This article revisits the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong through the lens of trauma. It argues that both the pro-democracy and pro-government camps framed themselves as victims and engaged in dehumanizing and infra-humanizing narratives, intensifying conflict and emotional harm. Although the movement ended with the National Security Law and the COVID-19 outbreak, the trauma remains unresolved. Post-movement policies, especially in education, have often exacerbated rather than healed the divisions. This study calls for government-led reconciliation efforts to move beyond mutual victimhood and foster genuine recovery for Hong Kong society.

This article examines the online media strategy of the religious group “Kōfuku no Kagaku” (Happy Science) and its political arm “Kōfuku Jitsugentō” (Happiness Realization Party) through two analyses: a quantitative analysis of the group’s news outlets and a qualitative analysis of a YouTube channel. Combining large data analysis with close reading we examine the group’s use of right-wing discourse, conspiracy narratives, pro-Russian disinformation, and anti-media rhetoric to position themselves within viral discursive networks. We argue that their media mission should be understood from historical and strategic perspectives, and discuss the compatibility of their ideology within the global right-wing media sphere.

This study examines the representation of aging hikikomori in Japanese language media through qualitative content analysis of 188 sources (2019–2024), including news articles and personal blogs. Using deductive and inductive coding, the research reveals disparities between institutional media portrayals and personal narratives. Findings demonstrate that Japanese media frames aging hikikomori through medical and social welfare lenses, emphasizing social burden and family crisis narratives, while self-authored blogs reveal intersectional identities encompassing disability, sexuality, and regional marginalization. This paper provides the first English-language empirical analysis of Japanese media representations of aging hikikomori, demonstrating how blogosphere self-representation functions as counter-discourse to medicalized framings.

This paper examines the reasons behind the sudden emergence of anti-foreigner populism in the mainstream during the July 2025 House of Councilors election. Starting with a comparative analysis of the right-wing organizations Zaitokukai (in the 2010s) and Sanseito (now), the paper argues that, against the background of exclusionist sentiment fostered during the pandemic and rising populism causing elites to lose control of the narrative on migration, the visibility of foreigners in everyday life in Japan has reached a psychological tipping point, a symbolic perceived threat to a homogenous identity that manifests itself in feelings of anxiety, injustice, and ultimately overt xenophobia.

This article examines Japan’s contemporary commercial whaling industry through the lens of “demand for demand,” i.e., efforts to 1) stimulate whale product consumption and 2) preserve the domestic industry, via public subsidy if necessary. Focusing on Shimonoseki, Japan’s principal pelagic whaling port, it analyzes strategies aimed at overcoming intergenerational whale meat consumption differences, particularly via the city’s public school lunch program. The article speculates that whale consumption is unlikely to recover and proposes a novel theoretical model for future research on the subject. I suggest that Japan has undergone an irreversible social regime shift away from whale-eating norms.

Paul Howard Skuse (1909–1994) was a Boston patrolman and naval officer in the Pacific theater of World War II and the Korean War who served from 1946 to 1958 as a police adviser in Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands). Afterwards, he became a police adviser in Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam working under the United States Agency of International Development (USAID)’s Office of Public Safety (OPS). Skuse’s career provides a window into US clandestine operations during the Cold War in Okinawa and Southeast Asia that have remained largely hidden from public view and are left out of most history books.

Shanghai’s renewal has advanced rapidly, replacing old neighbourhoods with commercial complexes and large infrastructure. While these projects modernise the city, they often demolish historic areas that embody local identity and memory, disrupting long-standing communities and social networks. The city increasingly caters to tourists and investors, sidelining the value of generational communities beyond financial compensation. Drawing on fieldwork and photographic documentation, this article examines shifting urban functions and their impact on residents’ daily lives.

This article examines the forgetting of the collective memory of the Filipina “comfort women” prior to the 1990s transnational redress movement. It argues that the prevailing social norms around prostitution, postwar narratives of heroism versus collaboration, and the interests of state and elite actors contributed to the initial silencing of this memory. However, shifts in societal norms towards sexual slavery and the return of democratic spaces in Asia enabled the later remembering and eventual mobilization of the “comfort women” memory which facilitated the emergence of the redress movement in the Philippines, challenging the state’s homogenized official memory of the Asia-Pacific War.

This article reads the post-moratorium boom in historical whaling fiction against shifting debates over the legitimacy of Japanese whaling. Taking Itō Jun’s Kyogei no umi (2013) as example, I draw on critical heritage studies and Svetlana Boym’s theory of nostalgia to show how the novel reconstructs Edo-period whaling as a morally coherent, patriarchal community built on self-sacrifice and masculine heroism. In doing so, the novel aligns with cultural-nationalist framings of whaling, enhancing its symbolic value as a marker of Japanese identity. The article thus shows how such narratives participate in the discursive work that sustains whaling in contemporary Japan.

