Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was an inheritor and preserver of Ainu culture. As collector of Ainu folk utensils, teacher of the prominent Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke, and recorder and transcriber of epics, songs, and tales from the last of the bards. He was also a fierce fighter against the construction of a dam in his village that meant destruction of a sacred ritual site as well as of nature. In addition, Kayano was the compiler of an authoritative Ainu-Japanese dictionary, a chanter of old epics, the founder of a museum of Ainu material culture as well as of an Ainu language school and a radio station. He was the first (and so far the only) National Diet member to address the assembly in Ainu. Kayano was also an inspiration behind today's appreciation of Ainu culture in which young people, Ainu and non-Ainu of various nationalities, join to celebrate aboriginal cultures and their contemporary development. That includes recent youthful attempts to create new forms that combine traditional Ainu oral performances with contemporary music and dance. “Ainu Rebels” which formed in 2006, for example, is constituted mostly of Ainu youth but also includes Japanese and foreigners. They are a creative song and dance troupe that draws on Ainu oral tradition adapted to hip hop and other forms, as well as engaging in artistic activities that combine traditional Ainu art with contemporary artistic elements. The three major genres of Ainu oral tradition were kamuy yukar, songs of gods and demigods, yukar, songs of heroes, and wepeker, prose, or poetic prose, tales. The Ainu linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-1961) saw the origin of Ainu oral arts in the earliest kamuy yukar songs of gods, in which a shamanic performer imitated the voices and gestures of gods. In Ainu culture, everything had a divine spirit: owl, bear, fox, salmon, rabbit, insect, tree, rock, fire, water, wind, and so forth, some not so esteemed or even regarded downright wicked, and others revered as particularly divine. This gestured mimicry apparently developed into kamuy yukar songs of gods, or enacting of songs sung by gods, in which a human chanter impersonates a deity. Kamuy yukar later included songs of Okikurmi-kamuy (also called Kotan-kar-kamuy), a half god, half human hero who descended from the land of gods to the land of the Ainu (humans), to teach how to make fire, hunt, and cultivate to humans living in kotan (hamlets).

Is the glass half full or half empty? Although this question is held up by pop-psychologists as a test of whether one is optimistic or pessimistic, it may be taken as making an epistemological point: one cannot tell the direction of a change by looking at the current state. A change can be fully appreciated only when it is seen over a longer period and in a larger context.

This article considers the experiences of Dutch and Indonesian women in enforced prostitution for the Japanese military during World War Two and the activism of prominent survivors and their supporters from the 1990s. It highlights how and why Japanese activists have continued to support these women and why Dutch and Indonesian women have rarely engaged in joint activism. It analyses how Dutch and Indonesian women's stories are presented together in a 2015-2016 exhibition at the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo and how women's and soldiers' testimonies are used to advocate further redress from the Japanese government and to challenge military sexual violence against women. The article assesses how a sustained focus in transnational activism on Japanese responsibility and the Japanese imperial context potentially leads to overlooking how localised forms of patriarchy and the specific context of this former Dutch colony affected women's experiences and their post war treatment.

Studies of the popularity of Hallyu concentrate almost exclusively upon Northeast Asian nations, disregarding their popularity within Southeast Asia, an area still defined as ‘Asian’ yet often ignored in favor of the more economically prominent East Asian nations. This article attempts to expand discussions of Hallyu through an analysis of the reception of South Korean television dramas among different consumers in Thailand. It draws upon evidence gathered from qualitative interviews with Thai fans to illustrate how diverse consumers use these foreign products as a means to assess and critique their own position within contemporary Thailand and actively engage with changing constructions of Koreanness, Thainess and Asianness as a means to do so.

Those who want to know more about Chiri Yukie and her adaptation of “The Song the Owl God Himself Sang: An Ainu Tale” should read this article, which directly addresses the context for Chiri's retelling of an Ainu legend. The process of empire building and colonialism is always disruptive. Moreover, it usually leaves behind victimized, traumatized, and marginalized indigenous people. Their common misfortune is that militarily and technologically superior outsiders arrived to annex them and their lands by force. The Ainu were no exception, and even the seemingly innocent Collection of Ainu Legends was inseparable from the Japanese colonization of the Ainu.

The single most remarkable feature of the 7th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) was that it took place at all, after a hiatus of no less than 36 years.

Ever since Kim Il Sung decided in the 1950s that his country needed its own way of doing things, which is often summarized under the term of chuch'e, it has been hard to categorize the DPRK as a typical socialist country. North Korea has always been different. It neither joined the military alliance of the Warsaw Pact nor was it willing to engage in the Soviet-led economic cooperation of COMECON. Its ideology moved further and further away from core premises of Marxism-Leninism. With its Hegelian emphasis on “mind over matter”, which in North Korea is called “man is master of everything”, Pyongyang's ideology stood directly opposed to the key paradigm of Marx's Dialectical Materialism. Even from the perspective of the Eastern European socialist brothers, North Korea was therefore a rather odd and even suspicious member of the socialist family, as countless documents unearthed from archival sources reveal. But the fact that a Communist party in power did not hold a congress for almost four decades has nevertheless to be regarded as highly unusual.

Military interventions since the end of the cold war have often been justified as humanitarian. But, as both experts in international relations and others have noted, that justification requires deciding whether we should give priority to state sovereignty or the rights of individuals. In the best-case scenario, nations intervene in other sovereign nations to prevent despotic leaders from violating human rights; however, the nice-sounding ideal of “humanitarianism” can easily become a pretext for interventions that have little moral justification.

