The election campaign for the Tokyo metropolitan government (TMG) does not begin, officially, until January 23, with the voting scheduled for February 9. But there is already an enormous amount of spin in the Japanese press and social media, as well as in the lamentably meagre coverage offered by English-language media and bloggers. I won't pretend to be objective about the election and assessing the associated reporting and commentary. Like 455 of Japan's 1789 local governments, I personally think Japan should get out of nuclear power, or at the very least reform its power markets-separating generation from transmission-before undertaking any restarts. Japan's best option is green and smart growth, and it is incredible to watch a TMG campaign unfold focused on that opportunity.

As accusations and denials swirl regarding the burial of herbicides employed by the U.S. military in Vietnam during that war, there are irrefutable facts that seem not to have been considered in their true context. Denials of such burials by the U.S. military on land that was then part of Kadena Air Base on Okinawa by Dr. Alvin Young, a hired consultant and purported expert on military herbicides, and the U.S. Department of Defense are disingenuous at the very least, and at worst a blatant cover-up of historical realities.

I was eight or nine when M samchon (“Uncle M”) arrived at our house in Japan on one of his regular late-night visits. In fact, it seemed as if he chose to visit at this hour, as if he was hiding from something or someone. Although he was not really related to us, he came from the same part of Korea, Jeju Island, and we referred to him using the term samchon, a Jeju term used when addressing uncles and aunts. He spoke in the Jeju tongue, which was unlike any of the other versions of Korean that I had heard at that time. Although my father was born in Jeju, even he had a hard time communicating with our samchon. This was because my father had grown up in Japan, his parents having taken him back to Ōsaka, where they ran a small business, soon after he was born. The visitor's Japanese was quite poor, but it was slightly easier for me to understand than Jeju-style Korean. Using the few words that I was able to understand, I could figure out that his childhood friend, Beomdori (Mr. Beomdol to us kids), was in the process of slowly recovering his speech. Given that Uncle M was in his late twenties or early thirties, my childishly inquisitive mind found it odd that a grown-up, such as Uncle M's friend, was learning how to speak. Not to speak a foreign language, like Japanese, but to speak, period.

When Miyazawa Kenji was writing his stories and poems nearly a century ago, Japan was a country with a two-pronged mission: to become the first non-white, non-Christian nation to create a modern prosperous state — and to be the leader of an Asian revival.

The Japanese people were obsessed with their cultural identity and their place, as an imperial power, among the first rank of nations in the world. It was an obsession that would lead them to prosecute an aggressive and brutal war in Asia and the Pacific.

Japan's searing summer of 2013 saw the lid slide further off Fukushima Daiichi and its Pandora's box of radioactive and political crises. The company in charge, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), already Japan's most distrusted firm, was irredeemably exposed as dangerously incompetent. A slew of reports concerning leaks of high-level radiation led to increasingly concerned appeals, from within Japan and from overseas, for the Abe Shinzo government to take over at Fukushima Daiichi.

Two years after the start of Japan's nuclear disaster, parents fear for their children's future.

Like most fathers, Fujimoto Yoji frets about the health of his young children. In addition to normal parental concerns about the food they eat, the air they breathe and the environment they will inherit, however, he must add one more: the radioactive fallout from a major nuclear disaster.

On December 6, 2013, Japan's Diet (national assembly) passed a controversial Designated Secrets Protection bill, having rushed it through both chambers in barely a month. Both the Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]-led administration that proposed the bill and the LDP-dominated Diet brazenly disregarded many voices of opposition, expressed in the public comments collected by the government (77% against and 13% for the bill), public opinion polls showing twice as many respondents opposing the bill as those in favor, daily demonstrations in front of the Diet building, and statements by an array of professional organizations: lawyers, journalists, academics, writers, film directors and actors, religious leaders as well as human rights and civil rights advocates. The law, promulgated December 13, 2013 and slated to take effect in a year's time, gives the government potentially unchecked power to designate government information as special secrets, some for an indefinite time, and to punish leakers much more harshly than now. Critics of the law fear that it will further restrict citizens’ already limited access to government information and intimidate public officials, journalists, and citizens, thereby severely eroding the people's constitutionally guaranteed right to know. Despite the grave and far-reaching implications of the legislation that could seriously jeopardize democracy in Japan, the Abe Shinzo administration rammed the bill through the Diet in less than a month: the administration introduced the bill on November 7, and the Diet spent only 67-68 hours to deliberate it, a strikingly brief time compared with more than 210 hours each that the Diet had spent deliberating the 2005 Postal Service Privatization Act and the 2012 legislation relating to the comprehensive reform of social security and tax systems, commonly known as the tax hike legislation.

