This article reconsiders prevailing assumptions of bureaucratic continuity in postwar Japan by examining the case of the Ministry of Communications during the Allied Occupation. While existing scholarship emphasizes institutional inertia, this study shows how structural reform and inter-institutional negotiations involving both American authority and Japanese agency reshaped parts of Japan’s administrative system. The case calls for a more differentiated, organization-focused perspective on postwar reforms and demonstrates that these transformations had enduring effects beyond 1952.

The article examines the boom of the “Mitsu Desu” game in 2020, which was created in the context of social distancing policies. In the game, players act as Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike, dispersing crowds to earn points. This case underscores that entertainment can help people cope with crises and can serve as an informal tool for policy implementation. The article identifies what design elements attracted people and analyzes how players interpreted in-game actions in relation to real-world situations. It also addresses the question of how conventional and new media triggered the game’s boom.

Suzume no tojimari (2022) depicts the coming-of-age road trip of a teenage girl through abandoned places, in order to save Japan from giant earthquake worms, and to confront her own past of 3/11. With hyperrealistic visuals and references to Shinto mythology and folklore traditions, the movie constructs a correlation between human misbehavior and natural disasters. This narrative indicates the restoration of a mythological unity of Japanese land, people, and culture to prevent earthquakes, and to overcome personal and social issues, echoing Japanese national conservative discourse. By doing so, the movie puts moral responsibility to the individual to cope with disasters and decline.

In recent elections across major destination countries in the developed world, migration has become a major issue of political salience. Japan has traditionally been an outlier to the trend, but migration did become a major topic driving public opinion in the 2025 Upper House election. This article explores the overall political salience of migration in Japan, focusing primarily on how the ruling coalition managed public discourse as it pushed through major reforms over the past decade, why it lost control of the narrative in the recent election, and what this means for the politics of migration in Japan going forward.

This paper discusses the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election in the context of past contests. It shows how this election manifested the trends since the 1990s: an increasing distrust of the existing political parties, including those created in that decade and the growing support for independent candidates. Such candidates follow their own line of thinking, free from party ties, and appeal to voters in ways that resonate with public skepticism toward party politics. The analysis highlights both continuity and change in Tokyo elections and underscores broader patterns in Japanese political development.

This article examines the replication of the Statue of Peace as a form of civic resistance and re-commemoration in response to the Japanese government’s efforts at de-commemoration. It advances three central arguments. First, replication functions as re-commemoration that resists state-led erasure of the “comfort women” memory. Second, this process constitutes a hauntological cycle, in which attempts to suppress unresolved memories only intensify their return. Third, both state and civic actors must embrace these haunting memories as enduring presences. The study draws on Derridean hauntology and case studies to support this framework.

This research reconsiders the true nature of Japanese military comfort stations and comfort women. To summarize the discussion in this paper, comfort stations were military facilities, and comfort women were the third unit of the Japanese military, after soldiers and direct civilian employees of the Army and Navy. The Japanese military recognized the comfort stations as an essential element of military operations, and institutionalized and formalized their comfort stations by incorporating them into innumerable detailed regulations.

The Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942–1945) caused the loss of 500,000–1,000,000 Filipino lives—a tragedy largely erased from Japanese visual media. A 2017 study of Japanese television and a 1980–2023 study of Japanese films found Filipino victims scarcely represented or omitted entirely. Unlike Chinese and Korean victims, whose narratives remain visible owing to activism and diplomatic pressures, Filipino experiences have been marginalized. This study reveals Japan’s selective war memory and advocates for addressing overlooked histories and fostering inclusive media representation to enhance societal cohesion and strengthen Japan’s international relations.

In 2002, the director of the Jindo Cultural Center learned of Waedeoksan, a tomb site said to commemorate Japanese naval soldiers who died in the 1597 Battle of Myeongnyang. Oral tradition framed the burials as an act of virtue toward foreign dead and remained confined to Jindo for centuries. After the discovery of a genealogical reference, the story gained attention and was mobilized as a symbol of Korea–Japan reconciliation, prompting a visit from a Japanese prime minister. In 2022, however, a historian challenged its archaeological basis, sparking debate. This article traces competing narratives and shows how the tradition became sensitive.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.