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This paper aims to expand the scope of studies of Japaneseshōjo manga(girls’ comics) by examining early 1980s and 1990sshōjo mangathat were primarily targeted at the youngest band of readers, stories with early adolescent heroines in light, romantic, and fairytale-like narratives. These have been paid comparatively little scholarly attention thus far compared with texts that enact more explicit gender subversion, such as stories that feature same-sex male love and cross-dressed fighting girls. We argue, however, that the “maidenesque” (otomechikku) subgenres enact complex and fascinating versions of girlhood. Furthermore, we propose that these neglected manga benefit especially from an analysis that prioritises the visual dimensions ofshōjo manga. We apply these suggestions to our analysis of fashion and aesthetic in heretofore neglected “maidenesque” works by Takase Ryō. Rather than simply maintaining conservative norms of femininity and heterosexual romance, these works explore gender issues within the “safe” trappings of girlishness. Examining the visual and textual dimensions of such works is vital for a more accurate picture of girlhood and gender as it is more broadly imagined inshōjo manga. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the emergence of post-disaster ‘voluntours’ following Japan's 2011 disasters. An overwhelming, yet haphazard volunteer response to previous disasters spurred extensive collaboration between the state, relief organizations, and would-be volunteers in the wake of 3.11. However, when mapped onto to the massive devastation of the 3.11 disasters, this collaboration almost immediately turned many post-disaster volunteers into ‘voluntourists’, a problematic category commonly associated with visitors from the Global North volunteering for social and environmental causes while on holiday in the Global South. Japan's post-disaster voluntours demonstrate how uncoordinated and potentially risky volunteers have been channelled into a carefully-controlled and long-term response that satisfies people's desire to help disaster victims, while ultimately encouraging tourism (sansvolunteering) as the most desirable form of disaster recovery assistance. This shift toward voluntourism potentially undermines post-disaster volunteering and threatens to trap parts of Tōhoku, like other disaster sites, in a position of permanently ‘post-disaster’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores a small strike organized by University of California (UC) exchange students studying abroad in Tokyo in 1969. This minor event demonstrates the overlapping motivations and interpretations of student protests in both the US and Japan in the late 1960s. I examine how participants in this specific and limited case negotiated their activism within a larger geopolitical context of US power in Japan to draw attention to the fine-grained textures that can constitute transnational alliances and test the limits of more abstract concepts, such as rights of speech and expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Video games often incorporate discourses, ideologies, and social relationships found in the social contexts in which these media forms are produced. This article explores the specific connections between the historical forms of understanding masculinity and male sexuality in Japan and the representation of male same-sex desire and homosocial relations in Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs). In doing so, this paper offers an analysis of Japanese male gender and sexual norms to then show how JRPGs tend to construct their narratives and characters, both heroes and villains, around these norms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on my own experience as both a student and a teacher, this paper illuminates the “gap” between the systems of anthropology education in Japanese and American universities, and argues that the major “gap” between the Japanese and the American systems of anthropology education lies in the number of professional anthropologists in the unit of teaching and that small Japanese programs with just a handful of anthropologists can offer only general apprenticeship-type training while large American departments with at least fifteen or more anthropologists can provide a wide range of courses and advisory committees of specialists matching the areas of concentration chosen by graduate students. I conclude that this “gap” in the size and style of anthropology education explains why more “star” anthropologists are produced in America than in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Japan’s rise has often been conceived in terms of the ‘flying geese’ model in which Japan led a flock of emerging East Asian economies as its production networks expanded and it shed outdated technologies to the followers. Though the model implied a continuing Japanese leadership role in the East Asian region, two lost decades have undermined Japan’s claim to head the flock of ‘flying geese’ and Japan is often perceived as in decline relative to China’s rapid rise. This paper challenges such accounts to argue that Japan still has significant leadership ambitions and, potentially, the means to bring them to fruition. Understanding Japan’s leadership ambitions requires conceptualizing power in terms of discursive as well as material resources. Doing so highlights how different policymakers articulate contrasting visions of how Japan should take the lead in East Asia. These visions are of Japan as (variously) a functional leader, a