History is a cumbersome science. Scholars work diligently in amassing data, reading original sources, and creating plausible narratives regarding the past. That is, however, of scant use for mitigating and resolving international conflicts, such as those presently involving Japan and its neighbours. As Ernest Renan observed in his famous 1882 essay Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?: “L'oubli, et je dirai même l'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation.” The importance of forgetting the past or getting the facts wrong lies in the fact that at the bottom of political formations great injustices and even massacres can often be found, and directing public attention to them is not conducive to integrating a nation as a peaceful unity. Renan had legal precedents for his idea of forgetting as the basis of a nation. One French massacre that Renan refers to was Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris in 1572, when several thousand Huguenots were killed. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 granting amnesty for Protestants included also a decree that all parties extinguish from their minds the memory of all that had happened during the decades of religious fighting. Renan's problem was how to create stable nations, but the phenomenon can be observed also in international politics. If Renan had wished, he also could have taken up the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the 30-years War, and which contained not only a decree for all parties to place into “perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon” all hostile acts that had been committed during the war, but also prohibited litigation processes related to lost property and most debts, so that “perpetual Silence” would fall on public memory of the war. The emphasis was on forgetting the past and moving on towards reconstruction of a functioning regional state and trading system, rather than keeping war memories alive by trying to sort out injustices, perpetrated to some extent by all parties.

The publication of Zen at War in 1997 and, to a lesser extent, Zen War Stories in 2003 sent shock waves through Zen Buddhist circles not only in Japan, but also in the U.S. and Europe.

These books revealed that many leading Zen masters and scholars, some of whom became well known in the West in the postwar era, had been vehement if not fanatical supporters of Japanese militarism. In the aftermath of these revelations, a number of branches of the Zen school, including the Myōshinji branch of the Rinzai Zen sect, acknowledged their war responsibility.

Japanese PM Abe Shinzo's win in the July 21 Upper House elections may have given him and his LDP party three full years to reform the Japanese economy. But as some analysts warn, there is still no key theme in Abe's plans for reform and he has already started talking about constitutional revision. All governments have limited capacity to make significant change, so - as in business and indeed life in general - it is essential to choose and focus. This short article argues that Abe would be well advised to follow the advice of a succession of recent white papers and reports from within his own party and government, and focus on the enabling role of information and computer technology (ICT) in energy, health and a range of other services and markets. Much of the Japanese elite want to transform the country into a national version of “industrial internet” General Electric, and are moving to implement those aims. But Abe could derail these efforts with his divisive and dangerous constitutional and historical obsessions.

With the third anniversary of Fukushima's triple meltdown approaching, stories of incompetence and corruption in the nuclear cleanup are rife. A team of Reuters' reporters working in Japan has researched working conditions at Fukushima Daiichi and decontamination jobs outside the plant. Their findings are shocking.

Sonia Ryang possesses “double vision” in that she is a U.S.-based anthropologist as well as a cultural insider who grew up as a Zainichi Korean. Her family supported Chongryun (the North Korea-affiliated Zainichi Korean organization), which stood in contrast to the twentieth century's other Zainichi Korean organization Mindan that was affiliated with South Korea., Zainichi Koreans during the last century was largely divided in their identification either with Chongryun or Mindan. She reached adulthood after attending Chongryun-run ethnic schools including the Korea University in Tokyo and worked as a journalist for a Chongryun newspaper before starting her graduate studies in the United Kingdom. This background endows her Zainichi Korean studies with depths, insights, and a distinctive ethos. In this article, she describes the contours of Zainichi Korean history after 1945 and why “Zainichi Korean” as an ethnicity separate from Koreans in Korea remains relevant today.

Since Japan's triple disaster of March 11, 2011, music has served to inform and give voice to unspoken opinions in several spaces—cyberspace, recordings, festivals and concerts, and public demonstrations. In particular, music has been an integral part of antinuclear demonstrations: here, music functions not only as an expression to be heard, but also—and perhaps more importantly—as a mechanism for encouraging participation and building solidarity among antinuclear citizens. Music has long been a part of demonstrations in Japan: percussive instruments and the rhythmic eejanaika (why not) call-and-response pattern were featured in demonstrations since the end of the Edo Period. Today, demonstrations in Japan include stationary demonstrations (kōgi), in which protesters voice claims in front of the offices of the offending parties, such as the prime minister, the Diet, or TEPCO. There are also “demos,” in which protesters walk through parts of the city; they are often preceded and/or followed by rallies, in which speeches by politicians and activists alternate with musical performances. In the weekly Friday kōgi in front of the prime minister's office (Kantei)—among the largest and longest-running weekly demonstrations Tokyo has ever seen, attracting 200,000 protesters on June 29, 2012, and running without a break for an unprecedented 19 months—drummers and horn players accompany the protesters’ calls and responses of slogans (Sprechchor), while folk singers, traditional drummers, chanters with uchiwadaiko, and fans of the late rocker Iwamano Kiyoshirō play in different spots around the block. In marching demos—which attracted 15,000-20,000 people per event in 2011, as many as 200,000 in 2012, and up to 60,000 in 2013—drum corps, brass bands, chindon bands, and other ambulatory musicians perform alongside “sound trucks,” piled with sound equipment, upon which rappers, singers, DJs, and bands perform. “Sound demos”—the name given to some demonstrations with sound trucks—have been credited with attracting masses of first-time demonstrators. In addition, protesters often credit the performances of musicians for establishing the mood of a demonstration. Drawing from the theories of Charles Tilly and Thomas Turino, this article focuses on the music of ambulatory demonstrations and explains the political catalysts for shifts between two styles: presentational and participatory, which I define below.

