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Greetings!
The Asia-Pacific Journal
now has Non-Profit Organization status. Your contribution to the Journal is tax
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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.
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 earlier 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
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.
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.
***
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..
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. 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.
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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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
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Steve Rabson, The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan at
War
When the Japanese government
abolished the Ryukyu Kingdom, absorbing it into Japan as Okinawa Prefecture in
1879, most Okinawans on the mainland were merchants of locally grown and
handcrafted goods. Large-scale migration began around 1900 with the development
of Japan's modern textile industry, centered in Greater Osaka. Thousands came
from the nation's poorest prefecture, mostly young women and teenage girls from
farming villages, to work under contract in factories.
Okinawan migration to the
mainland increased rapidly with the outbreak of World War I which boosted demand
for Japanese products, enormously benefiting the economy. What was known as the
"World War I boom" shook the nation's industries out of their recession
doldrums. With Japan on their side in that war, the Allies deluged Japanese
manufacturers with orders for munitions and supplies. Furthermore, with
industries in America and Europe on wartime production regimens, Japanese
manufacturers were able to displace them in large sectors of the consumer market
in Japan and in other Asian countries. Wartime demand for Okinawan sugar, the
most important product in the local economy, brought temporary improvement, and
the market expanded all of a sudden in wartime for locally woven Panama hats,
the prefecture's one "manufactured" export. But the United States and European
countries imposed a ban on their importation in 1919 that sent the market
tumbling. Two years later, the collapse of world sugar prices in 1921 devastated
the poorest prefecture's economy, compelling more Okinawans to leave for South
America, Hawaii, and the Philippines, but the largest number, a recorded 10,300,
went to mainland Japan, 7,419 of them to Greater Osaka, By 1925, approximately
20,000 lived there, about half in Greater Osaka. Responding to discrimination
and the need for networks of mutual support, they had begun forming residential
communities in the industrial sections of Osaka and other manufacturing cities.
The largest migration of
Okinawans to the mainland occurred during another labor shortage after Japan's
military incursions in China escalated to full-scale war in 1937. The war
brought thousands to the mainland for military-related jobs. In its final years,
however, it wrought death and devastation on their communities that were mostly
located in urban industrial areas. By 1940, a recorded 88,319 Okinawans-about 15
percent of the total population of Okinawa Prefecture-lived on the mainland. The
number of Okinawans residing in greater Osaka more than tripled between 1935 and
1940, from 18,774 to 56,828, after having declined by 4,565 over the previous
five years. During the second half of Japan's turbulent 1930s, more Okinawans
than ever left home for work on the mainland, where war-related production,
planned and subsidized by the Japanese government, was fueling rapid industrial
expansion. Meanwhile, the construction of new factories in Osaka's environs
accelerated a "secondary migration" to other cities in Osaka, Hyogo, and Shiga
Prefectures.
Steve Rabson is Professor
Emeritus of East Asian Studies, Brown University, and a Japan Focus Associate.
His other books are Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas (Institute of East Asian
Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1989, reprinted 1996), Righteous
Cause or Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Japanese Poetry (Center
for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998), and Southern Exposure:
Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, co-edited with Michael Molasky
(University of Hawaii Press, 2000). Islands of Resistance: Japanese Literature
from Okinawa, co-edited with Davinder Bhowmik, is forthcoming from University of
Hawaii Press.
Recommended Citation: Steve
Rabson, "The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan at War," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol.
11, Issue 41, No. 1, October 13, 2013.
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Andrew DeWit, "Data Will Change
ICT," But Will it Change the Abe Regime?
This
article focuses on the content and implications of a fascinating and inspiring
October 1 presentation by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications (MIC) at Aizukawamatsu City, a smart city project involving just
over 130,000 residents in Fukushima Prefecture, the area battered by the 3.11
triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. The presentation
was titled "Data Will Change ICT." ICT is an acronym for "Information and
Communications," a core area of innovation evident in the everyday ubiquity of
smart phones and other mobile devices. The MIC presentation offers a summary of
the Japanese political economy's performance in this strategic area as well as
its impressive further potential. The presentation also reveals that Japan's
ITC-centred growth strategy was officially launched by the Abe cabinet on June
14, 2013. After reviewing the presentation's content, I inquire why the Abe
cabinet is not stressing this potential in the discourse it aims at overseas and
domestic investors. The ICT initiative has immediate and obvious application to
the Fukushima Daiichi crisis. It thus seems imperative that the Abe cabinet
grasp this opportunity to move beyond the problems associated with the
continuing unfolding of the Fukushima disaster. Properly managed, Japan's ICT
strategy could maximize the national interest while at the same time making a
signal contribution to global sustainability.
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.
Recommended
citation: Andrew DeWit, "'Data Will Change ICT,' But Will it Change the Abe
Regime?" The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 41, No. 4, October 14,
2013.
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Christopher K.
