Miyazaki Hayao's new film Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) premiered on July 20 and is on pace to become one of the most successful, if not the most successful, Japanese films of 2013. Miyazaki tells the story of Horikoshi Jiro, the designer of the “Zero Fighter”, which was a terrifyingly effective weapon deployed against China, the United States, and its allies in the early war years, but was soon doomed to become the antique target of “turkey shoots” and the funeral pyre of kamikaze pilots as Japan's empire crumbled and its cities burned.

[We present two articles on a critical moment in the history of Japanese imperialism on Taiwan, the nature of the impact of colonialism on indigenous people, and contemporary ramifications of that history. In the first of these, Robert Eskildsen reflects on the broader issues of Japanese colonialism for contemporary East Asia in light of the 1874 Taiwan expedition and contemporary assessments of it. The second is Nishida Masaru's report on a commemoration of the expedition involving Japanese NGOs and villagers at the site of the Mudan Incident toward framing a people's reconciliation: “Japan, the Ryukyus and the Taiwan Expedition of 1874: toward reconciliation after 130 years.” Japan Focus]

On July 18, Japan's Softbank announced that it has formed a partnership with US Bloom Energy to enter the Japanese market and proceed from there through Asia. The good news comes at a time when an election victory prompts PM Abe Shinzo to embark on a bold and risky agenda of constitutional revision, military expansion and heightened conflict with China. Back in the early 2000s, Softbank CEO Son Masayoshi blazed a trail that led Japan to having the among the fastest and cheapest internet services in the world. Abe and Son appear to represent polar opposites in their approach to development, independence and power. In this short piece, I argue that while analysts have been dazzled by Abe's electoral triumph, Son's resilient and internationalist road could shape a very different and positive Japanese economic, technological and energy future than that envisaged by the PM.

A November 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on labor abuses in mining firms in Zambia parented by state-owned enterprise (SOE) China Non-ferrous Metal Mining Co. (CNMC) has been a media sensation.

CNMC subsidiaries operate two copper mines and two copper processing plants in Zambia Non-Ferrous Company Africa (NFCA), CNMC-Luanshya Copper Mines (CLM), Chambishi Copper Smelter (CCS), and Sino Metals Leach Zambia (Sino Metals).

On April 9, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report on the military comfort women, which Japan Focus presents here in full. Much of the report's content will not be new to Focus readers. The research and reporting of scholars and journalists such as Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Yuki Tanaka, Sarah Soh, George Hicks, and Norimitsu Onishi contribute much to author Larry Nikch's findings. But the report also draws extensively on responses to the issues by the Yomiuri Shimbun, Sankei Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun and other Japanese newspapers as well as successive Japanese government press conferences illustrative of the official disarray in the face of US Congressional pressures on the eve of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's first visit to the US since taking office. It also provides an extensive record of the Japanese government's official handling of the comfort women issues, including apologies and unofficial reparations over a fifteen year period.

It is just over two years since Japan's quake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. It was Japan's 3rd nuclear catastrophe, at level 7 highest on the scale and on a par with Chernobyl, although, unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was self-inflicted. The triple event left 20,000 dead, 315,000 refugees, and a devastated swathe of productive farm and fish country and its towns and villages that will take decades, at least, to recover.

In July 2008 the world media heralded the arrest of “the world's most wanted war criminal,” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. He had been in hiding for thirteen years, ever since he was charged with genocide by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for his role in the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. These events were subsequently termed “Europe's worst slaughter of civilians since World War II.”

Hachiro Yoshio ‘s stint as the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry in the new Noda Yoshihiko administration was not the briefest cabinet assignment on record, but it was certainly one of the most controversial. News outlets reported that it was “public outrage” over two remarks he made which forced Hachiro to quit. In the absence of evidence, we have to take their word for it.

While the media are rushing to announce the “full stop” of Japan's nuclear power production 2039, little attention has been paid to two much less publicized moves. The first is the restarting of Japan's nuclear export industry, especially its targeting of former colonial areas in South East Asia. The second is even more discreet. It is the revision of the Atomic Energy Basic Law loosening constraints on weapons development and breaking the long-standing pledge that nuclear technology be used exclusively for peaceful ends. The amendment may be related to the apparently contradictory announcement that the Japanese government will stop nuclear production but continue to reprocess spent fuel. We propose to analyse both of these recent developments.

North Korea ranks high on the Bush administration's list of ‘terror states’. The January 2002 ‘Axis of Evil’ speech and the June 2002 commitment to preemptive war were stark signals from Washington to Pyongyang. The formal presidential statement of strategy presented to Congress in September 2002 referred only to two ‘rogue states’, meaning states that brutalize their own people, ignore international law, strive to acquire weapons of mass destruction, sponsor terrorism, ‘reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.’ These states, which constituted ‘a looming threat to all nations’, were Iraq and North Korea.

