The mercury discharged into the sea by the Chisso factory in Minamata, and the radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are not entirely different “accidents,” although one was the result of a “natural disaster” and one not. Minamata offers hints of future developments as Japan attempts to respond to and recover from Fukushima.

Hirose is the author of several books, including Nuclear Reactor Time Bomb (2010), which predicted a Fukushima-style disaster. Hirose, like several others included in this reader, represents the voice of the knowledgeable layman; he is not an expert/scholar on nuclear power, but the meticulous research he has done and his own common sense have earned him wide respect. This article is an excerpt from Hirose's new book, Fukushima Meltdown.

Introductory Note: This is the first of a two part series describing the wartime roles of two of Japan's best-known 20th century Zen masters, Sawaki Kōdō (1880-1965) and Nakajima Genjō (1915-2000). Beginning with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, followed by the Asia-Pacific War of 1937-45, these masters left a record not only of their battlefield experiences but, more importantly, the relationship they saw between their Buddhist faith and war. Additionally, each was affiliated with one of Japan's two main Zen sects, i.e., Sawaki was a Sōtō Zen priest while Nakajima was a priest in the Rinzai Zen sect. Finally, Sawaki served as a soldier in the Imperial Army during the Russo-Japanese War, while Nakajima was a sailor in the Imperial Navy during the Asia-Pacific War.

In contrast to the previous article, in which Hirano upholds Ainu Chiri Yukie as an example of a colonized subject who established an ethnic pride in her Ainu identity, Park's article examines the other side of the colonial coin by focusing on the notion of self-assimilation in “pro-Japanese literature” (shin'nichi bungaku in Japanese, chin'il munhak in Korean). Such writing was written in either the Korean or Japanese language by Koreans who portrayed Japanese colonial rule in positive terms. Park argues for a re-evaluation of this literature which is “often taken as nothing more than an explicitly state-approved literature;” the writings can provide insights into the thinking of Korean colonial subjects of the time. He claims that “in fact, no writing more effectively expresses the confusion of Koreans during the late 1930s to mid-1940s, when the pressure to become ‘Japanese’ took place under the banner of ‘Japan and Korea as one body’ (naisen ittai).”

While other articles in this course reader treat the earlier forces that created and framed Zainichi, Rumi Sakamoto's article deals with the discourse in contemporary Japan concerning Zainichi Koreans. As John Lie recognizes in his article, many Japanese still view Zainichi Koreans with racist animosity; this is also the case in cyberspace.

Ang Lee's 2007 movie, Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) based on a short story by Zhang Ailing, is a deeply unsettling exploration of enmity and collaboration filtered through the medium of the erotic. The Chinese head of the Japanese Secret Service in 1942 Shanghai, Mr Yee, develops a sexual relationship with the winsome Mrs Mak who is a secret agent for the resistance and seeks to lure him to his assassination. The film maker skillfully utilizes the torrid sexual encounters between the two to register their ever-changing and volatile feelings of lust, hatred, violence and love.

Yoneyama analyzes the Fukushima and Minamata tragedies in the context of the “life-world,” a concept coined by OGATA Masato. Ogata is a Minamata fisherman who has written and spoken on philosophical matters, drawing experience from his experience growing up in the wake of Japan's worst pollution disaster. Yoneyama recounts the struggle victims of Minamata disease, including most of Ogata's immediate family, have faced in receiving compensation.

Aukema explains that renowned author and atomic-bomb survivor HAYASHI Kyoko is expanding her long-time criticism of nuclear weapons to include nuclear power. Survivors of the atomic bombs, such as Hayashi, are known as hibakusha. They often had to struggle to obtain assistance, or even recognition, from the government for their radiation-induced suffering. The voices of the hibakusha are an important addition to the discussion of nuclear power; their experience in 1945 give their statements a large impact in the twenty-first century.

Nick Cunningham of Oil Price.com has written a timely article summarizing the World Cup's gargantuan energy consumption and carbon footprint. The World Cup soccer competition underway in Brazil is held quadrennially, and is apparently the most watched sporting event of all. This year's games are to culminate in the July 17 finale in Rio de Janeiro. The games appear likely to set both a viewing record as well as a record for energy consumption and carbon emissions. An estimated 900 million watched the opening ceremonies of London's 2012 Olympics. But the World Cup governing body FIFA's research suggests 909.6 million viewers watched at least a minute of the 2010 World Cup, and Cunningham tells us there may be as many as 3 billion viewers for this event in 2014. Moreover, broadcasting's technical innovations are proceeding apace. Ultra-high definition broadcasts (expected to become standard in 2017) are being used for three of this year's matches, taking advantage of the event's eyeball-dense economics. The official match ball is the Adidas Brazuca, one of which has its own twitter account and micro-cameras studding its surface.

Approaching the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Tribunal in 2006, public opinion was divided over Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine. One reason for opposition to the visit was that Tokyo Tribunal Class A war criminals are enshrined there.

On August 15 1985, then Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, despite strong domestic and international criticism, carried out an official visit to Yasukuni. The government later acknowledged during parliamentary questioning that it had accepted the verdict of the Tokyo Tribunal through the San Francisco Peace Treaty. As a result, Prime Minister Nakasone refrained from further visits to the shrine from the following year. Though aware of these historical developments, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has persisted in visiting Yasukuni Shrine since his assumption of office in 2001. In 2005, he again visited the shrine in the face of strong criticism in Japan and abroad. Conservative newspapers like the Sankei Shinbun take the view that “visiting the shrine is not a Treaty violation.” This argument, however, is not in the least compelling. [1]

When we speak of “religion,” we often associate it first and foremost with matters of belief: to be “religious” is commonly understood in terms of the doctrines we accept, and the extent to which our actions are rooted in those doctrines. Indeed, our behavior (whether ethical or ritual) often makes sense precisely in the context of the religious world(s) we inhabit. As we found in Part I of this reader, religious traditions provide some of our most fundamental orientations to the world, profoundly shaping how we understand and respond to our experiences, even as those experiences influence the way we perceive the meaning of our traditions.

