The History of Hokkaido, compiled and published by the Hokkaido regional authority in 1918, explains why the Hokkaido frontier was “opened” (kaitaku) by the Japanese (wajin) rather than by the Ainu:

Japanese imperial authorities sought to justify their imperial project in Hokkaido by racializing the Ainu, whom they displaced in 1869. At the time, the Ainu, with their Caucasian features and beards, were considered racially and culturally distinct from the Japanese (wajin), explaining why some western anthropologists marveled at the feat of a yellow race colonizing a white race. Therefore, the Japanese racialization of the Ainu as a culturally inferior and primitive race at the brink of extinction turned conventional racial taxonomies on their head. In this article Hirano introduces the term “colonial translation,” referring to the process by which the cultural and social differences between the Ainu and Japanese were rewritten to cast the Ainu as primitives. The institutionalization of these depictions of Ainu as primitive people enabled the colonizer to justify rule over the colonized. Although by the turn of the 19th century the majority of Ainu were engaged in wage labor or trade with the Japanese, the passage of the 1899 Protection Act attempted to turn the Ainu into farmers. More precisely, the imperial project in Hokkaido was justified by the argument that the Ainu were not capable of settling the land and cultivating it; the Japanese as a more civilized and advanced race needed to take charge. Expropriation of land and the limitation of Ainu hunting and fishing rights all occurred simultaneously with the “nativization” of the Ainu.

TAKARAZUKA, Hyogo Prefecture–It was a strange time to fall in love. The Americans were about to land on Okinawa Prefecture for what would later be one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.

But Ohama Tatsuko says some of her most cherished moments came amid the horrors of the war, namely her walks on a beach in the prefecture with a student conscript, their hopes and promises for the future, and even the awkward moments trying to express their true feelings toward each other.

MINAMATA, Kumamoto Pref. (Kyodo) Kaneko Sumiko, 74, hopes to outlive, even by a day, her 50-year-old son, Yuji, who has been in a wheelchair the past nine years.

“His condition is getting worse, and now even we family members do not understand what he says or wants,” she said of her third son, who suffers congenital Minamata disease. “He must feel miserable that he cannot express his feelings to people, while I myself have had sleepless nights thinking about him.”

The town of Namie is the largest in both area and population among eight towns and villages within Futaba Country in Fukushima Prefecture. At the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 that precipitated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, the town's population was 18,464. Although Namie is located just 11.2 km from the nuclear power plants, it took four days from the explosion of the power plants before Tokyo issued an evacuation order. The government's belated order was consonant with its decision to withhold information on radiation levels provided by SPEEDI (System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information) in order to avoid “public panic.” Consequently, many residents of Namie as well as other neighboring villages and towns were exposed to high radiation. On April 15 2012, the town of Namie asked the Japanese government to provide free heath care for its residents, including regular medical check-ups to monitor the internal radiation exposure and thyroid examinations. The evacuated government of Namie obtained a monitoring device and installed it in temporary housing in Nihonmatsu City, Fukushima where many evacuees were relocated. On April 1, 2017, the central government lifted one set of restrictions on one zone—areas in which people were permitted to enter freely but were not allowed to stay overnight—and another on a second zone—where access was limited to short visits—based on its judgment that decontamination work had successfully removed radioactive contaminants from the areas. Since the termination of the evacuation order, the government has been encouraging residents to return to those areas although only 1-2% of the residents, mostly senior citizens, have returned so far and a recent poll indicates that less than a quarter of the population intends to return in the future. In this regard, Namie is no different from other towns and villages in that the so-called return policy remains a de facto failure and the former residents simply do not trust or refuse to follow the central government's “reconstruction” programs. At the same time, local governments have been thrown into extremely difficult situations where they have no choice but to go along with the “return policy.”

Murakami Tatsuya is the former mayor of Tōkaimura or Tōkai village located approximately 75 miles north of Tokyo and 111 miles south of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Tōkaimura is considered the birthplace of nuclear power in Japan since the Japanese government built the first reactor for commercial use there in 1965 in collaboration with British nuclear scientists. As Mr. Murakami reveals below, the Japanese government at the time informed the residents of Tōkaimura only of the building of a nuclear research institute, not a power plant. As time passed, Tōkaimura became heavily dependent on the nuclear industry for its revenue and people’s livelihood.

The UCLA event featuring Uemura Takashi was held on May 8th. Over 120 people attended. It was filled with tension, due largely to the fact that Los Angeles has become the primary site for Japanese right-wing activism on the west coast, especially since July 2013, when a memorial to the “Comfort Women” was erected in Glendale Park. Shin-issei (new immigrants arriving from Japan over the past quarter-century) have been organizing meetings and study groups to promote a revisionist history in the greater LA area, and one group, the Global Alliance of Historical Truth (GAHT), led by Koichi Mera, filed a lawsuit seeking the removal of the Glendale statue (this lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge in the summer of 2014). As anticipated, nearly two-dozen Japanese (-American) nationalists showed up for the event. Some of them clustered at the center of the lecture hall and caused tension by chattering among themselves during the lecture, abruptly raising their voices during the question-and-answer session, and distributing their pamphlets entitled “Comfort Women Not Sex-Slaves” to the audience.

