In early December 2011 the Nippon Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) “posted” Yu Darvish, making him eligible to field contract offers from Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in the United States. Darvish, a tall, handsome then 24 year old who, from 2005-2011, was the team's ace pitcher, had been the frequent subject of speculation: would he, and if so when, leave Japan for American baseball. By December 19 the Texas Rangers had won the posting process with a bid of $51.7 million dollars, paid entirely to Nippon Ham, payable upon the successful negotiation of a contract with Darvish. Several weeks later a six year, $60 million dollar agreement was signed and the next round of Darvish's athletic endeavors was set to unfold outside Japan. The month long process assumed its place alongside other moves by prominent Japanese baseball players to the United States, with baseball fans in both countries discussing and dissecting how he would fare against MLB competition.

On June 13, 2007, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs created a commission to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding the relocation, internment, and deportation of Latin Americans of Japanese descent to the United States during World War II. Among these were almost two thousand Peruvian citizens and permanent residents. Though not as widely known as the famous saga of internment and redress of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, in many ways the story of the Japanese in Peru is more intriguing, as much information still lies in the shadows, and is only now coming to light. Likewise, the issues of civil liberties that underscore this story—how a powerful nation can coerce a weaker ally into handing over some of its own people for imprisonment in another country without due process, on the ground that they are potential subversives—are all too obvious in a post 9/11 world fighting a “war on terrorism”. Also, while many people know that Peru's Alberto Fujimori was the first person of Japanese ancestry to be elected leader of a nation outside of Japan—thereby indicating a potential immigrant success story—few are aware of the cultural and social conflicts that still plague today's Peruvian Japanese population. Even fewer are likely to know about struggles of Japanese Peruvians who “return” to their ancestors' homeland for work for higher wages than the unstable Peruvian economy can provide. The short story of the Japanese in Peru, then, is many ways a microcosm of the larger saga of migration, discrimination and assimilation in the globalized, racialized, transnational twenty-first century world.

As I was researching Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese, I wondered whether Orwell ever wrote about China. His interest in India, where he was born in 1903, is well known, and he served in the Burma Police after leaving school and before becoming a writer, but my guess was that China didn’t concern him greatly. But when I went to the British Library to check in his massive, 20-volume Complete Works [CW], I was surprised to discover that he wrote quite a lot about China and its fate under Japanese occupation, in particular when he was working for the BBC's Eastern Service during World War II.

Blaxell treats the naturalization and Japanization of the land formerly known as Ezochi (literally “land of the barbarians”) into Hokkaido. Blaxell discusses the transformation of the urban space of Sapporo in the 1870s and 1880s by Japanese working with American advisors. The result was neither Japanese nor American, but distinctly modern and evocative of the imperial age. Blaxell touches upon the simultaneous erasing of the indigenous people, the Ainu, from the land during this re-conceptualization of Hokkaido as Japanese space and land. (The policies directed toward the Ainu after Hokkaido's colonization are discussed in Hirano Katsuya's article in Part II.) Blaxell uses the importation of a quintessentially Japanese characteristic—rice—to the unforgiving climate of Hokkaido and its eventual acculturation as an example of how the processes of colonization helped to naturalize a landscape as Japanese. Her article encourages us not to take for granted the geographic space—whether urban or “natural” —and understand how it is the result of both constructive (for some people but not others) and destructive human actions.

Hayashi Kyoko, born in Nagasaki in 1930, spent much of her childhood in wartime Shanghai. Returning to Nagasaki in March 1945, she attended Nagasaki Girls High School and was a student-worker in a munitions plant in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing on August 9.

Hayashi made her literary debut with the Akutagawa Prize-winning “Ritual of Death”, which records her exodus from the area of devastation and eventual reunion with her family. Her atomic bomb novella, “Masks of Whatchamacallit” (Nanjamonja no men) appeared the following year, followed shortly by a sequence of twelve short stories called Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Giyaman biidoro, 1978). These works established her as an important chronicler of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the lives of hibakusha in the wake of the bomb, themes she would elaborate in future work. A recent work “From Trinity to Trinity” (Torinitii kara Torinitii e) records her trip to Los Alamos New Mexico, the site of the first atomic bomb experiment, the source of her fifty-five years of experience of living with the bomb.

On the eve of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War Two, and the first anniversary of progressive political leadership by the Democratic Party of Japan, redress campaigns for wartime forced labor are bearing promising fruit and entering a decisive phase.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced on July 14 it would start talks on compensating the 300 Korean women who were deceived as teenagers into toiling without pay at a Nagoya aircraft factory. The so-called “teishintai” (volunteer corps) workers lost their lawsuit at the Japan Supreme Court in 2008, but last December the Japanese government issued seven of the women refunds of 99 yen (about one dollar) for pension deposits withheld during the war. The move enraged the Korean public and led to persistent protests at Mitsubishi offices in Tokyo and Seoul.

The Obama administration took office in 2009 determined to move beyond might-makes-right-makes-might unilateralism of the Bush years, and reassert America's global influence as the most principled and powerful guarantor of rule-based multilateralism.

With respect to China, this approach was presented as a doctrine of “strategic reassurance”.

