This article examines the little-known experiences of children born of Chinese mothers and Japanese fathers who had consensual relationships during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War in China, with a specific focus on those who migrated to Japan after 1972. To understand how and why they—in their own words—“returned” to their “homeland,” this article analyzes historical circumstances as well as Sino-Japanese children’s experiences, identities, and belonging in comparison with other groups of “children born of war” in different historical and geopolitical settings. Their long-neglected stories point to a missing part in narratives of the 8-year war.

This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the massive political scandal of 2023–2024, in which dozens of lawmakers from Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) received undeclared funds from their factions. First, it provides a detailed timeline of the scandal and places it within the broader historical context of political scandals in Japan. Next, it examines the roles and actions of key participants, including power actors (politicians, secretaries, whistleblowers, prosecutors, and the prime minister) and media actors (mainstream newspapers, tabloid magazines, and political papers). Finally, the paper discusses two possible outcomes of the scandal: an optimistic scenario, where the scandal spurs meaningful reforms, and a pessimistic scenario, where it results in minimal or no transformative change.

Drawing on ethnographic research from Amami Ōshima, southern Japan, this paper documents the ways in which contemporary societies, from the hamlet to the nation state, are wrestling with opposing forces of environmental and economic sustainability and discusses the fractures this creates for people and ecosystems. It uses as a case study the protest to stop the construction of a seawall being built in Katoku, an ocean hamlet in Amami, based within the buffer zone of the island’s United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Natural Heritage Site. Rather than being built with the primary aim to protect “people and property,” I suggest this infrastructural intervention is a symbolic declaration of risk management and repository of huge economic value for the island and prefecture. The background to the paper is the return of a cache of color photographs taken by an American anthropologist in the 1950s and the 70th anniversary of the reversion of Amami in 1953 from US military to Japanese control. The paper considers the contemporary ramifications of policy instituted in the post-World War II period, that has sought to maximize the potential of “remote” areas and continues to favor growth and development at the expense of the health of multispecies island communities.

Reading, writing, and literary engagements are often assumed to be solitary practices, but looking at the places where books are sold and discussed, and amateur literature written, reveals the relational side to this creative engagement. This article presents an ethnographic study of haiku composition in Booktown Jimbōchō in Tokyo, Japan, an area known for its literary bookstores, to explore how the social practices of literature unfold. Sketching the social life of a bar in Jimbōchō, I explore collaborative creativity through an ethnographic study of a bi-monthly haiku meeting that takes place in this social space.

Examining Olympic opening and closing ceremonies from the perspective of relational creativity, this article analyzes the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony and the 2016 Rio Games’ Japanese closing ceremony—both experimented with transitory meanings exploring alternative representations of Japan. We consider them as cases of relational creativity; the Nagano opening ceremony explored the fusion of local religious traditions and Western influences, while the Rio closing ceremony experimented with meanings of urban cosmopolitanism, consumerism, as well as cultural and social inclusivity.

Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko’s vision of a city where everyone can “shine” masks systemic contradictions in Japan’s future-making endeavors. While public proclamations frame Tokyo as inclusive and equitable, actions by Koike’s administration reveal abiding inequities. These efforts align with decades-long projects, most recently manifested in Society 5.0 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which prioritize market-driven growth while erasing systemic concerns of poverty and homelessness. Ethnographic insights from advocacy groups highlight the necessity of cultivating meaningful alternatives that emphasize empathetic dignity—a critique that underscores the necessity of reimagining Japan’s trajectory beyond performative policies of technologically mediated utopia futures.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the Incidental Process activated during the UNESCO Memory of the World (MOW) 2022/23 nomination cycle and the Memory of the World Regional Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP) 2021/22 nomination cycle. The Incidental Process is a mechanism that allows a Member State to contest nominations submitted by other Member States in the inscription process of the MOW Register. Japan became the first Member State to initiate the Incidental Process in 2022, contesting five nominations submitted by Korea and China. Japan’s initiative, seemingly part of its decade-long campaign, concentrated on identifying the elements in the nominated documents that would evoke the image of perpetrators and removing them from inscription. However, the MOW and MOWCAP responded in different ways to the contestation, which highlighted several contentious issues that were not effectively addressed by the General Guidelines. Furthermore, the disputes surrounding Japan’s contestation revealed the institutional weakness of the International Advisory Committee (IAC), the main operational body of the program. This paper, after examining the extraordinary situations that arose during the MOW and MOWCAP inscription process, attempts to identify the origin of the contentious issues and suggests the need to implement the provisions of the Incidental Process for the future operation of the MOW.

