South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has made strengthening the alliance relationship with the United States a key part of his foreign policy positions. At the same time, South Korea continues to maintain a decent relationship with China, pursuing a precarious position to decide its role in the context of the growing US–China rivalry. The US has made the trilateral cooperation and close coordination among the US, South Korea, and Japan the centerpiece of its Indo-Pacific strategy, while South Korea and Japan have maintained their contentious relationship. The articles in this special issue address the challenges that South Korea faces today, focusing on two major themes in the contemporary era: first, how the US–China rivalry and power competition affect South Korea’s security and economic foreign policies, and second, how the bilateral tensions between South Korea and Japan affect regional security and alliance capabilities.

South Korea and Japan have maintained tense bilateral relations over their unresolved historical and territorial disputes for decades. The US has repeatedly called for improved relations between South Korea and Japan and underlined the importance of US–South Korea–Japan trilateral relations to address North Korean threats and regional security challenges. Would we, then, expect the US to play a role in helping to mediate South Korea–Japan problems? If so, under what conditions and to what extent would the US get involved in South Korea–Japan disputes? If not, what makes the US hesitate to do so? We argue that US involvement in South Korea–Japan bilateral relations depends on the degree to which the US perceives the tensions as costly and risky for US national security interests. With an issues-based analysis, a granular examination of South Korea–Japan trade disputes and the spat over the GSOMIA in 2019, and qualitative interviews with former US government and military officials, we find that the US is more likely to involve itself in South Korea–Japan relations and more likely to use its leverage as a major power with its allies when it perceives significant risks to its capabilities to address security challenges, primarily those posed by North Korea.

This article analyzes how Shinzo Abe employed various strategies to challenge Korean sovereignty over Dokdo on the international stage and to promote Japan’s territorial claims on the islets domestically. Through a series of speeches discussed at Japan’s National Diet among Abe’s cabinet ministers and members of the Diet, this article investigates how and by what policy instruments the Abe cabinet infiltrated and revitalized Japan’s territorial claims over Dokdo across the nation. Several members of the Diets and ministers discussed the Dokdo issue amid worsening Korea–Japan relations stemming from Abe’s revisionism. Content analysis revealed that Japanese lawmakers and cabinet members were very frustrated about Korea’s effective control of Dokdo as well as the Korean government’s stance on comfort women and forced labor. Quantitative analyses found increases in the average intensity of Dokdo remarks following the Abe cabinet’s hardline stance toward President Moon’s government. Regression analysis confirms that the average intensity of Dokdo remarks was intensified by cabinet approval ratings, conservative rightwing politicians, and Japan’s domestic economic conditions.

Indigenous people are often depicted as helpless victims of the forces of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial empire building: forces that were beyond their understanding or control. Focusing on the story of a mid-nineteenth century diplomatic mission by Sakhalin Ainu (Enchiw), this essay (the first of a two-part series), challenges that view, suggesting instead that, despite the enormous power imbalances that they faced, indigenous groups sometimes intervened energetically and strategically in the historical process going on around them, had some impact on the outcome of these processes. In Part 1, we look at the story of one Sakhalin Ainu family over multiple generations in order to highlight the strategic place of the Sakhalin Ainu in cross-border relationships – particularly in the relationship between China and Japan – from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

For almost two decades, Gunma Prefecture has been the site of an intense political struggle over the public representation of the history of wartime forced labor in Japan's public sphere. Following an initiative by a private group, and with the unanimous consent of the prefectural assembly, a memorial dedicated to Korean wartime laborers was set up in a prefectural park in the city of Takasaki in 2004. However, in 2014, the prefecture announced it would not extend permission to maintain the memorial—a decision confirmed by Japan's Supreme Court in June 2022. The debates in Gunma are illustrative of the rise of historical revisionism in twenty-first century Japan and the revisionist campaign to erase the term “forced labor” from Japan's public sphere. The decision taken by Gunma Prefecture in 2014 to ban the memorial was a milestone, not only in this campaign, but also because it triggered massive media interest and encouraged other prefectural administrations to launch similar campaigns of censorship in public spaces.

Did the movements of “1968” change societies fundamentally worldwide? This article examines “1968” from the perspective of Japanese history. Japan's “1968” shared such common elements with “1968” in other countries, as the social background, development of visual media, and progress of modernization. This article investigates Japan's “1968” in light of the common background and characteristics of the movements in Japan and globally. I conclude that “1968” was a product of the resonance of unrelated phenomena throughout the world, and many evaluations of “1968” confuse the general trend of modernization with the specific influences of the movements.