On June 22, 2024, the coastal town of Stintino in Sardinia, Italy, became home to the first “Statue of Peace” (“comfort women” memorial) installed in Italy. This paper examines how this Korean memorial reached a small town of 1,600 residents, analyzing the local actors involved, community responses, and ensuing tensions. Based on fieldwork conducted in May–June 2025, including interviews with Mayor Rita Limbania Vallebella and project initiator Rosamaria Caiazza, the study shows how a retired teacher’s interest in Korean culture aligned with a feminist mayor’s commitment to combating gender violence, creating a powerful alliance for historical memory and women’s rights.

This article examines the All-Japan Students’ Photo Association’s (AJSPA) 1970 “Pollution campaign” as a pivotal intervention in photographic practice and public activism. Responding to industrial pollution across Japan, student photographers traveled to Minamata, Yokkaichi, and Ashio, documenting local communities’ lived experiences. Their photobook On This Land We Have No Country (1970) constructed a visual “pollution map” of the archipelago through photographs, historical documents, and data. Examining this work, I argue that students’ photographs framed pollution as a systemic, national crisis tied to Japan’s high-growth economic policies, rooted in historical patterns of treating humans as expendable under industrial capitalism.

In the early 1970s, emerging photographer Matsumoto Michiko (1950–) turned her camera towards Ūman Ribu (Women’s Liberation Movement). Published in both the mainstream press and the self-produced materials of various Ribu collectives, Matsumoto’s work provided a striking visual account of the movement’s activities and of the matters on which the radical feminists insisted. Women’s self-determination, control over their bodies, the deconstruction of social and familial structures: all these elements can be traced in Matsumoto’s visual narratives, which became instrumental for Ribu to reappropriate their own representations from the negative views offered by the mass media.

This article examines how the anime Night Raid 1931 reimagines 1931 Shanghai as mato (magic city), using spatial and temporal displacement to negotiate Japan’s imperial past. Drawing on heterotopia and hauntology, it analyzes how the anime reconstructs Shanghai as a phantasmic space, where historical time fragments through supernatural narration and stylized aesthetics. By setting the story in 1931, the series uses nostalgia and speculative imagination to articulate lost possibilities of Japan. This enables trans/national recentering, allowing Japan to reassert symbolic centrality in Asia through popular culture rather than political dominance, reconfiguring unresolved memory and regional identity.

Students’ understanding of Japan’s arrival in Indonesia during the Pacific Wartime (1942–45) sparks a sharp conflict in narratives: was Japan a savior or an invader? This study reveals how official school narratives in Indonesia glorify Japan’s role, clashing with family stories of suffering caused by forced labor (romusha). Using a qualitative approach, the research highlights the ambiguous role of Japan as both victim and perpetrator, shaping students’ complex and diverse national identities. These findings urge curriculum reform for a more inclusive and honest engagement with this controversial historical legacy.

The United States government sought to rehabilitate the devastated Philippines through a scholarship for Filipino youths at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Many Filipinos fought against the Japanese bravely and endured much hardship during the war on the side of the United States, including a significant portion of the cadets sent to the academy. Their stories were captured in a cadet corps magazine called Polaris, in which they described their experiences of war in gruesome detail, but in a way clearly influenced by the liberation narratives of the Japanese imperialists.

This paper discusses the work of Japanese painter Nakamura Hiroshi in the late 1950s and early 1960s in light of the politics and literature debate raging among the Japanese intelligentsia in the immediate post-World War II era, focusing specifically on the exchange between Kurahara Korehito and the writers associated with the Kindai bungaku literary journal. A key issue in these debates was that of subjectivity, and this article argues that analyzing Nakamura’s paintings with a focus on this concept reveals how the development of his work was dialectically mediated through the tumultuous political upheavals of the postwar era.

This paper examines how well news articles reflect levels of interstate cooperation, focusing on cooperation between the Japanese and the South Korean governments. The study analyzes events from news articles on Japan–Republic of Korea (ROK) government cooperation from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) 2.0 Event Database, a global catalog of weighted interstate events. Results reveal that news articles reflect major events of Japan–ROK government cooperation from 2015 to 2024. A few examples of cooperation not represented were found when conflict or past cooperation was reported simultaneously. This study highlights the complexity of Japan–ROK government cooperation and reveals the challenges of using news articles for event data generation.

This research note examines how people labeled as hikikomori—prolonged social withdrawal—navigate isolation, moral judgment, and attempts at rehabilitation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural rehabilitation center, it situates their experiences within broader social transformations in post-industrial Japan. Departing from accounts that frame hikikomori primarily through diagnosis or individual pathology, this note foregrounds lived experience and the moral dimensions of rehabilitation. It argues that hikikomori are not anomalies at society’s edges, but rather windows into how contemporary Japan organizes value, recognition, and social connection, and that further ethnographic work is needed to illuminate these dynamics.

This study examines the role of cultural connectivity in the evolving dynamics of Korea–Japan relations. Since the dramatic downturn in 2019—the worst since the 1965 normalization— there has been a significant shift. In the post-COVID era, the expansion of cultural exchanges, driven by Gen-Z influence and rising consumption of cultural content, has redefined this relationship. This is evident in the growing prominence of Korean culture in Japan, increased Japanese tourism among Koreans, and the shift from a hierarchical to a more symmetrical relationship. Through this lens, we explore how shared values bolster cooperation and how strengthening cultural ties foster a more sustainable future.