Based on excerpts from the author’s book, Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019), this article explores the passage and early implementation of Japan’s infamous prewar law, the Peace Preservation Law (Chianijihō). Enacted in March 1925, this law was utilized to arrest over 70,000 people in the Japanese metropole and tens of thousands more in Japan’s colonial territories until being repealed by order of Allied Occupation authorities in October 1945. Proponents initially explained that the law was to suppress communists and anticolonial activists for threatening the national polity, although how to exactly define such threats remained ambiguous. By the 1930s the purview of the law expanded and was used to detain academics, other activists, and members of religious groups who were seen as challenging imperial orthodoxy. This article focuses on the interpretive debates over the law’s central category—kokutai, or national polity—and how its interpretation started to transform as the law was first applied in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The occasion of the Peace Preservation Law’s centennial invites us to consider its history and legacy, especially as policing and state power have expanded since the so-called war on terror.

The landscape of the Meiji Jingu Gaien area of Tokyo is famous; it has a gingko-lined avenue and various sports facilities, including national stadiums and facilities used by ordinary citizens. The large-scale redevelopment of this area has been planned and implemented on the basis of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s district plan in 2013 in the wake of Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games. This paper examines the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s actions since the formation of this plan, mainly on the basis of the Metropolitan Government’s official documents and Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly minutes and considers their implications.

This paper explores the differences between the historical trajectory of jazz in mainland Japan and in Okinawa, where a stronger presence of American military bases monopolized employment for jazz musicians. In the turn of the 70s, while the leftist youth of mainland Japan embraced avant-garde free jazz for its anti-war messages, the economic dependency of Okinawan jazz musicians on American bases divorced the genre from involvement in protests for reversion. Through oral accounts and written records, this essay examines the politics of “Okinawan jazz” and the place of its musicians in the realm of reversion protests.

Events such the Great East Japan Earthquake or 3.11 force us to rethink our ways of life in relation to nature. Even in the midst of disasters, people have the desire to create and to express themselves—as does nature. How can we understand relational creativity in the aftermath of such disasters, and how might creative works assist recovery processes? This article focusses on the “Lost Homes” Scale Model Restoration Project. The project, initiated and led by architect Osamu Tsukihashi of Kobe University and his students, is a collaborative community project with residents in the disaster region as well as with students and professors of architecture across Japan.

This introduction to the special issue “Performance, Projection,Provocation! Relational Creativity in Contemporary Japan” presents ahistory of group-based creative practice in Japan, from the amateur endeavors ofsākuru (circles) to the professional creativity of internationalproduction companies. The special issue applies the concept of“relational creativity” to a series of case studies to betterunderstand how creative practices shape relationships and other social forms,institutional and less institutional.

Virtual YouTubers, also known as VTubers, are entertainers who use two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) computer-generated characters to create entertaining virtual content online. This article explores a group project called the “MetaBirthday,” in which VTubers and their followers collaborated to write lyrics, compose music, design stage outfits, and shoot a music video. Through semistructured interviews with the group’s participants and close reading of their published textual material, this article interrogates how VTubers harness virtual and physical spaces to create a sense of mutual benefit, inspiration, and satisfaction in tension with the everyday realities of these spaces.