Green and Stephen J. Epstein, Now On My Way to Meet Who? South Korean
Television, North Korean Refugees, and the Dilemmas of
Representation
In 2011, the
recently established South Korean broadcasting network Channel-A launched Ije
mannareo gamnida (Now on My Way to Meet You), a program whose format brings
together a group of a dozen or more female talbukja (North Korean refugees) on a
weekly basis. These women interact with host Nam Hui-seok, an additional female
co-host (or, in the earlier episodes, two), and a panel composed of four male
South Korean entertainers. Episodes typically open in a lighthearted manner,
with conversation about daily life in North Korea alongside mild flirtation
between the Southern male and Northern female participants, often involving song
and dance, but climax with a talbuk seuteori, an emotionally harrowing narrative
from one of the border-crossers detailing her exodus from North Korea. Via this
framework Ije mannareo gamnida attempts to nurture the integration of North
Korean refugees into South Korean society; personalization of their plight
occurs in conjunction with reminders of a shared Korean identity maintained
despite the regime they have fled, which is depicted as cruel, repressive and
backward. The show has proven a minor hit within South Korea and received
coverage from local and global media. The unusual subject matter of Ije mannareo
gamnida itself renders the show worthy of analysis; equally significantly, it
offers a useful window into attempts to address South Korea's increasingly
diverse society, which now includes a large number of North Koreans, as well as
media practice in the face of this demographic shift. Nevertheless, other than
journalistic treatment, only a limited number of South Korean scholars and
Western academic bloggers have thus far investigated the show and its larger
social ramifications. In this paper, we ask how Now on My Way to Meet You is to
be understood within the contexts of South Korean society, its evolving media
culture, and developments in South Korean popular representations of North
Koreans. We offer close readings of segments from Ije mannareo gamnida in order
to elicit motifs that recur as it pursues its stated goal of humanizing North
Korea for a South Korean audience and giving defectors a voice amidst the
general populace. Given that the show's very title intimates that a genuine
encounter is about to take place, one might reasonably ask how successfully Ije
mannareo gamnida establishes a meeting point for South Koreans with these recent
arrivals from North Korea: in other words, does the show fulfill its stated aim
of breaking down prejudices against North Korean refugees and supplying them
with a vehicle that allows self-expression? Or, alternatively, does it
reinforce, even if unintentionally, pre-existing regimes of knowledge and
actually impede understanding of North Korea and its people? As we will argue,
given the broader sociopolitical context, the show's desire to reinforce
elements of commonality between North and South while illuminating life in North
Korea leads to a double bind: viewers are encouraged to recognize homogeneity
with the newcomers based on a shared ethnic and cultural identity, even as the
conversations and editing techniques applied to the material often represent
the Northern panelists as Others.
Stephen J.
Epstein is the Director of the Asian Studies Programme at the Victoria
University of Wellington and the current president of the New Zealand Asian
Studies Society. He has published widely on contemporary Korean society, popular
media and literature. Recent full-length publications include Complicated
Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia, a volume co-edited with Alison
Tokita and Daniel Black, which appeared on Monash University Publications in
2010, and novel translations The Long Road by Kim In-suk (MerwinAsia, 2010) and
Telegram by Putu Wijaya (Lontar Foundation, 2011).
Christopher
K. Green is a Ph.D candidate studying North Korean society and economics at the
University of Cambridge. He is also the Manager of International Affairs for
Daily NK, a prominent provider of news about North Korea to the international
community. He has translated and edited NK People Speak,
2011, a translation of in-depth interviews with North Korean citizens
(Zeitgeist, 2011).
Recommended
citation: Christopher Green and Stephen Epstein, "Now On My Way To Meet Who?
South Korean Television, North Korean Refugees, and the Dilemmas of
Representation," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 41, No. 2, October 14,
2013.
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Adam Broinowski, Fukushima: Life and
the Transnationality of Radioactive Contamination
When Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant
(NPP) was torn apart by several explosions, whether due to earthquake, tsunami
or a combination of both, it not only dispersed radioactive contaminant but also
exposed the bonds connecting people's lives with nuclear power. Over the two and
a half years since then, the corruption, inadequacies and mendacities at the
centre of the sovereign power structure that has prevailed in Japan since 1945
have become ever more visible. This essay first introduces the foundations of
this structure, exploring how the long-standing relationship between Government
and major private electric utilities in Japan informs the present crisis, noting
in particular the ramifications of decisions being made within this structure at
the individual level in present and projected effects to human health. Following
consideration of the effects of radiation on human health, the discussion then
turns to visual and local testimonies of the effects of other radiological
events - Hanford, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Iraq - so as to offer a
comparative assessment of the Fukushima disaster. While mindful of the
difficulty in arriving at an absolutely conclusive position on these conditions,
enough evidence has now accumulated to make a realistic assessment of the human
health impact, and to discern how public understanding has been, and continues
to be, confused. Finally, given that the Fukushima disaster is distinguishable
from other radiological events in scale and type of contamination, this essay
argues that far-reaching change is called-for in the current legal standards and
institutional responses which have been governed thus far by mid twentieth
century power relations.
Adam Broinowski is an Australian Research Council post-doctoral
research fellow at Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the
Pacific, the Australian National University. His book Cultural Responses to
Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body during and after the Cold War is
forthcoming in 2014. His current research is concerned with understandings of
radioactive contamination since 1945.
Recommended citation: Adam Broinowski, "Fukushima: Life and the
Transnationality of Radioactive Contamination," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol.
11, Issue 41, No. 3, October 14, 2013.
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