The assassination of Abe Shinzo in July 2022 not only felled a political giant, but also propelled the government to seek dissolution of the Unification Church (UC), known as the Moonies in the Anglophone world, because the gunman told police that he targeted Japan's longest serving prime minister (2012–2020) due to his links with the UC. Ironically, the South Korea-based UC enjoyed extensive influence in the Abe faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a strange brew of clashing nationalisms given that Abe was an advocate of historical revisionism, a rightwing political movement that promotes an exonerating and glorifying narrative of Japan's shared past with Asia, while the UC was guilt-tripping donors about Japan's colonial rule in the Korean peninsula (1910–45).

Through a historical analysis of Japanese constitutions and key constitutional drafts from the Meiji Era to the present day, this article examines the relationship between the constitution of Japan and the rights of indigenous peoples. In recent decades, the constitutions of a number of countries have introduced clauses recognizing the culture or rights of indigenous people, but this still remains a lacuna in Japanese constitutional debates. After examining the continuing social problems which result from this lack of constitutional recognition, particularly from the perspective of the Ainu and Ryūkyū peoples, the article concludes with a call to oppose current government schemes for constitutional change by putting forward a radical alternative proposal to revise the constitution in a way that would recognize and celebrate Japan's ethnic, historical and cultural pluralism.

This essay suggests that the renewed politicization and militarization of the maritime sphere is a product of the increasing need to re-legitimise the current state-based political order. Order can be understood as particular configurations of boundaries as they define political communities through various practices of inclusion and exclusion: East Asian seas have become one of the final frontiers for sustaining national developmental projects, they mark the boundaries between the Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean nation-states, and are also borderlands in the global order as they separate ‘East’ from ‘West’ and thereby differentiate the ‘civilized’ self from the ‘barbarian’ other.

This article examines the new sphere of transnational activism in the Japanese environmental movement of the 1970s. What was previously a domestic phenomenon of local mobilizations against pollution and development expanded into a new array of transnational initiatives, many with a specific focus on pollution in the countries of East Asia. The article focuses on a transnational movement involving South Korean and Japanese activists to stop the relocation of a polluting mercurochrome plant from Japan to South Korea. I argue that such transnational involvement had a significant impact on activist identity. Within the framework of the Japanese nation, activists could seamlessly position themselves as victims of the state and industry. But transnational involvement upset this schematic by exposing their complicity in the transgressions of Japanese industry abroad. The result, I argue, was a more self-reflexive activist identity and the development of a kind of grassroots regional consciousness within some Japanese civic movements throughout the 1970s.

From a political perspective, a constitution can be seen not only as a promulgation of basic law, but also as a political act: a seizure of power. Most modern constitutions in the tradition of the Magna Carta (though not those promulgated by dictators) aim to seize power from kings and/or aristocrats and place it under the limits of law. The Constitution of Japan was also such a power seizure, carried out by a short-lived alliance between The US Occupation forces and (a part of) the Japanese people. Thus it should not be surprising that the Japanese political class sees it as having been “forced on” them. That's what good constitutions do. Almost from the time it was ratified, Japanese conservatives have been trying to promote constitutional revision that would return the country to something closer to the authoritarian condition it was under during the reign of the Meiji Constitution. This is going on as this is being written, so one can only speculate how it will turn out…

In discussions on Japanese whaling, a common question is why Japan appears indifferent to international pressure (gaiatsu) on the issue, that is, why it continues to flout the international anti-whaling “norm” despite widespread criticism and condemnation. The key to answering this question is to examine why the anti-whaling “norm” resonates so poorly in the domestic sphere. This paper argues that the impotence of international pressure to curb Japanese whaling can only be understood by examining how whaling has come to be reactively defined in the domestic debate not as an issue of conservation and environmental protection but as a symbol of national identity and pride. The paper concludes that because whaling is framed as a key marker of “Japanese-ness”, international pressure is counter-productive as it merely serves to stoke the fires of nationalism, creating an atmosphere in which anti-whaling opinion is seen as “anti-Japanese”.