Tomiyama addresses the main issue introduced by Park and Hirano, the process of becoming Japanese. While Park analyzes literature to argue that becoming Japanese involved individuals disciplining their bodies and everyday actions, Tomiyama explains how lifestyle reform movements were ways in which the Ainu, Koreans, and Okinawans worked to improve themselves and become Japanese, or “good people of society.” Tomiyama uses a different approach to explore this question because he believes that analyzing discourse is limited; instead he argues that we must consider “imperialism's actual scenes” and understand that, for colonial subjects, becoming Japanese was realized through concrete actions that “unfolded as the performance of a model lifestyle.” Tomiyama also stresses a connection between this self-disciplining in everyday life and mobilization to work and fight for the nation. Tomiyama argues that colonial subjects’ mutual surveillance of each other and auto-surveillance of themselves in everyday life was the first step in their “mobilization for the violent invasions of others.”

In the 1990s East Asian experienced a turn toward nationalism that includes an extremist, xenophobic wing, which expanded further during the 2000s. This is true in all three of the major countries in the region; Japan, China, and South Korea. In Japan, for example, Abe Shinzo, whose platform calls for hawkish foreign policies and the rewriting of the postwar constitution based on cultural nationalism, returned as the prime minister in 2012. The anti-Korean slanders that were limited earlier to cyberspace, as discussed by Rumi Sakamoto in her article earlier in this reader, have since taken to the streets in Japanese cities. How to deal with such a phenomenon, described by Tessa Morris-Suzuki as a kind of “mass retreat to the psychological fortresses of ethno-nationalism and racism” (p. 5), is becoming an ever more pertinent issue for all East Asian countries and their nationals.

‘Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.’ Ernest Renan

In 2002, the Japanese government built the “Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims” within the Hiroshima Peace Park. It is located less than two hundred meters from the A-Bomb Peace Museum operated by the Hiroshima City Council. This new Memorial Hall, funded and run by the Japanese government, includes the following message on one of the wall panels:

The question of moral judgment looms large over every discussion of World War II collaboration, at times clouding and distorting our understanding of this complex issue, as Timothy Brook poignantly remarks in his contribution to this journal's recent symposium. This moral question is certainly relevant and should not be dismissed, since collaboration came to be more or less directly associated with the civic and human rights infringements perpetrated by the occupying forces. Always complex, this question becomes murkier when linked to the rhetoric of patriotism and to postwar political agendas, as is the case with the “resistentialist” postwar narrative that has dominated the debate on collaboration until recently. This narrative has mythologized resistance and enshrined it as the only patriotic, moral, and honorable response to foreign occupation, gliding over difficult moral dilemmas raised by some strategies and practices of resistance. In the process, it has polarized the debate on collaboration by offering only two opposite and monolithically-conceived categories: moral and patriotic resistance versus unethical and treasonous collaboration. It has therefore left no conceptual tool for gaining a more nuanced understanding of behaviors that do not fit this pre-established and rigid dichotomy, such as “nationalist” or “state-building” collaborationism—referring, respectively, to attempts at protecting nation and population from the occupying forces and at state building in the face of the complete and bewildering disappearance of the preexisting order, as in the cases discussed by Brook. Finally, this resistentialist narrative has constructed a universal image of collaboration, which tends to reduce various forms of this phenomenon in different countries to a common denominator, obliterating all political, social, and cultural differences.

Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) was a multi-talented educator, poet and author of the Taisho era. In his introduction, Roger Pulvers describes him as “a dilettante typical” of his time, combining a profound appreciation for all the world's culture (he was an devotee of Beethoven, and translated more than one of his own works into Esperanto) with a deep commitment to the Buddhist tradition. His short story “Indra's Net,” for example, demonstrates a number of the trajectories of this fascinating character. The protagonist — an archaeologist at work unearthing the Buddhist artifacts of the ancient Silk Road — carefully describes the geological features of the Tsela Pass even as he seeks to affirm his community with the Buddhist culture of that place in a cosmic epiphany replete with heavenly beings. As the afterward by Jane Marie Law indicates, the core images of this story are grounded less in the personal idiosyncrasies of its author, however, than the canonical symbolism of the Avatamsaka Sutra (Kegon-kyō), a scripture that teaches the fundamental interconnectedness of all beings and all experiences. It is this image of “Indra's Net” that helps to locate, not only the story's protagonist, but one suspects, Miyazawa himself, in a larger world, a vision in which the diversity of societies and the physical environment is grounded in a fundamental unity, one not entirely incompatible with the imperialist trajectories of his day.

Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power

Rabson's chapter explores the experiences of Okinawans in mainland Japan, specifically the diaspora communities that developed in Osaka from the early 20th century to the present. These communities faced discrimination much like Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants in America. Rabson's likening of Okinawan experiences on the mainland to that of foreigners trying to assimilate in a new country is an apt analogy. For example, as in America, some Okinawans changed their names to de-emphasize their Okinawan ethnicity, and laborers found they earned a lower wage than did other Japanese, and at times were told not to apply for certain jobs. Worsening economic conditions in Okinawa in the first decades of the 20th century had caused the sudden migration of Okinawans to the mainland, while other Okinawans migrated to Taiwan and the islands of Micronesia during the colonial period.