Sakiyama Tami (1954-), real name Taira Kuniko, was born on Iriomote Island, the largest of the Yaeyama island group in Okinawa Prefecture, where she lived until age fourteen when her family moved to Koza (present-day Okinawa City). Sakiyama graduated from the Department of Law, Economics, and Literature at the University of the Ryukyus. She began publishing in Okinawan periodicals in 1979 and in mainland Japanese literary magazines, a conventional means of launching a literary career, starting in 1988.

Stocks of Pacific Bluefin tuna continue to decline to dangerous levels, with figures published in an International Scientific Committee report in April estimating that spawning stock levels are now less than three percent of their unfished levels. In line with international recommendations, Japan, which consumes 80 percent of the world's tuna, has implemented measures to counter the trend. However, some experts question their efficacy, and warn that, if current catch levels continue, Bluefin may well be a leading topic of discussion at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) when members meet in Johannesburg later this year,.

1. 1. Introduction to the Special Issue in Honor of Kyoko Selden: Japan in Translation - Alisa Freedman

2. 2. Introduction to the Taiheiki: The Chronicle of Great Peace - Joan Piggott

3. 3. Selections from the Taiheiki: The Chronicle of Great Peace - translated by Kyoko Selden and Joan Piggott

4. 4. Introduction to the Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers' Chronicle of Peace - Kyoko Selden

5. 5. Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers' Chronicle of Peace - translated by Kyoko Selden with Joshua Young

6. 6. Renga by Sasaki Dōyo: Selected from the Tsukubashū (Tsukuba Anthology) -translated and annotated by Kyoko Selden, edited by Lili Selden

7. 7. The Takarazuka Concise Madame Butterfly- translated by Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden

On July 11, 2016, the organization Veterans for Peace issued a statement (see document below) observing the 162nd anniversary of the Lew Chew Compact, popularly known as a “friendship” or “amity” treaty. In reality, officials of the Ryukyu Kingdom were forced to sign it by Commodore Matthew C. Perry who commanded a squadron of battleships invading the Ryukyus in 1853 and 1854. The Compact permitted unlimited visitation and residence to Americans in Ryukyu and mandated that American criminal suspects be turned over to U.S. authorities aboard American ships. Also in 1854, Perry forced Japanese officials under threat of bombardment to sign the “Convention of Kanagawa” compelling Japan's ports to accept foreign trade and imposing a system of extraterritoriality which placed foreign residents under the jurisdiction of their respective nations' consular courts, exempting them from Japanese law. This was gunboat diplomacy much like what the United States imposed on the nations of Latin America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Both of these “treaties” ominously foreshadowed postwar U.S. military policies toward Japan where the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) exempts Americans and their bases from key provisions of Japanese law; and, especially in Okinawa, where a disproportionate U.S. military presence remains despite overwhelming opposition expressed in elections, local government policies, and public protests.

It has been seven years since the US military launched air strikes in revenge for the 9/11 terror attacks. The Taliban have not been suppressed and Afghanistan remains in a state of war. Although overshadowed by the war against Iraq, this too is a war of aggression. A Japanese photo journalist examines the US-Afghan War.

The azure skies peculiar to Afghanistan weigh heavily on the land. Rivers that are supposed to flow among the mountains have dried up, exposing the earth's cracked skin. Snow remains here and there, but it is still too early in the season for it to moisten the soil. Magnificent mountains extend in all directions.

The Japanese WWII defeat in 1945 also meant that the Japanese empire disintegrated. Although many colonial subjects returned to Taiwan, Korea, and elsewhere, some stayed in Japan either because they had put down roots there or because, especially in Korea, ongoing warfare made returning dangerous. Koreans and Taiwanese who stayed in Japan were deprived of their Japanese citizenship in 1947, and they and their descendants have lived there as foreigners ever since, experiencing various forms of discrimination. Ainu did not lose their citizenship and Hokkaido remained a Japanese prefecture but they did face similar ongoing social discrimination.

The December 2003 deployment of Self-Defense Force troops to Iraq by the Koizumi administration took Japan closer to the practical repudiation of the non-belligerancy principle of Article 9 than any prior move in its more than half-century of existence. Of course, as the very existence of “self-defense forces” attests, Article 9 had already been subjected to considerable abuse by interpretation, virtually since inception. Nevertheless, the deployment to Samawah was controversial. It stirred visible opposition in the beginning even though it soon faded, at least from public view. Thus is a status quo created.

Despite a general state of ignorance and neglect on the part of the Japanese toward the Ainu people and their cultures, Ainu political and cultural activism developed apace in post-WWII Japan. Eleven years after passing the Ainu Cultural Promotion Law, which aimed to make Japan a “society in which the ethnic pride of the Ainu people is respected and to contribute to the development of diverse cultures,” what still needed to be done? This article discusses what Ainu people themselves saw as remaining tasks in 2008, at the Indigenous Peoples Summit (IPS) held in Hokkaido.

Energy is the master resource, the sine qua non for all resource extraction, material production, mobility, and every other sphere of economic activity. Mounting empirical evidence and expert interdisciplinary analyses show that the present energy economy poses unparalleled positive and negative externalities. In response to these crises and opportunities, the global system is undergoing multiple energy revolutions. The general trend is towards convergence on disaster-resilient, low-carbon infrastructure, including distributed heat and power systems and other new networks. And post 3-11 Japan is emerging as a leader in this movement.

While the high drama of the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election has grabbed international headlines, Japan has quietly completed an election that may also have far-reaching implications. In the elections for the Upper House of the Diet (Japan's parliament) on July 10, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partners won 162 seats, which, together with Diet seats not up for election and the seats of sympathetic but unaffiliated members, give the coalition a two-thirds majority in the Upper House. It already had a two-thirds majority in the Lower House.