A month following the election
of Okinawa's new governor Onaga Takeshi proclaiming opposition to a new
base at Henoko, the anti-base movement faces perhaps its gravest challenge.
C.
Douglas Lummis reports on the intensifying police violence
against protesters at Camp Schwab and efforts to ferry in new protesters
from Naha. Meanwhile, the Japanese and international media have remained
silent about the deepening crisis.
As coverage of the
Interview
incident dwindles in western media, it is important not to forget that
behind the parody and rhetoric lie mutual threats of nuclear destruction.
Peter
Hayes examines how the nuclear threat is woven into inter-state
relations throughout northeast Asian region, arguing for the creation of a
nuclear weapons-free zone with the eventual aim of abolishing the nuclear
threat and bringing peace in Northeast Asia. He traces the history of
mutual threats and ongoing attempts at quelling them, etching the core
provisions of an agreement.
With the approaching seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World
War,
Ran
Zwigenberg examines the "entangled histories" of the
commemorations of Hiroshima and the Holocaust through the activities of the
Hiroshima-Auschwitz Committee, an organization that strove precisely to
link these two catastrophes in the 1960s. Following the global media
spectacle of the Eichmann trial, the little-known Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace
March illustrates the emergence of a shared discourse of commemoration and
narratives of victimization, as in Japan reminders of the Holocaust stirred
up memories of their own atrocities.
Following the controversy over the Asahi's retraction of their reporting on
'comfort women', Yomiuri Shinbun "apologized" for using the term
"sex slave" to refer to them in their English-language edition.
Michael
Penn argues that this "astonishing" declaration not
only illustrates the newspaper's submission to the views of the current Abe
government but is an attempt to impose those views on its past editing, as
the offending articles in their databases were amended with the apologetic
text.
Last April, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee selected for contention
Japanese citizens working to conserve Article 9, Japan's long-standing
constitutional prohibition against waging war.
Alexis
Dudden presents the case for renomination in anticipation of the
selection of the 2015 prize candidates on February 1, inviting readers to
support the nomination at a time when the Abe administration moves to
abolish Article 9.
