The COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have raised concerns about the relevance and reliability of current measures and indices of child well-being. This article aims to bridge a significant knowledge gap by examining how these indices respond to shocks and exploring attributes of shock-responsive indicators related to child well-being. Drawing on the UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 16 on child well-being and the Korean Child Well-being Index, the study conducts a comparative analysis of differences in the design and purpose of indices that influence their resilience to shocks. Subsequently, it proposes an approach for evaluating the ‘shock-responsiveness’ of key outcome indicators of child well-being before going on to review how child income poverty measures performed during COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis. After finding that child well-being indices, at present, are not able to fully capture the effects of covariate crises on children, the article concludes with insights for policymakers and researchers.

This article analyzes how Shinzo Abe employed various strategies to challenge Korean sovereignty over Dokdo on the international stage and to promote Japan’s territorial claims on the islets domestically. Through a series of speeches discussed at Japan’s National Diet among Abe’s cabinet ministers and members of the Diet, this article investigates how and by what policy instruments the Abe cabinet infiltrated and revitalized Japan’s territorial claims over Dokdo across the nation. Several members of the Diets and ministers discussed the Dokdo issue amid worsening Korea–Japan relations stemming from Abe’s revisionism. Content analysis revealed that Japanese lawmakers and cabinet members were very frustrated about Korea’s effective control of Dokdo as well as the Korean government’s stance on comfort women and forced labor. Quantitative analyses found increases in the average intensity of Dokdo remarks following the Abe cabinet’s hardline stance toward President Moon’s government. Regression analysis confirms that the average intensity of Dokdo remarks was intensified by cabinet approval ratings, conservative rightwing politicians, and Japan’s domestic economic conditions.

The assassination of Abe Shinzo in July 2022 not only felled a political giant, but also propelled the government to seek dissolution of the Unification Church (UC), known as the Moonies in the Anglophone world, because the gunman told police that he targeted Japan's longest serving prime minister (2012–2020) due to his links with the UC. Ironically, the South Korea-based UC enjoyed extensive influence in the Abe faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a strange brew of clashing nationalisms given that Abe was an advocate of historical revisionism, a rightwing political movement that promotes an exonerating and glorifying narrative of Japan's shared past with Asia, while the UC was guilt-tripping donors about Japan's colonial rule in the Korean peninsula (1910–45).

As an outcome of the ongoing re-democratization movement in South Korea, the recent success of the Candlelight Revolution provides valuable perspective for those grappling with the crisis of democracy in the U.S. Tracing an unexpected material link to the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, this article also seeks to explain the relationship between the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster and the Candlelight Movement, a connection readily taken for granted among most South Koreans but often perplexing to those outside of Korea.

Certain fundamentals of the geopolitical frame of inter-state relations in East Asia remain as set around 70-years ago in the wake of the cataclysmic Second World War and subsequent San Francisco Treaty (1951), when the US was undisputed master of the world, China divided and excluded, Korea divided and at war, and Japan occupied. The economic underpinnings of that system, however, are now rudely shaken. The United States, in 1950, with about half of global GDP, is now 16 per cent (in “purchasing power parity” or PPP terms) while China, already (2016) 18 per cent, has grown by an astounding fifteen times in the two decades from 1995. Chinese GDP, one-quarter that of Japan's in 1991, trebled (or even quadrupled) it in 2018. Late in 2020 the IMF declared that China had become the world's biggest economy, $24.2 trillion to the US's $20.8 trillion, with the gap widening. The alliance system as a design to preserve US hegemony looks increasingly incongruous in a period of mounting US-China conflict.

The four major countries of East Asia—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—form one of the most densely populated regions on earth, and through the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries the region experienced some of its fastest economic growth, propelled by the policies of state-led developmentalism. As a result of this density and these policies, the four countries in turn became some of the most environmentally degraded. As each achieved middle-to-high income status, however, the populace and then the regime in each country realized that they could not sustain either rapid economic growth or popular legitimacy without addressing the environmental consequences of this fast growth. The four states thus changed their fundamental economic policies from pure developmentalism to what we call eco-developmentalism, an attempt to reconcile economic prosperity with environmental sustainability. Although success so far has been mixed, this turn to eco-developmentalism has allowed these states to claim world leadership in mitigating environmental degradation.