conveyer of universal values, a conformist to ASEAN norms, a strategic partner and a promoter of open regionalism. Whilst most analyses have focused on Japan as a declining power, it is the spatial, temporal and ethical incompatibility of these regional visions that undermines Japan’s aspirations to lead the East Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Even though Japan and Switzerland are characterised by comparatively low youth unemployment rates, non-standard forms of employment are on the rise, posing a risk to the stable integration of young labour market entrants. Drawing on the French approach of societal analysis, this paper investigates how country-specific school-to-work transition systems stratify the risk of non-standard employment in early career differently in Japan and Switzerland. Our results reveal that in Japan, young entrants who completed university education are least at risk of becoming employed in non-standard work. On the contrary, it is the highly educated university graduates who mainly enter the labour market via non-standard employment in Switzerland, where vocational education promotes smooth transitions into standard employment relationships. Our findings suggest that the transition systems of the two countries differ in the way they revert to non-standard forms of employment. However, while job insecurities may not endanger labour market integration of highly skilled university graduates holding good career prospects in Switzerland, they may go hand in hand with social exclusion processes for the low-educated young entrants lacking bargaining power in the segmented Japanese labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the practical challenge in monitoring the performance of a large number of algorithmic trading orders, this paper provides a methodology that leads to automatic discovery of causes that lie behind poor trading performance. It also gives theoretical foundations to a generic framework for real-time trading analysis. The common acronym for investigating the causes of bad and good performance of trading is transaction cost analysis Rosenthal [Performance Metrics for Algorithmic Traders, 2009]). Automated algorithms take care of most of the traded flows on electronic markets (more than 70% in the US, 45% in Europe and 35% in Japan in 2012). Academic literature provides different ways to formalize these algorithms and show how optimal they can be from a mean-variance (like in Almgren and Chriss [J. Risk, 2000,3(2), 5–39]), a stochastic control (e.g. Guéantet al.[Math. Financ. Econ., 2013,7(4), 477–507]), an impulse control (see Bouchardet al.[SIAM J. Financ. Math., 2011,2(1), 404–438]) or a statistical learning (as used in Laruelleet al. [Math. Financ. Econ., 2013,7(3), 359–403]) viewpoint. This paper is agnostic about the way the algorithm has been built and provides a theoretical formalism to identify in real-time the market conditions thatinfluencedits efficiency or inefficiency. For a given set of characteristics describing the market context, selected by a practitioner, we first show how a set of additional derived explanatory factors, calledanomaly detectors, can be created for each market order (following for instance Cristianini and Shawe-Taylor [An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-based Learning Methods, 2000]). We then will present an online methodology to quantify how this extended set of factors, at any given time, predicts (i.e. haveinfluence, in the sense of predictive power or information defined in Basseville and Nikiforov [Detection of Abrupt Changes: Theory and Application, 1993], Shannon [Bell Syst. Tech. J., 1948,27, 379–423] and Alkoot and Kittler [Pattern Recogn. Lett., 1999,20(11), 1361–1369]) which of the orders are underperforming while calculating the predictive power of this explanatory factor set. Armed with this information, which we callinfluence analysis, we intend to empower the order monitoring user to take appropriate action on any affected orders by re-calibrating the trading algorithms working the order through new parameters, pausing their execution or taking over more direct trading control. Also we intend that use of this method can be taken advantage of to automatically adjust their trading action in the post trade analysis of algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until recently, Japan has been known for its small number of lawyers (bengoshi). Aggrieved clients also rarely brought lawsuits against theirbengoshifor malpractice. However, in 2001, Japan embarked on a sweeping reform of its legal system. As a result, the number ofbengoshidramatically increased. However, there are claims that there has been a decline in the quality of the new generation ofbengoshiand that legal malpractice lawsuits are increasing. Is this really the case and, if so, will there be a crisis in the near future? To explore these questions, this paper will analyse the factors that arguably contribute to the hitherto small number of legal malpractice lawsuits in Japan and then examine whether any of these contributory factors has changed or will change and whether such change (if any) will cause a substantial increase in legal malpractice lawsuits and a crisis in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1930s and 1940s shaman hunts (yutagari) were conducted by the Japanese Special Higher Police in Okinawa, Japan's most southern and remote prefecture. This was not the first time that attempts had been made to remove these women from Okinawan society. The fact that theyutawere hunted down and incarcerated, driven underground, and