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Greetings!
The
Asia-Pacific Journal now has Non-Profit Organization status. Your contribution
to the Journal is tax deductible.
Twice
a year we invite our readers to help us to continue to publish The Asia-Pacific
Journal. Thank you.
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Check
out the most widely read articles at APJ . . . in the last month, last year,
last five years and all time: at Top Ten Articles on our
home page.
Asia
Pacific Journal NEW Free Downloadable Course Readers!!!
The
Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus announces the release of our second
set of volume-length e-book compilations of essays on selected topics with
explanatory introductions by scholars. The volume editors have chosen articles
from the archive that lend themselves particularly well to classroom use and
work well as a set.All volumes have been peer-reviewed, in addition
to the initial review process before each article was originally posted, and we
have permission from all verified copyright holders.
Students
like the fact that the articles are available 24-7,
are storable on-line, searchable, and cost nothing to them. The
readers can also be highlighted, annotated, printed, and include convenient
bookmarks to navigate to the beginning of each article.
New
Course Readers:
**
The Japanese Empire:
Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggle edited by Kirsten
Ziomek
**
Japan's "Abandoned People" in the Wake
of Fukushima edited by Brian Earl
**
Public Opinion on Nuclear Power in
Japan after the Fukushima Disaster edited by Brian Earl
**
The Politics of Memory in Japan and
East Asia edited by Sven Saaler & Justin Aukema
They
join the 2012 publications:
- War and Visual Culture edited by
Hong Kal and Jooyeon Rhee.
- Environmental History edited by
Eiko Maruko Siniawer.
- War in Japanese Popular Culture
edited by Matthew Penney.
- Women and Japan's Political Economy
edited by Valerie Barske.
The
topics of other volumes currently in preparation include:
**
Japan and the American-led Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
**
Ethnic Minorities and Japan.
**
Globalization and Japanese Popular Culture: Mixing It Up.
**
Japanese Intellectual Currents of the Twentieth Century.
**
Putting Okinawa at the Center.
To
Download a Volume: The volumes are downloadable from the
Asia-Pacific Journal website as searchable PDFs.
From the home page, please click on the button marked Course Readers at the top
and center of the page, or go directly to the course reader
page. Interested viewers may download a copy of any reader by clicking on
the appropriate link at the course readers home page and entering their email
address. In addition, viewers may directly download the table of contents of
each course reader for a preview of the volume.
The
Editorial Board for this project consists of Mark Caprio; Rikkyo University;
Lonny Carlile, University of Hawai'i, Parks Coble, University of Nebraska;
Sabine Früstück, UC-Santa Barbara; A. Tom Grunfeld, Empire State College; Laura
Hein, Northwestern University; James Huffman, Wittenberg University; Jeffrey
Kingston, Temple University-Japan; Susan Long, John Carroll University; Laura
Miller, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Mark Ravinia, Emory University; Mark
Selden, APJ-Japan Focus; Stephen Vlastos, University of Iowa.
If
you are interested in creating a volume yourself, wish to participate as a
reviewer and editor, have suggestions for new topics, or want to discuss another
aspect of this project, please contact Laura Hein at
l-hein@northwestern.edu.
Although
the course readers are free, we welcome donations to support the Journal and
this initiative; please note the red button Sustaining APJ on the left side of
the APJ home page.
***
All
recent articles are now available on Kindle, as are several recent articles. If
you experience any difficulty in accessing them, please let us know at
info.japanfocus@gmail.com.
Our
home page has a category Featured Articles. This
will take you to the most widely read articles of recent times and over our
decade of publication. Check it out to discover some of the most important work
that has appeared in the journal..
What have been the most widely read articles at APJ? To find out, click on
"Top Ten Articles" at the
top of the home page, for the top
articles of the last month, last year, last five years and last decade.
Our home page has a number of important features. There is a powerful
search engine that permits search by author, title, and keyword, found in top
left of the home page. For most purposes, author's surname or a keyword entered
in Title is most useful. Another is a regularly updated guide to the more than
100 articles we have published on the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power
meltdown which is transforming Japanese politics and society, and is reshaping
issues of nuclear power and energy policy in that nation and globally. Articles
are arranged topically. In addition, we have added a guide to some of the most
important, and liveliest, online and print sources on 3.11 including blogs and
websites. Second, the list of articles now indicates all those available in
Japanese translation or original, as well as other languages.
Many thanks to all who contributed to our annual fund-raiser. APJ
will continue to be available free to all in 2013. If you missed the opportunity
to join our sustainers, you can still do so by going to the red sustainer button on our
home page to contribute via Paypal or credit card. Or, if you prefer, we can
accept checks on US banks: write to us at http://info.japanfocus@gmail.com.
