Chiri Yukie (1903-22) was born in Noboribetsu, Hokkaido to Chiri Takakichi and Nami. Nami was the daughter of a Hokkaido Ainu grandsire, Kan'nari. Yukie was the older sister of the linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-61). When she was five and six years old, she lived in Horobetsu with her grandmother, the great bard Monashinouku. Yukie grew up listening to recitations in the oral tradition as narrated by Monashinouku and later also by her adoptive mother Kan'nari Matsu (1875-1961), Nami's sister. Starting in 1909, she and Monashinouku lived with Matsu at the Episcopal Church compound in Chikabumi in the suburbs of Asahikawa in Hokkaido. After a total of seven years of normal and higher normal school education, she attended Asahikawa Girls Vocational School for three years, graduating in 1910.

“To Hell and Back” is a phrase that can bear a pretty heavy metaphorical load when it comes to talking about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It's also the title of a book by Charles Pellegrino.

Pellegrino's book is a moving and grueling close-up look at the horrors experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both on the day of the bombing and in the days and years afterward. I have the heart of a dried-up raisin but even I got a little teary in places.

This article examines images of migrant workers and brides in recent South Korean films in order to demonstrate how popular media can complicate the issue of multiculturalism in Korea, and to problematize the ethnic and gender hierarchy embedded in multicultural policies and in the social fabric of Korean society.

This article discusses key political issues surrounding Japan's Legislation for Peace and Security that came into effect on 29 March 2016. The past two years have seen heated public debate and political protests with opposition parties uniting in their opposition to the legislation in their attempt to challenge the LDP-Komeito ruling coalition in the July 10 Upper House election. This challenge continues. In this article, I discuss opposition claims that the security legislation is ‘war legislation’ that poses a threat to Japan's pacifist Constitution. I also discuss the central role played by Komeito in the passage of this legislation and examine the often antagonistic relationship between the LDP and its junior coalition partner, which is often ignored in the simplified narratives of the choice between ‘war and peace’ played out in the public sphere. This article, therefore, addresses not only the legislation but also public perceptions and misperceptions of the issues involved and the underlying political process.

Despite the push for more fundamental change and the heated rhetoric that followed the July 2014 Abe Cabinet Decision on the security legislation and its enactment in September 2015, this article argues that it was a centrist pragmatic development in Japanese politics rather than a radical change, due in large part to the moderating influence of Komeito.

The Tsukubashū (1356-57), or Tsukuba Anthology, was the first of two official collections of medieval linked verse (renga) modeled on the structural and thematic format of the seventeen imperial waka anthologies compiled between 905 and 1349. The Tsukubashū was initially compiled by the court poet Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-88) in 1356 without an imperial mandate. In the following year, however, it was recognized as a quasi-imperial anthology through the mediation of warrior and lay monk Sasaki Dōyo (1295?-1373).

1. Introduction - Mark Selden and Claire Andrieu

2. Defending Civilians against Aerial Bombardment: A Comparative/Transnational History of Japanese, German, and British Home Fronts, 1918-1945 - Sheldon Garon

3. Blockbusters, Nukes, and Drones: Trajectories of Change over a Century - Matthew Evangelista

4. American Fire Bombing and Atomic Bombing of Japan in History and Memory - Mark Selden

5. Napalm in US Bombing Doctrine and Practice, 1942-1975 - Marine Guillaume

Introduction

Born in Tottori Prefecture (where her last name is pronounced Osaki rather than Ozaki), Osaki Midori (1896-1971) was the fourth of seven children in a middle-class, intellectual family. Her mother was the daughter of the head priest of a Buddhist temple; her father was a teacher, who died while Osaki was a teenager. Osaki graduated from the Tottori Girls' School (Tottori Jogakko), and, at age eighteen, became an elementary school teacher. Aspiring to a literary career, she wrote poetry, essays, and fiction and sold a novel for schoolgirls (shōjo shōsetsu) to Shōjo sekai (Girls' World) magazine in 1917.

This article provides a critical discussion of Okinawa's role in serving American and Japanese strategic interests. Since the end of World War II Okinawa has been a mostly unhappy host of American military bases, and the issue has been prominent at times on the agenda of the Japanese peace movement. The interplay of overseas bases and U.S. foreign policy is a crucial and often hidden dimension of the global projection of American power, which gives rise to friction with and opposition from the peoples living in the vicinity of the bases. This has certainly been the case in relation to Okinawa. This essay offers reflections on thisunderlying reality, as well as the linkage between the network of foreign military bases and the emergence of the first global state in history, a new political phenomenon that distinguishes it from ‘empires’ of the past.