In November 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, Hoover also began to compile a list of individuals to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency or war. In June 1940 he sought and gained the approval of Attorney General Robert Jackson for this list, known as the Custodial Detention list. (Late in life, Jackson appears to have regretted the powers that Hoover accumulated.)

For more than five decades after the end of the World War II, Japan articulated an official identity as a pacifist, anti-nuclear nation both domestically and in the international arena (its formidable Self Defense Force notwithstanding). Since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, however, the debate over revising Japan's “Peace Constitution” intensified. In particular, Article 9 of the Constitution, by which Japan renounces offensive war, has been under attack by politicians proclaiming the goal of becoming “a normal nation”, and the present Abe administration has prioritized Constitutional revision. Along with politicians and the citizenry, many intellectuals and artists have spoken against the possibility of Japan identifying itself as a “nation that wages war”–thus rejecting its assumed role as advocate of peace and foe of nuclear arms. In June 2004, Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo, along with artists and intellectuals Inoue Hisashi, Komori Yoichi, and Kato Shuichi and others, formed the Article 9 Association, which advocates “protection” or preservation of the present Constitution.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement is a proposed trade pact that Japan is currently negotiating with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam (as of September 2013). The TPP aims to increase the liberalization of economies in the Pacific region through abolition of tariffs on trade as well as reregulation. In 2008, the United States joined the talks “and has espoused a hard core complete free trade policy,” which has vastly expanded the scope of the negotiations. With both the US and Japan as participants, the pact would cover nearly 40% of the world's economy. Japan officially joined one of final rounds of the negotiations in July 2013 in Malaysia, as the participating countries intend to finalize the TPP negotiations (at least partially) by the end of 2013.

During the Pearl Harbor raid that opened the Pacific War - perhaps the world's first energy war - Hickam Army Air Force base was among the initial targets attacked by Japanese fighters and dive-bombers.

The return to power of Abe Shinzō and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) unfolded as tensions on the Korean peninsula mount. As a key advocate of the abduction lobby, Abe's rapid political rise since the early 2000s is closely connected with his role in promoting a hardline policy towards North Korea. Mobilizing a new nationalism in Japan, Abe's return as prime minister in December 2012 signals a rightward shift in Japanese politics. The current international crisis surrounding North Korea offers a critical test for analyzing the trajectory of Abe's foreign and security policy. In addition to joining multilateral United Nations sanctions, the Abe administration has increased the pressure on North Korea through new measures constraining the activities of pro-Pyongyang groups within Japan. Moreover, as Abe has pledged yet again to solve the abduction issue, the kidnapping problem has brought the old anti-DPRK policy network back to the forefront of Japan's North Korea policy.

While Onitsuka explains the political elements that created Japan's “abandoned people,” Norimatsu formally introduces the term and links two separate groups of people, each of whom was abandoned in order to pursue a specific government priority. She compares the Fukushima disaster to the ongoing U.S. military occupation of the island of Okinawa. Both of these topics demonstrate tensions in Japan's center-periphery relations, and in both instances, Norimatsu argues that the Japanese government is discriminating against citizens who live in distant regions in order to make life better for those living in the large cities. Specifically, Japan allows the U.S. to maintain military bases on nearly 20 percent of the main island of Okinawa, which many locals resent. The Americans are not always good neighbors. To give three examples: stray bullets have wounded people and damaged property; in 2004 a helicopter crashed into a building at Okinawa International University (luckily no one was injured); and in 1995, three US personnel raped a 12-year- old girl. In the same way, Norimatsu argues, the risk from living near nuclear power plants is unfairly assigned to people living in Japan's rural periphery, only temporarily alleviated by enormous subsidies granted while the plants are under construction.