related to Japan's industrialization in the Meiji period (“Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining”) met the criteria for designation as World Heritage sites. ICOMOS' evaluation paved the way for the sites to be inscribed in the World Heritage list at the 39th session of the World Heritage Committee in Bonn, Germany. South Korea voiced its opposition immediately, citing the use of Korean forced labor at 7 of these sites, and criticized Japan's nomination for attempting to obfuscate that history. Seoul demanded that Japan address the use of forced labor at these sites, but Tokyo rejected these calls as “political claims.” Japan and Korea met twice to discuss the issue (on 22 May and 9 June) but failed to reach any agreement. At the same time, Korea's foreign minister met with his counterparts in Germany, Croatia, and Malaysia - all three are members of the 21-member World Heritage Committee - to present Seoul's case against Japan's World Heritage proposal. On 21 June, however, Japanese and Korean foreign ministers meeting in Tokyo announced their agreement to cooperate to ensure the inscription of both Japan's Meiji industrial sites and South Korea's Baekje Historic Area into the World Heritage list at Bonn.

As a young historian researching prewar popular political movements in the early 1970s, Yoshimi Yoshiaki (b. 1946) became increasingly struck—and troubled—by the systematic inattention to popular experiences of the war period, along with the virtually universal silence on questions of popular war responsibility. Imbued with the progressive convictions of a scholarly generation that came of age amid the political struggles of the late 1960s, he was dissatisfied with the near-universal academic focus on elites and abstract social structures that rendered the story of the Japanese experience of the war “a history without people.” After many years of research, stops and starts, the end result was Grassroots Fascism: a radically different vantage on the wartime experience from the “bottom-up” and a bold attempt to break out of the constricted confines of “history in the passive voice.”

Masako Robbins' intimate personal account of her life in pre-war, wartime, and early postwar Okinawa compels the reader to experience the history of this tumultuous era from the perspective of the daughter in an impoverished family. Sold as a child by her father to a brothel in the 1930s, and drafted by the Japanese military as a combat nurse during the Battle of Okinawa, she barely survived after being trapped in a cave collapsed by shelling. Placed in a refugee camp at the end of the battle, her family later returned to their village to find their home destroyed. Her strength, resourcefulness, and resilience throughout these horrifying ordeals are nothing short of astounding. Now eighty-six years old and living in Yuma, Arizona, Masako learned enough English after coming with her first husband to the United States in 1952 to write this memoir in English. In 1964 she met Warren and Mieko Rucker who, together with Karen King, edited the text, a portion of which is presented below.

On May 24, 2015, thirty women peacemakers from fifteen nations, including American feminist activist Gloria Steinem and two Nobel Peace laureates, Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, walked with Korean women of the North and South to call for an end to the Korean War and the peaceful reunification of Korea on the seventieth anniversary of its division. The arbitrary division of the peninsula in 1945 by the United States and the Soviet Union led to the creation of two separate states, setting the stage for an all-out civil war in 1950 that became an international conflict. After nearly 4 million people were killed, mostly Korean civilians, fighting was halted when North Korea, China, and the United States representing the UN Command signed a ceasefire agreement in 1953, which called for a political conference within three months to reach a peace settlement. Over 60 years later, we are still waiting. To renew the call for a peace settlement by offering a model of international engagement, Women Cross DMZ organized peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul where women shared experiences of mobilizing to bring an end to violent conflict, and crossed the two-mile wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates millions of Korean families as a reminder that division can be overcome. As one of the members of the organizing committee of Women Cross DMZ, I travelled with other international women peacemakers to meet face-to-face with Korean women on both sides of the DMZ and cross the military demarcation line that divides Korea. On the seventieth anniversary of Korea's partition this August 2015, I write as a historian of modern Korea to reflect upon the experience specifically from a feminist standpoint.

JAPAN'S WARTIME PROPAGANDA IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, E.H. Carr finished his draft of Twenty Years' Crisis. In it he observed:

[W]ithin twenty years of the armistice [of the First World War]… many governments were conducting propaganda with an intensity unsurpassed in the war period; and new official and non-official agencies for the influence of opinion at home and abroad were springing up in every country.

In July 2014, the front page of the Mainichi Shinbun featured a small picture of a young man in glasses with the headline, “Today's Faces.” A blurb below the photo declared, “The real name of the early Showa author Hōjō Tamio, who had Hansen's Disease and lived a life under quarantine, will be made public in a booklet to be published next month.” The article then revealed that Hōjō Tamio, the author of the novella “Life's First Night,” was born Shichijō Kōji and raised in Anan-shi, on the island of Shikoku in Tokushima prefecture.

Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, I argue that these two threats are symptomatic of a growing structural imbalance in all economies, which is how nature is exploited to create wealth and how it is shared among the population. The root of this imbalance is that natural capital is underpriced, and hence overly exploited, whereas human capital is insufficient to meet demand, thus encouraging relatively higher wages for skilled labor and resulting wealth inequality.

Two headline stories dominate discussion of China's energy trajectory right now. The first is that reports from three agencies all point to the continuing decline in use of coal in the first half of 2015, continuing a trajectory already notable in 2014. These are not declines in the rate of growth, but absolute declines in the amount of coal consumed in power generation as well as in energy-intensive industries like steel and cement production. This points to the possibility that coal consumption may be peaking much earlier than anticipated in official government statements – and so pointing to an early peaking of carbon emissions. If continued, this would be a ‘Great Reversal’ of China's recent dominant role in consumption of dirty fossil fuels and production of greenhouse gases.

What follows is a translation of the second half of Ōe Kenzaburō's article, America ryokōsha no yume—jigoku ni yuku Huckleberry Finn, which was first published in the September 1966 issue of the monthly Sekai (The World). The untranslated first half begins, “America. I shall never become entirely free from the oppressing, demonic power of the word America,” and describes how the writer has lived since boyhood “within the conflicting, extremely complicated [inferiority] complex that the word America evokes.”

Team Abe keeps saying it will try to gain public understanding of its controversial security legislation, but there are few signs that it is winning anyone over. The massive youth-led demonstration in front of the Diet on August 30, widely reported as involving more than 120,000 Japanese spanning the often-divided liberal spectrum and involving all generations, is a sign of the times. Demonstrators loudly denounced Prime Minister Abe Shinzo as a threat to peace and the constitution while some signs depicted him as a warmongering fascist tyrant and puppet of Uncle Sam.

To Japan and to the world Japan is a democratic country, in which popular sovereignty, the rule of law, and the division of powers (executive, legislative, judicial) are assured. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has repeatedly told international fora – including the US Congress and the UN General Assembly – that such is the case. But what is evolving now in the course of confrontation between the Abe government and the people of Okinawa, led by their Governor, suggests otherwise.

This article is the first of a three-part symposium. See parts two and three here.

Perhaps it should have been foreseen, but it was not evident in 1995 just how farcical, tragic, and alarming the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII would look in Japan. Then, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, the Socialist politician in an extraordinary coalition, to put it politely, with the Liberal Democratic Party, issued a statement acknowledging that his country, “through its colonial rule and aggression, [had] caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.” That followed upon a declaration two years earlier by the then chief cabinet secretary, Kōno Yōhei, which states, “Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military authorities of the day. The then Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women. The recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military. The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments. They lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” This remarkably straightforward observation from what is known as the “Kono Statement” exists in “unofficial” translation on the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

C. Douglas Lummis, Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Intercultural Communication, Okinawa Christian University, discusses his experiences in the present resistance movement in Okinawa and how his observations reflect some of the central arguments in his book, Radical Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1996). In this series of interviews, Lummis suggests that fundamental political changes can and often do emerge through the conditions that people confront as they are drawn through natural curiosity to communicate with one another and to find out through dialogues what is happening to society. The conditions that Okinawa now faces in the anti-base struggle provide an excellent case study of how radical democracy actually works. Lummis draws upon his experiences and observations over the decades in the military occupation of Okinawa, in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement. The interview features reflections on institutionalized racism and bigotry during the McCarthy Era, analysis of how expressions in public discourse representing the “other” reflected a deeply ingrained subconscious hatred or contempt for African Americans and Asians generally; an illuminating synopsis of colonialism and the lure of the free market in the expansion of capitalism in Africa and Asia as both historical and antidemocratic processes, all of which point to the rampant inequality and poverty across the current world. Rounding out the discussion is an insightful commentary on the contradictions inherent in respecting Japan's pacifist constitution while maintaining a strong and expansive military.

“You lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, and then you win.”

Rosa Luxemburg

The worldwide revolutionary movement inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 encompassed a powerful cultural component: hundreds of thousands of literary, visual, and performing artists – writers, painters, filmmakers, photographers, composers, and others – passionately devoted their work to the monumental task of a radical reconstitution of the world. As a prominent Yugoslav author, Miroslav Krleža, was to write in 1924: “Lenin's name in the year 1917 signified a lighthouse beacon above the shipwreck of international civilization.”