For more than two decades I had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Kyoko Selden on Japanese texts relating to the history of Italian opera in Japan. We started with translations involving the reception of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and then began working on Takarazuka musical adaptations of the opera. Although administrative duties made it difficult to realize a book project Kyoko's translation of the 1953 Takarazuka Chōchō-san sandaiki (Three-Generation Chōchō-san) furnished me with the basis for a conference presentation, and we eventually collaborated on an English edition of its libretto. That edition was the result of an extensive and—for me—instructive series of revisions and discussions with Kyoko about the intricate relationships between source and target languages. We spent stimulating afternoons over coffee interrogating texts in Italian, Japanese, and English, ultimately working through several complete revisions. Lamentably, that kind of collaboration was less fully realized in the following translation, which we discussed only once. I have edited it here with the generous help of Lili Selden, and revised or added footnotes, in one case deliberately juxtaposing two viewpoints. I believe I also speak for Kyoko in hoping that readers will find it an invitation to continue and refine our dialogue on the transpositions of Italian and Japanese music-dramas into widely different cultural contexts.

On the morning of March 10, 1945, Hotta Yoshie could not believe his eyes when he saw the extent of the devastation caused by the massive firebombing raid on Tokyo's Shitamachi district that came to be known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid. On March 18, concerned about the fate of a close female friend, he again walked through the burned-out area, where he was astonished to witness the Emperor conducting an inspection of the damage at a shrine in Fukagawa. A quarter of a century later, in Hojoki shiki (Personal Reflections on the Hojiki; 1970), Hotta described these experiences in the context of the famous essay Hojiki by the poet Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216). The following extracts, translated by The Asia-Pacific Journal, are from Hotta's account of what he saw and his reflections on it in the context of Japanese politics and the Buddhist concept of impermanence.

How do the Ainu see themselves, nature, and the world? The Ainu did not have a written language, but they carried a rich oral tradition that has been passed on for centuries. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus offers two samples of Ainu oral stories; both are short but nevertheless distill important aspects of the Ainu's lives and their views of the world.

For more than three decades, Kyoko Selden was deeply involved in the Talent Education (Sainō kyōiku) movement, as a parent of three string-playing children and the translator of major books and articles on the Suzuki Method. Developed in the thirties and forties by the violinist Suzuki Shin'ichi (1898-1998), the Suzuki Method teaches children classical music as a means to enrich their lives while also enhancing their motor skills, concentration, memory, and self-discipline. Suzuki, who had studied the violin in Germany in the twenties, was one day struck by the capacity of children to master their native languages. Against the conventional wisdom that only certain people were graced with the talent to master musical instruments, Suzuki declared that anyone who could speak a language with facility had the potential to become a refined performer—whether amateur or professional—of music.

Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was an inheritor and preserver of Ainu culture. He was a collector of Ainu folk utensils, teacher of the prominent Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke, and recorder and transcriber of epics, songs, and tales from the last of the bards. In addition, Kayano was the compiler of an authoritative Ainu-Japanese dictionary, a chanter of old epics, and the founder of a museum of Ainu material culture as well as of an Ainu language school and a radio station. He was the first (and so far the only) National Diet member to address the assembly in Ainu. He was also a fierce fighter against the construction of a dam in his village that meant destruction of a sacred ritual site as well as of nature. Finally, Kayano was an inspiration behind today's appreciation of Ainu culture, in which young people, Ainu, and non-Ainu of various nationalities, join to celebrate and explore aboriginal cultures and their contemporary development. This movement includes youthful attempts to create new forms that combine traditional Ainu oral performances with contemporary music and dance. Ainu Rebels, a creative song and dance troupe that formed in 2006, for example, is constituted mostly of Ainu youth but also includes Japanese and foreigners. The group draws on Ainu oral tradition adapted to hip hop and other forms and also engages in artistic activities that combine traditional Ainu art with contemporary artistic elements.

The transnational dissemination and consumption of contemporary Korean culture, better known as Hallyu, has encouraged a wave of academic writing from various disciplines, forming one of the major new developments in the field of Korean studies (Kim 2014, 12). This issue attempts to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on Hallyu by demonstrating how the consumption of Hallyu delineates multiple borders in various societies-national, cultural, gender, class, and ethnicity-borders that are constantly shifting and transforming.

Shukan Bunshun is one answer to the charge that aggressive, confrontational journalism does not exist in Japan. For over a year, the nation's biggest-selling weekly magazine (about 420,000 audited copies) has scored a string of scoops. In January 2016, it harpooned economy minister Amari Akira over bribery claims, forcing him to quit. The following month, it exposed an extramarital affair by Miyazaki Kensuke, a politician who had been campaigning for maternity leave during his wife's pregnancy. The same month it revealed illegal betting by Kasahara Shoki, a former pitcher with the Yomiuri Giants baseball team.

The majority of studies on regional formation in East Asia (both Northeast and Southeast Asia) have focused on economic integration and institutional build-up initiated by states. Developments in the field of contemporary society and culture, however, have been largely overlooked. This study seeks to shed light on the way popular culture influences our perception of regions by examining some recent developments in the study of translational dissemination of popular culture across Asian societies. The paper argues that popular culture plays a constructive role in shaping the East Asian region by creating transnational markets for cultural commodities and by disseminating communalities of lifestyles and concepts, which are based on the experience of consuming the same cultural products by different people in different parts of East Asia.