Japan's prison system is renowned for its safety and order. There has not been a prison riot there in decades, and figures about escapes from and assaults at its penal facilities are far lower than in other developed nations. Such features have not gone unnoticed; foreign policy makers increasingly look to Japan for lessons in how to improve their own prisons. Whilst various aspects of the Japanese prison system have been investigated by legal experts, government agencies and human rights organizations, however, a gap remains with respect to how Japanese prison policies are formulated. This article provides a study of the decision-making process, focusing on the political events triggered by a sequence of inmate injuries and fatalities in Nagoya Prison following the turn of the century, which culminated in the 2005/6 reform of the 1908 Prison Law. Whilst this study reveals the scope of the discretion that the Ministry of Justice enjoys over prison management, it also shows the capability of the legislature to hold the former to account when called to do so, and the potential for civil society to impact policy-making in Japan.

J. Mark Ramseyer's 2020 article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” provoked numerous highly critical responses from the general public and the scholarly community. Our group composed a report that analyzed the article and concluded that it should be retracted because it misused and distorted evidence. After more than two years of investigation, during which Ramseyer published a response to his critics, the editors of the International Review of Law & Economics decided not to retract the article, but to keep a statement of concern attached to the final published version. In this follow-up report, we explore the legacy of the original article as it relates to problems of academic integrity and historical denialism in public discourse. We highlight Ramseyer's persistent strategies of obfuscation and suggest how historians might continue to address the problem of deliberately misleading scholarship masquerading as “academic freedom.”

At a time when the prospects confronting Hong Kong are overshadowed by the combination of the popular movement for democratic rights and the corona virus epidemic that is challenging Hong Kong as well as China, issues of income inequality and declining economic prospects deeply affect the future of Hong Kong youth. This article documents the pattern of growing income inequality with specific reference to educated youth of Generation Y in spheres such as income distribution, the relative stagnation of income of young graduates, and soaring housing prices that make Hong Kong among the most expensive real estate markets in the world.

This article reviews the potential for United States accession to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) under the current U.S. leadership, the administration of President Donald J. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress. The strategic significance of U.S. ratification of UNCLOS is demonstrated by U.S. claims and rights in areas subject to geopolitical contestation such as the Arctic and South China Sea. More broadly, the United States has a compelling interest in preserving the international order and protecting the global commons, as embodied in the terms of the treaty. Despite clear evidence that ratification is in the U.S. national interest, UNCLOS faces the obstacle of continued Senate inaction and the challenge of a domestic political atmosphere suspicious of international law and institutions. President Trump, as a Republican leader and populist dealmaker, may be well-positioned to overcome domestic political opposition and achieve a vital U.S. foreign policy objective that has eluded his White House predecessors.

Despite the rise of the importance of the ‘Indo-Pacific,’ this article argues that discussions on the concept remain at the theoretical level, such as seen in the grand strategy debate. However, in the policy field, the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy has evolved to a much more detailed one that manifests as an action plan. Given the discrepancy between theory and practice, this article aims to provide a tool to read the development of the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy with a focus on U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM), which is in charge of operationalizing the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy in the security field.

With the review and analysis of mission, strategy, and operational essence of USINDOPACOM and its component commands, this article finds that first, at the mission and strategy level, the commands assume that their main position is to deter and defend rather than to preempt conflict in the region. The operational level finding is that to fulfill its mission and strategy, USINDOPACOM and its component commands consistently emphasize the importance of strengthening and enhancing its posture in the region. Third, USINDOPACOM and its component commands are establishing new types of troops equipped with enhanced mobility and capabilities covering multi-domains.

This analysis and review has implications for the allies and partners of the U.S. when pursuing their own Indo-Pacific strategies. Based on the current evidence, there is a likelihood that the U.S. will request allies and partners act jointly or mini-laterally beyond the established bilateral relationship. In addition, in order to overcome the logistical difficulty caused by the ‘tyranny of distance’ in the Indo-Pacific area, the U.S. may request allies and partners play additional roles in this context beyond what they have done to date. Allies and partners need to consider these practical trends toward which the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy is heading and what this means for their own national interests, strategies, and operations.

Olympic organizers have used a mix of spin and patriotic arm-twisting to sell the 2020 Games in their attempt to rebrand Japan as open and multicultural. But another Japan - chauvinist and fretting about its place in a globalized world - keeps showing through.

The Japanese military was led throughout its history from the 1880s until the end of World War II in 1945 by a small group of elite officers who graduated from the Army War College and then served as staff officers and/or commanders in the Army Ministry, the General Staff headquarters, and in field armies in Manchuria, China proper, and elsewhere. These officers were trained to do careful research into the comparative militaries, economies and logistics of their own, their allies, and their potential enemies' strength for war. The point of this essay is to explore why highly-trained officers, who learned from their own observations and research about Japan's and its wartime allies' weaknesses vis-à-vis the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China, ignored what they learned and went to war between 1931 and 1945 with these larger and economically more advanced nations. That is, why did the brains of the Japanese army, with help from many staff officers in Japan's navy and civil bureaucracy, lead Japan into a war it could not win? Did they really believe, as they often said they did, that superior spirit could overcome superior technology and production, or were they motivated by the desire for advancement—wars brought promotions. Or what else may have motivated them? I believe that they knew they could not win the war, but went to war anyway.