Japan's prison system is renowned for its safety and order. There has not been a prison riot there in decades, and figures about escapes from and assaults at its penal facilities are far lower than in other developed nations. Such features have not gone unnoticed; foreign policy makers increasingly look to Japan for lessons in how to improve their own prisons. Whilst various aspects of the Japanese prison system have been investigated by legal experts, government agencies and human rights organizations, however, a gap remains with respect to how Japanese prison policies are formulated. This article provides a study of the decision-making process, focusing on the political events triggered by a sequence of inmate injuries and fatalities in Nagoya Prison following the turn of the century, which culminated in the 2005/6 reform of the 1908 Prison Law. Whilst this study reveals the scope of the discretion that the Ministry of Justice enjoys over prison management, it also shows the capability of the legislature to hold the former to account when called to do so, and the potential for civil society to impact policy-making in Japan.

Over the past decade, the concept of the “uncanny valley” (bukimi no tani) coined by roboticist Mori Masahiro (b. 1927), has appeared in over ten thousand (English-language) articles and chapters, Briefly, the concept presumes that the scary surprise of realizing that, say, a flesh-and-blood human was actually a zombie will send one tumbling into a valley of existential queasiness. As an application, this effect was hypothesized by Mori as grounds for avoiding the design and manufacture of humanlike robots or androids. In this edited and augmented excerpt from chapter 6 (Cyborg-Ableism beyond the Uncanny [Valley]) of my book, Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (2018), I interrogate the 'uncanny valley“ hypothesis, which has been accorded an almost ”natural-law“-like status. I critically examine Mori's original 1970 essay in Japanese and draw attention to some of the problems posed both by translating bukimi as ”uncanny“ and by treating the ”uncanny valley“ as a self-evident truism.

This article examines the background to Japan's Dowa-related affirmative action programs which, based on postwar constitutional guarantees, set about relieving the material and psychological expressions of majority discrimination against Buraku residents. It shows the generally beneficial consequences of these programs, and highlights the overall weakening of discrimination, the improvement of living conditions, and a high level of mixed living and intermarriage. Finally, it considers how the resulting erosion of Buraku-based identities remains contested both by those displaying a continued will to discriminate, and by activists who desire to maintain a Buraku-based identity into the future.

This paper inquires into the revival of the cement industry in postwar Japan. The Allied Occupation did not immediately undertake comprehensive plans to rebuild the country's infrastructure. Only after controls on the production of basic industries were lifted in 1948 did cement production begin to rise. By 1956, Japan produced 13,737,594 tons of cement, double that of the prewar peak in 1939. This paper examines the rebirth of the Japanese cement and limestone mining industries in the period between 1945 and 1956 and highlights the cement industry's role in the rebirth of Japan as a “construction state.”

This article explores Japanese responses to the Syrian refugee crisis since 2011. In particular, it examines the rationales of the Japanese government and others who expressed opinions on the crisis. Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in March 2011, a large number of civilians have been forced to flee their country of origin. Japan has been reluctant to accept refugees although it has pledged a large amount of financial assistance to international organizations. This article explores the rationales of Japanese responses as expressed in media texts and proceedings of the Diet and its committees, with a particular focus on issues of national identity and state identity.

In this essay I provide an account of a series of commemorative events held in Eastern Australia since the compound disaster of March 2011 occurred in Fukushima in Northeastern Japan. Individuals expressed transnational solidarity through the embodied experience of attending and participating in local events. Reflecting on these events reminds us of the entangled and mutually imbricated histories of Japan and Australia, and the ways in which various individuals and groups are positioned in the global networks of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry.

Recent moves by the Abe administration to change the Japanese constitution may result in the most fundamental change to Japanese political life since the 1940s. Although there has been widespread debate on the possible revision of Article 9 – the constitution's Peace Clause – other profound implications of the push for constitutional change have received scant attention. This special issue edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Shinnosuke Takahashi aims to take a broad view of constitutional debates in Japan today by posing two key questions: “What is the purpose of the constitution?” and “What does the constitution mean for a culturally plural and diverse society?”

The total number of Japanese casualties in the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) is estimated to be around 3.1 million, with military fatalities accounting for 2.3 million. In contrast to the popular image in Japan of these war dead as “noble heroes” (eirei) who fought valiantly in service of the nation, however, the realities of war were quite different. Rather than being killed in combat, some sixty percent of soldiers (1.4 million) died away from the battlefield, succumbing to disease and starvation. Others suffered from the military's failure to secure dependable supply lines to provide food and equipment replenishments, resulting in a large number of otherwise preventable deaths. In this article, Professor Yoshida Yutaka focuses on the grim realities of war death as experienced by ordinary soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, a topic rarely touched upon by scholars. Combining a social historical approach with rigorous statistical analysis, Yoshida sheds light on the institutional issues and peculiarities of what was once proudly known as the “Emperor's military.”