Back to Back with Death

Kaneko Masaru: I read your book, I've Become Homeless. The general image of homeless people is that they've chosen that lifestyle themselves. Speaking from reality, that is totally wrong. Homeless people are in much more dire circumstances. That comes across well in your book.

Julia Adeney Thomas takes us beyond Japan to the nearby Korean peninsula to consider the broadly significant issue of the relationship between human beings and nature through the particular and unusual case of a space with minimal human intervention: the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. Thomas focuses on this strip of land—over 2 miles wide and about 160 miles long—that runs roughly along the 38th parallel that separates North and South Korea. Heavily militarized along each border, this buffer zone of 64 million square feet is hostile to and barren of much human life. This has made it a space unique in its relative absence of human intervention that has become, quite by accident, a refuge for wildlife. In contrast to the other essays discussed in this volume, Thomas explores a lack of human intention and action vis-à-vis the environment, and asks how deliberate human action might now preserve an ecosystem that was created without design. Also, in a more methodological vein, she poses questions about how the complexities and contingencies of environmental history challenge the foundations of the discipline of history.

Andre Vltchek has written more than one article for The Asia-Pacific Journal demonstrating the rise of militant Islamic nationalism in Indonesia, in refutation of many Western media outlets and statements in U.S. foreign policy that would characterize the country as a bastion of human rights and religious moderation in the Islamic world. In the article reproduced here, he indicates several strands that come together to form the religious climate in the most populous Islamic nation in the world. In at least some instances, the rise of intolerance appears to be a matter of religious orthodoxy in the strict sense of the word: for example, the Ahmadiyah sect, a minority group that posits the existence of prophets after Muhammad, has faced concerted pressure by mainstream Islamic groups (who have declared them heretical) and by the government itself (which has prohibited them from publicly spreading their doctrines on the basis of their “deviant” views). Other instances - like the anti-pornography laws of 2008 - seem to combine calls for Islamic sexual morality with opposition to the traditional dress of minority ethnic groups like the Balinese, while offering sweeping new censorship powers to the government.

Nuclear power proponent turned critic Koide Hiroaki is one of the best informed opponents of Japan's nuclear system. Since the March 11 crisis, he has spoken out continuously on the potential for serious effects on radiation public health and the need for a more comprehensive government strategy to protect the people of Fukushima and surrounding prefectures. In the Asia-Pacific Journal piece The Truth About Nuclear Power, Koide highlighted flawed assumptions about nuclear safety. In addition, a June talk by Koide has been subtitled in English and posted on Youtube:

Now, in the major Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun, he turns his attention to gaps in scientific knowledge about the potential impacts of radiation on human health.

This paper presents the results of a survey conducted on Japanese municipal governments regarding their attitudes and policies towards foreign residents. While assimilation and exclusion were historically the only approaches the Japanese authorities took in handling immigrants (mostly Korean former colonials), the reality of ever-increasing immigration heralds the task of integration. A national government is generally the ultimate decision-maker when it comes to immigration policy, including matters of integration. Yet most pressure to perform better is framed in terms of immigration control. The Japanese government, following European examples, perceives control and integration as the two pillars of its immigration policy, but the latter task needs more local involvement than the former. Therefore it is meaningful to focus on local-level immigration policy, which inevitably focuses more attention on immigrant integration.

The effects of the Fukushima shock continue to spread. Throughout the eventful summer, one of those consequences was the turn away from nuclear power with a dramatic emphasis on renewable power and the feed-in tariff (FIT) to deploy it fast. The FIT policy was championed by former Prime Minister Kan Naoto as well as the CEO of Softbank, Son Masayoshi. They and others in the political, business, non-profit, and academic communities strongly endorsed a legislative bill to expand Japan's handicapped FIT to geothermal, wind, biomass and small hydro. The bill was passed on August of 26 with explicit constraints on the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry's (METI) capacity to hamstring renewables in favour of nuclear power and on behalf of the nuclear village. Notably, the bill took price setting out of METI's hands. But now METI and its allies in the nuclear village are trying to get that clout back in their hands.

This essay introduces three different generations of artists whose works deal with experience, memory, and trauma derived from World War II. The first generation refers to artists who experienced the war: they are harsh critics of the wartime government for the victimization of both Japanese and non-Japanese citizens, such as Koreans. The second generation of artists were born in the 1940s and 50s. These artists do not have direct memories of the war, yet they challenge less-explored issues in relation to the time period, such as women's participation in the war effort. The third generation can be characterized by their desire to participate intergenerational and transnational dialogues with the older generations and with other artists and social-justice activists. The authors explain how these artists engage with viewers about the importance of remembering the war. Some older artists incorporate their direct war experience as a way to redress the atrocities imposed on their people while others reflect on family histories that were largely shaped by Japanese imperialism and war. Although they use different media and explore various issues, what binds them together is a message to the younger generation “not to forget” the brutality of war, and to critically reflect on their identity in relation to history. The essay also provides a number of images of relevant artworks with informative descriptions.