Donald Trump's plan for a more muscular US nuclear posture got a ringing endorsement from the increasingly right-wing government of Japan. Not long after the Trump administration released its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in early February, Foreign Minister Taro Kono said he “highly appreciates” the new approach to US nuclear weapons policy, including the emphasis on low-yield nuclear options the United States and Japan can rely on to respond to non-nuclear threats.

TOKYO - In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Aoyama Michio's initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government's Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident.

We reviewed infection prevention policies using an adapted Equity Impact Assessment tool. Thirty-one percent of policies had substantial potential to impact marginalized groups and create or sustain inequities, and most lacked existing equity considerations. Systematic policy review for equity implications can result in actions to improve care and quality.

In this introduction to an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa's travel memoir A Dosimeter on the Narrow Road to Oku, I give an outline of Sukegawa's biography, his reasons for undertaking a journey by bicycle in 2012 along Matsuo Basho's route in The Narrow Road to Oku, and the reasons for my own particular interest in this text. The translation covers the section of his journey from Fukagawa to Nasu. It won the 2021 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature, Thought, and Society.

In Fukushima there are two museums that present different narratives of the 3.11 natural disaster and nuclear crisis. TEPCO's Decommissioning Archive Center focuses on the nuclear accident, what its workers endured and provides rich details on the decommissioning process expected to take three to four decades. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum focuses on how the lives of the prefecture's residents were affected by the cascading 3.11 disaster. The Archive elides many controversial issues that reflect badly on the utility while the Memorial conveys the human tragedy while addressing some of the controversies not covered in the Archive. TEPCO presents an evasive narrative at the Archive, but it is slickly packaged and casts the utility in the best light possible. The Memorial is impressive in scope and conveys the extent of the various tragedies with updates that responded to patrons' criticisms about controversial issues.

Precis: A translation of an oral autobiography of the life of Usami Osamu (1926-2018), the human rights activist and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit brought, and won in 2001, by men and women whose lives were taken away under Japan's Hansen's Disease (leprosy) absolute lifetime quarantine policy, in effect until 1996, who passed away on April 10th. A portion of his ashes will remain at Nagashima Aiseien National Hansen's Disease Sanatorium in Okayama Prefecture where he lived for almost seventy years and another portion will be placed in his family grave in Aichi prefecture, the reunion with the parents he struggled for throughout his life.

Through an examination of Olympic-related art and the gendered, labored bodies that produce the Olympic spectacle, “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games” reveals continuities in the political and artistic stakes of the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964 and 2020.

Over the past decade, the concept of the “uncanny valley” (bukimi no tani) coined by roboticist Mori Masahiro (b. 1927), has appeared in over ten thousand (English-language) articles and chapters, Briefly, the concept presumes that the scary surprise of realizing that, say, a flesh-and-blood human was actually a zombie will send one tumbling into a valley of existential queasiness. As an application, this effect was hypothesized by Mori as grounds for avoiding the design and manufacture of humanlike robots or androids. In this edited and augmented excerpt from chapter 6 (Cyborg-Ableism beyond the Uncanny [Valley]) of my book, Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (2018), I interrogate the 'uncanny valley“ hypothesis, which has been accorded an almost ”natural-law“-like status. I critically examine Mori's original 1970 essay in Japanese and draw attention to some of the problems posed both by translating bukimi as ”uncanny“ and by treating the ”uncanny valley“ as a self-evident truism.

On 4 August 1993, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei issued an official declaration on the issue of the so-called ‘comfort women’ - women recruited to work in a large network of brothels operated by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War, where many suffered terrible sexual and other physical and mental abuse, and many died. The declaration, based on a study conducted by the Japanese government, read in part as follows:

In the summer of 2012, following an accident at the Fukushima power plant in March 2011, 200,000 people filled the streets outside the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo. This new movement had much in common with contemporaneous movements around the world, such as Occupy Wall Street. These included its use of the internet and the central role played by a highly educated precariat. In this essay, I analyze the results of the research I conducted on this movement, including the characteristics displayed by its main actors and participants, the structure of the organizing group and its methods of mobilization. Furthermore, I analyze Japan's political structure to show why the movement has not directly affected electoral outcomes. While this article analyzes Japanese society, it also contributes to understanding a more universal problem: What is the relationship between twenty-first century social movements and political systems that took shape during the twentieth century?

An american organization founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

On the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize through the generosity of her colleagues, students, and friends, the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Prize.