For almost a century after E.S. Morse's 1877 excavations at Ōmori shell mound demonstrated the existence of a Stone Age culture in the archipelago, it was generally accepted that the Japanese people dated back only to the Yayoi period, the time when wet-rice farming was introduced from the continent. The Stone Age was associated with pre-Japanese peoples such as the Ainu. By the 1980s, however, the idea that the Stone Age Jōmon period formed a key component in Japanese culture became widely accepted in both academia and the popular imagination. ‘Jōmon’ became a household word for the first time. This essay uses recent interdisciplinary work in archaeology, linguistics and genetics to re-evaluate the contribution of the Jōmon to Japan. New genetic research has started to find significant Jōmon ancestry in ancient Korea, showing that Jōmon genomes were not limited to the Japanese archipelago. DNA studies have also concluded that Yayoi, Kofun and modern ‘mainland’ Japanese populations derive only around 10% of their ancestry from the Jōmon, a figure which rises to 25% for early modern and contemporary Okinawans. Such figures are comparable to reported levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry found in many European countries. Linguistically, with the exception of Ainuic in the north, Jōmon languages were replaced by the incoming Japonic family with, at best, limited borrowing. The idea that Jōmon culture has been a dominant factor in shaping modern Japan also requires reconsideration. Many ‘Jōmony’ traits in historic Japan reflect ecological constraints—there are only so many ways to eat an acorn. Other such traits can be seen as part of a transcultural strategic resistance to Japan rather than as unchanging tradition. While the Jōmon has proven a fecund source of ideology in post war Japan, its actual contribution to historic Japanese civilisation has been small. This conclusion requires a reevaluation of why the Ainu in Hokkaido were not absorbed in the same way as Jōmon cultures elsewhere and why they went on to make such an important contribution to the history of the northern archipelago.

Between 1894 and 1936, Imperial Japan fought several “small wars” against Tonghak Rebels, Taiwanese millenarians, Korean Righteous Armies, Germans in Shandong, Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, and “bandits” in Manchuria. Authoritative accounts of Japanese history ignore these wars, or sanitize them as “seizures,” “cessions,” or occasions for diplomatic maneuvers. The consigning the empire's “small wars” to footnotes (at best) has in turn promoted a view that Japanese history consists of alternating periods of “peacetime” (constitutionalism) and “wartime” (militarism), in accord with the canons of liberal political theory. However, the co-existence of “small wars” with imperial Japan's iconic wars indicates that Japan was a nation at war from 1894 through 1945. Therefore, the concept “Forever War” recommends itself for thinking about militarism and democracy as complementary formations, rather than as opposed forces. The Forever-War approach emphasizes lines of continuity that connect “limited wars” (that mobilized relatively few Japanese soldiers and civilians, but were nonetheless catastrophic for the colonized and occupied populations on the ground) with “total wars” (that mobilized the whole Japanese nation against the Qing, imperial Russia, nationalist China, and the United States). The steady if unspectacular operations of Forever War– armed occupations, settler colonialism, military honor-conferral events, and annual ceremonies at Yasukuni Shrine–continued with little interruption even during Japan's golden age of democracy and pacifism in the 1920s. This article argues that Forever War laid the infrastructural groundwork for “total war” in China from 1937 onwards, while it produced a nation of decorated, honored, and mourned veterans, in whose names the existing empire was defended at all costs against the United States in the 1940s. In Forever War—whether in imperial Japan or elsewhere–soldiering and military service become ends in themselves, and “supporting the troops” becomes part of unthinking, common sense.

This Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus special issue on “The Comfort Women as Public History” concludes with documentary filmmaker Miki Dezaki in conversation with Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost. Dezaki's film Shusenjo, released in 2018, examines the controversy over “comfort women” within Japan, as well as its implications for Korea-Japan relations. Dezaki, himself Japanese-American, also devotes considerable attention to the growing ramifications of this controversy within the United States, as an instance of the increasing international significance of the comfort women issue. In this discussion, he, Frost and Vickers reflect on the messages of the film, the experience of making and distributing it, and what this reveals about the difficulty - and importance - of doing public history in a manner that respects the complexity of the past.

In October 2017, the application to list the Voices of the Comfort Women archive on UNESCO's “Memory of the World Register” was rejected (or “postponed”). In this paper, I set that decision in the context of other recent instances of “heritage diplomacy” in East Asia, highlighting the tensions between nationalistic agendas and UNESCO's universalist pretensions. I then discuss the nature and extent of similar tensions in the framing of the “comfort women” issue, as manifested in “comfort women museums” (institutions closely associated with the preparation of the 2016-17 Memory of the World application). I focus especially on the case of China, where the Xi Jinping regime first sought to weaponize this issue against Japan, only to pull back in 2018 as Sino-Japanese ties warmed. I conclude by considering how the story of the comfort women might be reframed to underline its global significance (or “outstanding universal value”), in a manner that makes it more difficult for Japanese nationalists to portray the campaign for recognition and commemoration as an anti-Japan conspiracy.