in some cases executed says much about how influential and threatening Japanese authorities perceived them to be. At the end of the Battle of Okinawa, more than one quarter of all Okinawan civilians were dead, and in many cases their remains were unrecoverable due to the extent of the destruction. The absence of appropriate mortuary rituals and religious specialists to perform these rituals, many of whom had been removed by authorities, led to severe spiritual dislocation for many Okinawans. In the chaotic postwar environment a path was opened for the revival of the previously hunted shamans to treat those who had suffered physical, family and spiritual loss, through providing help for these clients in dealing with settling the unsatisfied dead. It also led to the emergence of the ‘new’yuta, those shamans who followed different routes to becoming religious advisors. This paper first outlines some of the circumstances that led to the shaman hunts, and then assesses the role of the Battle of Okinawa and its aftermath in rehabilitating shamanism in postwar society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the emergent interest in risk communication as a strategy for disaster risk reduction. Communication plays an essential role in understanding risk, but studies suggest that people often do not respond in the way that risk experts anticipate. For risk communication to be effective, vulnerable communities need to understand risk within the local context as well as in terms of sustainability. Risk messages offer communities a way to enhance their collective knowledge of existing vulnerabilities, leading them towards alternative solutions for action. A longitudinal study of the Mano community development approach and its recovery from the 1995 Kobe earthquake illustrates how risk communication dynamics contributed to the community’s sustainable risk reduction. The study concludes that risk communication is a collaborative way for a community to work with risk experts, own their risk information, influence existing policies and practices, develop solutions to reduce vulnerability, and ultimately enhance a community’s capacity for managing future risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The contamination of food with radionuclides has posed serious problems to consumers, producers and policy makers in Japan since the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. Many Japanese consumers were and still are worried about the safety of domestic food products. How did the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima affect consumer trust in food safety regulation, and how did the Japanese government try to (re)establish consumer trust in its food governance system? Drawing on empirical data from a consumer survey, expert interviews and documents issued by the Japanese government and public authorities, this paper argues that existing institutions had difficulty handling the situation and rebuilding consumer trust. I will argue that consumers in Japan lack trust in government institutions and the food industry and that the government's risk communication was not suitable for rebuilding trust. This specific situation saw the emergence of new actors from civil society, such as citizens’ radioactivity monitoring stations (CRMS). These actors took over some of the functions of public authorities by providing information and monitoring food. I argue that they have the potential to build trust by fostering the participation of lay people and encouraging a more democratic discourse on food safety. Nevertheless there are some limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introductory article to the special issue on ‘Food, agriculture and risk in contemporary Japan’ attempts to set the background to the theme by addressing trends and changes in the global agri-food system. These changes affect issues hinging on food, agriculture and risk in Japan. Against this backdrop, we argue that ‘risk’ is becoming an ever more important analytical category for understanding changes in Japan’s agri-food system given numerous phenomena that are perceived risky or unsafe. Although the contributions in this issue inevitably deal with various types of risks, among them two types of risks stand out in the analysis of the papers: economic risks that concern farmers’ livelihoods and health risk concerns stemming from food safety problems. The contributions shed light on how different actors deal with these risks and point to an interesting twist with regard to the question of agency; they show that consumers and farmers are not all that powerless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on the videogame industry has to date revealed the importance of pre-existing cultural and technological foundations, firm-level innovation management strategies, interactive innovation with end-users, and uniqueness of national production/innovation systems. There are few theoretically informed empirical studies, however, that investigate geographical dimensions of innovation dynamics, particularly the role of spatial agglomerations, in this ‘hits-based’ cultural industry. This paper focuses on the console videogame industry in Japan, drawing on the extensive research on secondary data, corporate questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews with representatives from videogame firms and organizations in the country. Our premise is that redundancy – a diverse range of often indistinguishably similar outputs, most of which end up as commercial failures – is critically important for innovation in industries that