Duara argues that the relationship between Manchukuo and Japan was a new form of imperialism, rather than a mirror-image of European imperialism. As Duara explains, the political relationship between the two showed “a strategic conception of the periphery as part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power.” The Japanese developed this strategy in response to growing nationalist movements by colonized people for independence after World War I. Many Japanese also thought they could win the cooperation of those movements by stressing their own frustrations at racial discrimination in the international sphere. Further exacerbating the sense that they were criticized by everyone, the Japanese faced racial discrimination when they tried to emigrate to Europe and North America and were refused even the principle of racial equality at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. Japan thus began to articulate itself as the anti-imperialist leader in Asia, set to lead the other Asian nations and throw off the yoke of western imperialism.

On January 17, PBS documentary program Frontline ran a feature on the Fukushima nuclear meltdown entitled Nuclear Aftershocks. It is available online here. The show has generated buzz, but also drawn significant critiques. The most powerful criticisms come from author Gregg Levine, writing on the website my FDL. The review is reproduced below. Please view the original here.

ULSAN, South Korea — Led by fast-growing China and India, Asia is going nuclear in a big way to feed its ravenous appetite for energy.

The strains of economic growth are already showing. Energy shortages have forced Chinese factories to scale back production, and farmers in India often have power for only half the day. Both countries say their future growth is at risk unless they diversify their energy mix.

Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neoconservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.

Writing in publications from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neoconservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by “realist” and other critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday's test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with “rogue” states like North Korea are useless and that “regime change” -by military means, if necessary – is the only answer.

The renowned architect's life work and his new book, My Place, reflects an awareness of humanity's close affinity to the world around us

“I wanted to go to a place that wasn’t neat and tidy, somewhere dangerous. I was bored, and it had something to do with the era and something to do with myself too.”

In a recent letter to fellow architect Sejima Kazuyo, Kuma Kengo expressed in the above words the tenor of his mood and the disarray of his esprit during his student days.

These drawings and paintings by Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb were created more than a quarter century after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. They are provided courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and form part of a much larger archive of more than 2,000 images and annotations. Posted at Japan Focus on April 27, 2005.

On April 11, the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability published a report entitled The Path from Fukushima: Short and Medium-term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on Japan's Electricity System (Executive Summary). The document, authored by a team headed by David von Hippel and Kae Takase, looks at an issue that has been frequently overlooked amid radiation concerns and attention to the tsunami-ravaged north – demand for electricity. Will Tokyo and surrounding regions have enough power to fuel revival? How will Japan's energy industry change in the wake of the Fukushima disaster?

Around 10pm on 5 October 1948 a small boat made its way along the coastline of Cape Sada Peninsula, the long finger of land that juts west from Ehime Prefecture on the Japanese island of Shikoku. The darkness was intense. It was a moonless autumn night, and the forested spine of hills above the jagged cliffs of the peninsula was devoid of lights.

The boat – a 20-ton wooden vessel called the Hatsushima – had left the heavy swell of the open ocean and now moved slowly and quietly through the calmer waters of the Uwa Sea. No doubt the captain believed that his craft's progress along this remote stretch of Shikoku coastline was unobserved. In the little fishing villages which dotted its rocky inlets the working day began and ended early, and most of the villagers were already asleep. But from the hills above, eyes were watching.

This article introduces the concept of “Insider minorities”, those whose difference is of a sort that currently does not deny their Japanese-ness in the eyes of other Japanese, as opposed to outsider minorities, who are considered foreign despite their long, even multigenerational, residence within Japan. Most surveys of minorities in Japan have focused on ethnic minorities, including Koreans and Chinese, as well as the indigenous Ainu and Okinawans. The Burakumin ends up being the only non-ethnic group to be included (see De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995; Weiner, 1997; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1998). Such a focus on ethnic and racial minorities, however, fails to recognize the extent of difference that exists in Japan. Indeed, ethnic minorities in Japan, together with the Burakumin, account for only 4 to 6% of the Japanese population (De Vos and Wagatsuma, 1995, p.272), making it easy for many Japanese, most notably former Prime Minister Nakasone, to claim ethnic and racial homogeneity in contrast to other countries such as the U.S. (Creighton, 1997).

Japan's Ogasawara (or Bonin) Islands (Ogasawara shotou), dubbed ‘the ‘Galapagos of the East’, are a group of oceanic islands situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Many of their numerous indigenous fauna and flora are at the brink of extinction, mainly caused by human settlement and construction during the last half century. Among those destructive factors, a plan to build a commercial airport was the most controversial and divided the community. Although the airport plan was withdrawn by the Tokyo Municipal Government in 2001, the native species are still facing various dangers.

The zanryu fujin (stranded war wives) [1] are former Japanese emigrants to Manchukuo who remained in China at the end of the Second World War. They were long among the forgotten legacies of Japan's imperialist past. [2] The reasons why these women did not undergo repatriation during the years up to 1958, when large numbers of former colonial emigrants returned to Japan, are varied but in many cases, the ‘Chinese’ families that adopted them, or into which they married, played a part. [3] The stories of survival during the period immediately after the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War on 9 August 1945, the civil war that followed, and throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, are testament to their strength. At the same time, the history of how the zanryu fujin came to be in China is useful for understanding the Japanese government's colonial policies, its wartime attitudes toward women, and its post war handling of inconvenient war legacies.