It is very difficult to say anything useful about Kobayashi Yoshinori today. Not least, because it was very hard to say anything about him in the first place. The lashings of masochistic self-irony in his work have been more than well commented upon. The more the manga artist and one contemporary face of cultural fascism in Japanese popular culture is criticized, the more it seems he feeds upon that controversy; the more he is pronounced “dead” as a significant cultural force, the more he seems to bounce back into necroperformative life.

The following comment on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, abbreviated here, was first published in Korean in the widely read blog Hangyoreh Sarangbang, in early May, and then translated and published in Japanese shortly afterwards. Here the author provides an English version, and adds an introduction briefly surveying responses to the death in South Korea, particularly those of progressive sectors of South Korean opinion. APJ

Fifty years ago, the mass repatriation of ethnic Koreans from Japan to North Korea was reaching its peak. In towns and cities all over Japan farewell gatherings were being held, as “returnees” to North Korea packed their bags and boarded trains that would take them to the port of Niigata where, after various formalities including a “confirmation of free will” by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), they would board Russian ships for the voyage to Cheongjin in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Over 49,000 people embarked on this journey in 1960 alone, and 93,340 over the full span of the “repatriation project”[帰国事業, 북성사업) from December 1959 to July 1984.