Suzuki Yūichi (56) was born to a farming family in Namie, Fukushima in 1960. Namie was one of the areas most devastated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as well as the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Besides 565 deaths from the earthquake/tsunami, because the town was located within the 20 kilometer exclusion zone around the damaged nuclear power plant, the entire town was evacuated on March 12. The government of Namie continued to operate in Nihonmatsu-city 39 kilometers from Namie. At the time of the nuclear accident, Mr. Suzuki was working in the Citizens' Affairs Division of Namie and was immediately assigned to the Disaster Management Division established to assist citizens in finding missing family members, locating temporary housing, and evacuating families. Suzuki was subsequently responsible for decontamination efforts, return policies, and establishing clinics for prospective returnees. In the summer and the winter of 2016, I visited Namie with my colleagues Professor Yoshihiro Amaya of Niigata University and Yoh Kawano, a PhD candidate at UCLA, to interview Mr. Suzuki. Mr. Suzuki contends that the majority of former residents of Namie are unlikely to return to the town even after the Japanese government lifts the restriction on residency in certain areas on March 31, 2017.

I consider problems in the references to the history of Buraku in J. M. Ramseyer’s article, “On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan”, published in Review of Law and Economics in 2019. As a researcher on the history of those who had been subjected to discrimination in the early-modern era, mainly in East Japan, I would like to point out problems in the article, focusing on its references to and quotations from previous works.

Koide Hiroaki (66) has emerged as an influential voice and a central figure in the anti-nuclear movement since the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi of March 11, 2011. He spent his entire career as a nuclear engineer working towards the abolition of nuclear power plants. His powerful critique of the “nuclear village” and active involvement in anti-nuclear movements “earned him an honorable form of purgatory as a permanent assistant professor at Kyoto University.” Koide retired from Kyoto University in the spring of 2015, but continues to write and act as an important voice of conscience for many who share his vision of the future free from nuclear energy and weapons. He has authored 20 books on the subject. Professor Kasai Hirotaka and I visited his office at Kyoto University's Research Reactor Institute in Kumatori, Osaka, on December 26th, 2014 for this interview. We believe that the contents of the interview, which offer new information about the degree of radioactive contamination and invaluable insight into Koide's ethical and political stance as a scientist, remain crucial for our critical reflection on ecological destruction, the violation of human rights, and individual responsibility. Professor Robert Stolz, the translator of this interview and the author of Bad Water (Duke University Press, 2015), provides a historical perspective on the interview in a separate article.

Those who want to know more about Chiri Yukie and her adaptation of “The Song the Owl God Himself Sang: An Ainu Tale” should read this article, which directly addresses the context for Chiri's retelling of an Ainu legend. The process of empire building and colonialism is always disruptive. Moreover, it usually leaves behind victimized, traumatized, and marginalized indigenous people. Their common misfortune is that militarily and technologically superior outsiders arrived to annex them and their lands by force. The Ainu were no exception, and even the seemingly innocent Collection of Ainu Legends was inseparable from the Japanese colonization of the Ainu.

The nonlinear dynamics of a helical vortex disturbed by a long-wave-instability mode is studied by direct numerical simulation. Vortex reconnection or self-reconnection of the helical vortex is shown to play a crucial role depending on the pitch of the helical vortex. For the larger pitch, a vortex ring is created after the vortex reconnection; it detaches from the remaining helical vortex, whose pitch is doubled. A vortex ring is also created for the smaller pitch; however, it forms a linked system with the remaining vortex. The topological constraint due to this linkage forces strong interaction between the different parts of the helical vortex, leading to turbulent transition.

It will be interesting to listen to the personal beliefs concerning “Truth” as revealed in the studies of different scholars in different countries. But how will such a collection of beliefs contribute to the seeking of truth itself when we want to attribute to the word truth one of the adjectives: “absolute,” or “universal”?

This article challenges the prevailing narrative surrounding the Japanese manufacturing industry in the post-World War II era, which predominantly centers on large corporations and male engineers. It sheds light on the vital role played by Japanese housewives in shaping product innovation. It argues that the exclusion of consumers, particularly women, from existing industrial models carries a gendered dimension. By presenting Japanese housewives as active stakeholders who defy stereotypes and enhance their lives by expressing their opinions, we aim to offer a fresh perspective on innovation and product development. The article specifically focuses on the electric appliance industry and draws upon a diverse range of sources, including women’s magazines and corporate archives, to uncover the hidden aspects of gender within the Japanese economic miracle. It shows that housewives have played an active role in product innovation and that women’s magazines have made this possible by acting as intermediaries between women and companies.

In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which contributes to the existing literature that focuses on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally, we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline.