The
writer
Hōjō
Tamio died at the age of 23 in 1937 in quarantine at a hospital
outside of Tokyo. Taken as a pupil by Kawabata Yasunari, Hōjō became known
for his fictionalized accounts of the experience of stigmatization of
victims of Hansen's Disease in 1930s Japan. Along with an introductory
essay, Kathryn M. Tanaka translates his novella, "Life's First
Night," which was awarded the Bunshun Bungakkai Prize in 1936.
In late 1979, the South American state of Guyana, under the leadership of Forbes
Burnham, received assistance from Pyongyang in importing the tradition of
"mass games," the practice of performing dance or gymnastics in
massive numbers. This established North Korea as a major influence in
Guyana's cultural and political life into the early 1990s.
Moe
Taylor explains the ideological foundations of this experiment
by the Burnham regime in a time of austerity and crisis and the shaping of
the practice of mass games by the Guyanese political context.
On January 10, South Korea deported U.S. citizen
Shin
Eun-mi and barred her from returning for five years, after
detaining her for questioning on charges of violating the National Security
Law. Hyun Lee interviews Shin, who has been the subject of controversy in
South Korea over her speaking tour on her travels to North Korea.
This made her the target of right-wing attacks, including a bomb
detonation. Shin talks about her travel to the North, her experiences
speaking about it in the South and the need to bridge the gap between the
two Koreas.
The
people of Okinawa are not the only victims of the new US military base in
Henoko. The diverse ecosystem of Oura Bay supporting thousands of species
of marine life, the last of its kind in Japan, is threatened to be wiped
out by concrete building the proposed base.
Katherine
Muzik writes of her recent visit to the bay's coral reefs,
calling for an end to this violence against nature.
