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In This Issue
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Koide
Reiko
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Greetings!
On March 29th, thirty associates and authors of APJ met at
the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Philadelphia to chart the
journal's future. Look for changes and new synergies and special issues as
well as new design features in the coming months.
James Hansen,
the leading US climate scientist recent critiqued the work
on Chinese green energy policies by our authors John Mathews and Hao Tan.
See their response in this issue and their article last week on China's
energy revolution.
Koide Reiko
draws attention to a Critical New Stage in Japan's Textbook
Controversy outlining the Abe administration's aggressive steps to
consolidate control over historical memory in Japan's school textbooks. A
recent influential report has placed human rights violations in North Korea
at the center of global debate.
Christine Hong
offers a critical rethinking of the debate by enlarging the
frame of reference to include the ongoing Korean War in War by Other
Means: The Violence of North Korean Human Rights.
Thanks to the generous support of our readers, we
succeeded in raising more than $12,000 to fund the Journal for 2014. The
Journal will remain free. You can still support the journal at our home
page with your 501 (C) tax-deductible gift.
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Subscription Information
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Koide Reiko
Critical New Stage in Japan's Textbook
Controversy
In order to be
eligible for use at public and even private schools, Japanese textbooks
must be compiled by private publishers in accordance with the National
Curriculum Standards and then endorsed by a Ministry of Education (MEXT)
organ, the Textbook Approval and Research Council, and finally authorized
by MEXT in accord with their Textbook Examination Standards. In the
process, scrutiny by "textbook experts" and
"specialists" "ensures that the textbooks are objective and
impartial." At one 2012 MEXT meeting, Abe Shinzo, who became prime
minister a few months later, targeted one particular history textbook
because it mentioned the forceful recruitment - the text called it
"mobilization" - of women to the Japanese military's sanctioned
brothels - classified as "comfort women" - during the
Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945).
This article analyzes how a textbook becomes part of a school curriculum by
explaining carefully Japan's textbook screening process and the influence
of State actors on textbook authors. Koide Reiko shows how history textbook
content, standards, and review have been taken completely out of the hands
of historians and educators and placed directly under the control of
politicians, and warns against the selective and systemic forgetfulness
that can lead to contempt toward other nations, fundamentalism,
essentialism, isolationism, and ultimately, to war.
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Christine Hong
War by Other Means:
The Violence of
North Korean Human Rights
Offering an historicized overview of the
consolidation of contemporary human rights as the dominant lingua franca
for social justice projects, this article applies it to the debate over
human rights in North Korea. What does the rights framework render legible
and what consigns to unintelligibility? Hong examines the antinomies of
contemporary human rights as an ethico-political discourse that strives to
reassert the dominance of the global North over the global South. The human
rights framing of North Korea has enabled human rights advocates, typically
"beneficiaries of past injustice," to assume a moralizing,
implicitly violent posture toward a "regime" commonsensically
understood to be "evil," one that distances contemporary Korean
issues from the ongoing Korean War.
The North Korean human rights project has allowed a spectrum of political
actors-U.S. soft-power institutions, thinly renovated Cold War defense
organizations, hawks of both neoconservative and liberal varieties,
conservative evangelicals, anticommunist Koreans in South Korea and the
diaspora, and North Korean defectors-to join together in common cause. By
contrast, Hong enables a range of critical perspectives - from U.S.- and
South Korea-based scholars, policy analysts, and social justice advocates -
to attend to what has hovered outside or been marginalized within the
dominant human rights framing of North Korea as a narrowly inculpatory,
normative structure.
Christine Hong is an assistant professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz and
an executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute. She is co-editor
of the Critical Asian
Studies issues on "Reframing North Korean Human
Rights" (45:4 (2013) and 46:1 (2014)).
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John
Mathews and John Hansen, Jousting
with James Hansen: China building a renewables powerhouse
We have the dubious
distinction of being misrepresented by Dr James Hansen, surely the most
famous climate scientist in the world. In this article, we begin our
rebuttal by affirming our unbounded admiration for Dr Hansen. He is not
only the world's top climate scientist but also a fearless, and
deliberately activist, exponent of the view that the age of fossil fuels is
- and must be - drawing to an end. Dr Hansen's research and activism are a
major reason we are having this debate about climate and energy.
So we have no disagreement that it is imperative to end the age of fossil
fuels. Where we part company, however, is on the policy implications. We
have been caught in Dr Hansen's wider trawl for what he calls
"Renewables can do all" greenies, or what might better be called
"Nothing but renewables" greenies (NBRGs). He accuses NBRGs of
mistakenly promoting renewables at the expense of nuclear power and thereby
opening the way towards the rise and conquest of the gas industry.
Our concern however is with China and the representation of its efforts to
build a sustainable energy system to underpin its awesome and dangerously
polluting industrial machine. See our article China's
Continuing Renewable Energy Revolution: Global Implications.
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