This article examines four recent South Korean action drama films dealing with the Japanese colonial period and the Korean nationalist resistance movement in particular – Chung Chiu's Modern Boy (2008), Ch'ae Tong-hun's Assassination (2015), Kim Chi-un's The Age of Shadows (2016), and Hŏ Chin-ho's The Last Princess (2016). It explores the ways in which these films valorize armed anti-colonial resistance through a spectacular form of violence detached from real everyday politics during the colonial period and which hermetically seals such past political involvement from any corresponding activity in the present. The result of this, I will argue, is the repression not only of the memory of mass political mobilization under Japanese rule, but of the 1980s-era minjung or “people's” movement as well, having significant implications for how contemporary social movements may be imagined and represented.

On 8 July, Abe Shinzō was assassinated during a political rally in Nara. He was Japan's prime minister twice, first in 2006–2007 and then again from 2012 to 2020, when he resigned amid falling approval ratings and ill-health. While Abe's legacy is deeply disputed within Japan, abroad he has been widely praised as an unusually resolute, even transformative statesman who helped the country shake off the deadwood of the postwar era. In this compendium, David McNeill collects a series of short assessments of Abe's legacy in key areas by some of the journal's lead writers.

This column was born out of curiosity and community. Inspired by the many conversations and shared experiences of colleagues and friends at gatherings of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) and other law library organizations around the world, it seeks to explore the ever-evolving roles we play in the legal community.

The home rule movements in Taiwan and Korea were two major events that took place at a time when the Taisho Emperor was embracing a more liberal atmosphere. While Taiwan asked for equal standing within the Japanese empire, Korea wanted political independence from colonial rule. The different framing strategies adopted by the social activists lead to the following empirical puzzles: How did the public intellectuals and social activists define their colonial grievances in Taiwan and Korea and seize the window of opportunity in the post-WWI era? And what framing strategies did they apply in promoting their ideas of self-determination?

This article proposes a comparative analysis of Taiwan’s and Korea’s mobilization of international norms, and it investigates how their framing strategies were used in their respective home rule movements during the colonial era. Their rhetoric and mobilization finally led to Japan’s shift to a more conciliatory policy in these two colonies. The finding contributes to the theoretical development of norm contestation and discourse analysis in international relations.

The organizational structure of this article is presented as follows. First, it engages the current literature on social movements, norm diffusion, and East Asian politics, and it explores the framing strategies of the resistance to Japan’s rule by comparing Taiwanese and Korean social movements in the early 1900s. Second, this study offers a framework of norm contestation in capturing how activists in Taiwan and Korea promoted the principle of self-determination. Third, it addresses alternative explanations on the structural factors and agency in these two movements.

As astroviral infection rapidly increased in the summer of 2022 in Korea, this study aimed to determine the cause and genotype of astroviruses during this period. From January to December 2022, we tested 43,312 stool samples from patients with acute gastroenteritis utilizing multiplex PCR to detect HAstV. For the HAstV-positive samples, we determined the genotypes of the HAstVs by PCR and sequencing. The monthly positive rate from 2015 to 2022 showed a notable and abrupt increase of HAstV infection between June and August 2022, peaking at 9.8% in July 2022. The annual positivity rate of HAstV remained at 2–3% between 2015 and 2019, and then decreased to 0.5% in 2020, followed by an increase to 1.5% in 2021 and 3.6% in 2022.The genotyped astroviruses in 2022 were all identified as HAstV-1 type, and the nucleotide identity% among them was >99%. The GenBank accession number for the strain genetically closest to the strains identified in our study was ON571597.1, which was HAstV-1 isolated from Pingtan in 2019. Our results provide recent epidemiological data on HAstVs in Korea. The decline and surge in astrovirus positivity in recent years may be related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study presents the first Korean records of two subtropical fish species, Pseudojuloides paradiseus and Diplogrammus xenicus, collected around Jeju-do Island, as well as one boreal fish species, Erilepis zonifer, collected in Busan (approximately 200 km away from Jeju-do Island). In this study, we discuss the implications of the species’ habitat range expansion. Previously, P. paradiseus was known as an endemic species of Japan, while D. xenicus was known to inhabit the Eastern Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean excluding around the equator, and E. zonifer was only known to inhabit the Pacific Ocean between eastern Japan and the western USA. Their habitat range expansions might be attributed to the expansion of the Tsushima Warm Current at the surface layer and/or the North Korean Cold Current at the bottom layer. Our findings may suggest that habitat of marine fish is being changed continuously by climate change or oceanic currents. Therefore, it needs to conduct integrated and systematic monitoring of fish fauna to response changing marine biodiversity.