Thank you for your support.
More
than 6,000 people now subscribe to APJ, either through our Newsletter or the
more than 2,700 who follow us through Twitter or Facebook, whose numbers are
growing steadily. Please consider joining them by clicking at the appropriate
link on our home page.
We
invite authors, publishers and directors to bring their books, films and events
on East Asia and the Pacific to the attention of our readers. See the home page
for information about presenting relevant books and films at our site and for
examples of authors, publishers and filmmakers who are presenting their work at
the Journal.
Contact
Japan Focus by email at info@japanfocus.org
To
access our full archive with more than 2,000 articles, and to view the most
widely read articles through their titles or via our index, go here.
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Subscription information
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The
Asia-Pacific Journal is freely available to all. We invite those who wish to
support our work by allowing us to make technical upgrades, defray
technical, mailing and maintenance fees, and to enable us to expand our output
since the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami. Recommended support level: $25 ($10 for
students and residents of developing countries); $40 for institutions including
libraries, research centers, government offices. If you experience difficulty in
subscribing, write to us with the error message at
info@japanfocus.org
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Sachie Mizohata, The
Trans-Pacific Partnership and Its Critics: An introduction and a
petition
The
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement is a proposed trade pact that Japan is
currently negotiating with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico,
New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam (as of September
2013). The TPP aims to increase the liberalization of economies in the Pacific
region through abolition of tariffs on trade as well as reregulation. In 2008,
the United States joined the talks "and has espoused a hard core complete free
trade policy," which has vastly expanded the scope of the negotiations. With
both the US and Japan as participants, the pact would cover nearly 40% of the
world's economy. Japan officially joined one of final rounds of the
negotiations in July 2013 in Malaysia, as the participating countries intend to
finalize the TPP negotiations (at least partially) by the end of 2013.
The
TPP agreement affects not only trade issues, but also nontrade matters that
immensely impact lives of citizens in all participating countries.
The
petition by the Association of University Faculties is available in English and
Japanese.
Recommended
Citation: Sachie Mizohata, "The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Its Critics: An
introduction and a petition," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 36, No.
3.
Read More. .
.
Sachie Mizohata, The
Trans-Pacific Partnership and Its Critics: An introduction and a
petition
The
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement is a proposed trade pact that Japan is
currently negotiating with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico,
New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam (as of September
2013). The TPP aims to increase the liberalization of economies in the Pacific
region through abolition of tariffs on trade as well as reregulation. In 2008,
the United States joined the talks "and has espoused a hard core complete free
trade policy," which has vastly expanded the scope of the negotiations. With
both the US and Japan as participants, the pact would cover nearly 40% of the
world's economy. Japan officially joined one of final rounds of the
negotiations in July 2013 in Malaysia, as the participating countries intend to
finalize the TPP negotiations (at least partially) by the end of 2013.
The
TPP agreement affects not only trade issues, but also nontrade matters that
immensely impact lives of citizens in all participating countries.
The
petition by the Association of University Faculties is available in English and
Japanese.
Recommended
Citation: Sachie Mizohata, "The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Its Critics: An
introduction and a petition," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 36, No.
3.
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Andrew DeWit, The End of Japan's
Nuclear Power Mirage? Tokyo's Green Olympics in
2020
The
September 7 decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award the
2020 games to Tokyo is potentially of monumental importance. That significance
is not merely due to the fraught geopolitics of the so-called pivot to the
Asia-Pacific or the collective angst of all those analysts waiting for Abenomics
arrows.
Rather,
the big deal is energy. And energy is the biggest deal there is, composing
roughly 10% of the USD 70 trillion global economy. This short article aims to
assess the IOC decision from the perspective of its impact on the contest
between centralized versus distributed energy. The unsustainable, centralized
energy paradigm illustrated by the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, was
the very audible elephant in the room during IOC decision-making. The upstart
alternative, distributed power generation, is the route that many are now aiming
at. Hence, the 2020 games could usher in a "new Japan," a very different country
from the one PM Abe Shinzo described in his book "Towards a New Country" and has
sought to realize via pressing for reactor restarts and overseas sales. Tokyo is
on course to offer by 2020 a rapidly urbanizing and increasingly desperate world
multiple models of sustainable, smart city technology.
Andrew
DeWit is Professor in the School of Policy Studies at Rikkyo University and an
Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator. With Iida Tetsunari and Kaneko Masaru, he is
coauthor of "Fukushima and the Political Economy of Power Policy in Japan," in
Jeff Kingston (ed.) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan. He is the
author of an ongoing series on Japan's political and energy alternatives at the
Asia-Pacific Journal.
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Sonia Ryang, Reading Volcano
Island: In the Sixty-fifth Year of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising
I was eight or nine when M
samchon ("Uncle M") arrived at our house in Japan on one of his regular
late-night visits. In fact, it seemed as if he chose to visit at this hour, as
if he was hiding from something or someone. Although he was not really related
to us, he came from the same part of Korea, Jeju Island, and we referred to him
using the term samchon, a Jeju term used when addressing uncles and aunts. He
spoke in the Jeju tongue, which was unlike any of the other versions of Korean
that I had heard at that time. Although my father was born in Jeju, even he had
a hard time communicating with our samchon. This was because my father had grown
up in Japan, his parents having taken him back to Osaka, where they ran a small
business, soon after he was born. The visitor's Japanese was quite poor, but it
was slightly easier for me to understand than Jeju-style Korean. Using the few
words that I was able to understand, I could figure out that his childhood
friend, Beomdori (Mr. Beomdol to us kids), was in the process of slowly
recovering his speech. Given that Uncle M was in his late twenties or early
thirties, my childishly inquisitive mind found it odd that a grown-up, such as
Uncle M's friend, was learning how to speak. Not to speak a foreign language,
like Japanese, but to speak, period.
Boemdori was nine and Uncle M
ten when they were smuggled out of Jeju Island in the aftermath of the April 3
Uprising of 1948 (known among Koreans by the abbreviation "4.3" or sasam). By
the end of 1948, most of Uncle M's male relatives and many of his female
relatives had been killed, either by the army or by Seocheong (an abbreviation
of Seobuk cheongnyeondan or North West Youth Militia), an extreme-right wing
militia gang originating from amongst anti-Communist settlers from northern
Korea that the South Korean government actively deployed in its efforts to
eradicate leftist forces. Beomdori and his mother were dragged along to witness
the execution of fellow villagers, including that of his own father. In the face
of such unspeakable brutality, his mother had lost her sanity and Beomdori his
power of speech. In fact, he had remained mute since that time. The story was
often heard that the army and the gangs wanted to kill all of the male offspring
in order to finish off the "red" lineage for good. It was in this environment
that Beomdori's grandmother and Uncle M's mother decided to send the youngest
male survivors of their respective families away from the island. -
This article interweaves the
personal experiences of the author growing up in Japan with analysis of 4.3 and
its portrayal in the South Korean film, Volcano Island.
Sonia Ryang is a Professor of
Anthropology and international Studies and C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley
Family and Korea Foundation Chair of Korean Studies in University of Iowa. Her
most recent book is Reading North Korea: An Ethnological
Inquiry (2012, Harvard) and her forthcoming book is Eating Korean: A
Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity (Hawaii). Her most recent contribution
to the Asia-Pacific Journal is "North Koreans in South Korea: In
Search of Their Humanity"
Recommended citation: Sonia
Ryang, "Reading Volcano Island: In The Sixty-Fifth Year of the Jeju 4.3
Uprising," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 36, No. 2, September 9,
2013.
Read More. .
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David McNeill, Cover-Up: Toyota and
Quality Control
Toyota is back on top after one of the worst crises
in its history. But has it solved its problems, or just buried them?
In 2008, Toyota faced an embarrassing problem: The
Imperial Family's luxury Century Royal, used to carry Crown Prince Naruhito
around Japan, was a dud. Memos flew back and forth between managers and senior
engineers trying to find the cause of what appeared to be a speed-control fault.
"This is a very difficult situation," fretted one engineer. "The Imperial
Household Agency feels there is risk if it should recur." The unspoken concern
was clear: What if a crash hurt or even killed Japan's heir to the Imperial
throne?
The problem seemed rooted in electronics - but its
solution was elusive, even to all those trained minds. Toyota replaced the gas
pedal, the throttle system and the engine computer at its own expense. The
crisis passed; the engineers heaved a collective sigh of relief.
For Betsy Benjaminson, however, that incident
was a turning point. A professional translator, she had been privy to internal
memos at Toyota and other large Japanese corporations since living and working
in Japan in the 1970s. From 2000, she was exceptionally busy, thanks to the huge
upsurge in legal translation among these companies. As they expanded abroad, the
companies became ensnared in legal battles over price-fixing, bad deals,
financial fraud and unreliable suppliers. Demand for experts able to bridge the
linguistic and legal gaps was intense.
David McNeill writes for The Independent and other
publications, including The Irish Times, The Economist and The Chronicle of
Higher Education. He is an Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator and coauthor of
Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan's Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear
Disaster (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). This is a revised and expanded version of
an article that appeared in The Japan Times newspaper on June 9, 2013.
Recommended citation: David McNeill, "Cover-Up: Toyota and Quality
Control," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 36, No. 1, September 9,
2013.
Read More. . .
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