are characterized by fundamental demand uncertainties. We then argue that agglomeration (in the sense of both industrial and urban agglomerations) can play a vital role in accommodating, or ‘tolerating’, such redundancy by allowing constituent firms, whose practice may seem inefficient in the short run, to remain in business. The findings of our study lead us to be cautious about policy initiatives to identify and implement ‘best practices’ for innovation, which may end up replacing critical redundancy with increasing efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Japanese Post Office, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, was finally privatised in 2015, marking an appropriate time to examine financialisation in Japan. The literature on financialisation and changes in Japanese capitalism assumes convergence on Anglo-American capitalism with a diminishing of state power. The main argument of this paper is that financialisation is instead a more contingent process. This is put forth through an examination of how this process has been mediated by the Japanese state through the workings of the Japanese Post Office. The state has frequently shaped the direction of financialisation by intervening in the routing of household funds via the postal savings system in order to achieve its objectives in different circumstances, particularly evident in the protracted and contested nature of the post bank’s privatisation. Financialisation is thus not preordained; instead its path is hewn by crisis, catastrophe, demographics and the agency of domestic social actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A questionnaire survey was conducted to determine the current status of home medical care (HMC) waste collection by nurses for individual items and whether the collection rate differs with city size. The questionnaire was mailed to 1,022 nursing offices, of which 645 offices provided valid responses. Offices were classified into three groups according to the local population size. Responses indicated that used syringes and needles, except for pen-type self-injection needles, were collected by >50% of HMC nurses. On the other hand, enteral nutrients, nutritional adjustment diet vessels, feeding tubes, portable injectors, ventilator masks, endotracheal suction catheters, tracheal cannulas, continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) bags, and urinary catheters and bags had a low collection rate in comparison with syringes or needles. The collection percentage of used syringes, needles, and infusion needles (p< 0.05) and that for infusion bags, tubes, and catheters (p< 0.001) differed among the three population groups. Although municipalities are responsible for collect all HMC waste, sharp or infectious items should be collected by HMC doctors or nurses. On the contrary, nonhazardous HMC waste should be collected by municipalities. Implications: This paper illustrates the status of waste collection of individual home medical care (HMC) items by HMC nurses. Infectious waste, such as needles and syringes, is collected by nurses. The collection rate of infectious waste by nurses in large cities was low compared with that in small cities. Although municipalities are responsible for collecting all HMC waste, sharp or infectious items should be collected by HMC doctors or nurses, whereas nonhazardous HMC waste should be collected by the municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of strategic ethnic performance (SEP), when members of one ethnic group present themselves as members of a phenotypically similar ethnic group for economic gain. I use ethnographic and interview data focused on Sub-Saharan African merchants involved in the Hip Hop fashion boutique business in urban Japan to show how SEP develops from four interconnected areas: the opportunity structure for ethnic entrepreneurs, the physical presentation of sellers, the arrangement of the selling venue, and feedback loops between the seller and the consumer. By utilizing SEP, ethnic entrepreneurs enhance the perceived authenticity of their goods and themselves. A thorough analysis of this process illuminates the interactional nature of ethnic authenticity as it is understood by consumers within urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Japan, this paper explores whether powers and competences in the political system are likely to be recalibrated in favour of the executive when the environment is perceived as increasingly threatening. It shows that the executive has been significantly strengthened during the past two decades of political reforms, though a closer look reveals that only the most recent efforts are motivated by security concerns. Case studies on military deployments and arms exports do not expose any clear trend towards curbing parliament’s formal control powers, but they indicate two related mechanisms that affect executive‒legislative relations. Firstly, the executive has sought to ensure faster decision-making in security policy, which may limit the Diet’s ability to scrutinise policies in depth. Secondly, the level of contestation over security policy issues has been decreasing, especially given the securitisation of North Korea and China. This provides the executive with more leeway in devising policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the next 20 years, more than half of the bridges in Japan would be in service for more than 50 years. These include truss bridges those are generally considered to be non-redundant and fracture critical. With ageing, these bridges are facing an increasing risk of bridge collapse under extreme conditions. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate alternate load paths on existing bridge structures to avoid bridge collapse or replacement. In this paper, after-fracture redundancy of truss bridges is investigated through a case study for a five-span continuous truss bridge. Field tests were performed, and the displacements on key sections were measured in the test. According to the experimental observations and test results, a numerical model capable of simulating the present truss bridge was built and was used to investigate the after-fracture redundancy of the target bridge. Fracture of truss members in typical locations was considered in the numerical analyses, and the ‘R’ values of both intact and damaged trusses were compared. On the basis of the numerical results, a critical member in this bridge was also determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy is one of the important elements in the production of goods and satisfies the required services. The economy of Japan is basically dependent on imported energy resources for 97% of its total domestic energy consumption per year, the highest percentage of any major industrialized nations. Thus, reducing dependency and import expenditures are always main issues in the energy policy of Japan. In this study, four indices are constructed to measure Energy Supply Security: Dependency Index, Intensity Index, Local Production Index, and Composite Index. This paper investigates the causal relationship between aggregated and disaggregated levels of energy supply security indices and the input parameters that are: petroleum prices, total primary energy supply, energy consumption per capita, share of renewable energy sources, carbon dioxide emissions, human development index, and the mean of democracy indices of energy supplier countries of Japan for the period of 1975–2007. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1959 to 1984, some 90,000 Koreans migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of the “repatriation movement.” Enduring severe deprivation in North Korea, in the last decade some 300 of these individuals have returned to Japan. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this paper asks how gift giving and the attendant obligation to reciprocate impacts on relations between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the people they seek to help. I answer this question by examining the resettlement of returnees from North Korea, and their relationship to members of Japanese civil society. The organizations working with returnees primarily consist of elderly Japanese men who aid returnees out of guilt for their support in the 1960s and 1970s of the socialist left, North Korea, and the repatriation movement. Their assistance engenders a feeling of debt in the people they help. Returnees try to mitigate this debt by performing acts of “flexible filial piety” toward NPO members. But returnees’ attempts to renegotiate the burden of the gift consequently endanger themselves and their families who remain in North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Japanese Tower, commissioned by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1900 and designed by the French architect Alexandre Marcel, was finished and inaugurated in 1904. This building presents a remarkable variety of decorative techniques and materials, including Japanese lacquer executed using specific and complex decorative techniques. Preliminary research on the interior decorations allowed the rediscovery and highlighting of a large and unique collection of lacquerwork and architectural Japanese ornaments from the Edo and Meiji period, combined with European artefacts. This paper focuses on the study of the extensive use of Japanese lacquer found in the upper floors of the Tower. This focus was facilitated by collaboration with other specialists, which granted a better understanding of the secrets of this extraordinary piece of cultural heritage and the development of a preservation plan for the interior decoration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion progressed, Japanese Protestants intensified their efforts to take up a leading role in the education of Koreans in colonial Korea and in the metropole wishing to spearhead the assimilation of Koreans. By drawing on the colonial discourses of East Asian unity under Japanese leadership, Protestant churches strove to mediate and facilitate colonial policies in Korea. Yet there were also voices of dissent from prominent Japanese Protestants critical of the assimilation policies implemented by colonial authorities in Korea. This ambivalent stance of Protestantism towards Korea is further complicated by the fact that the Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Tokyo served as an important venue of the Korean Independence Movement. Examining Christian magazines and journals of the time, this paper delves into the contentious debates among Japanese Protestants concerning the Korea Mission and the Japanese government’s strategy of assimilation through education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Growth and shrinkage are two sides of the same coin—global restructuring of the capital that produces geographies of unequal urban development. This new reality goes beyond the attention of academics and policymakers, and is becoming a common narrative in Japanese cinema. This paper explores how Japanese contemporary filmmakers portray the problems associated with shrinkage, such as urban decay or the social and economic restructuring processes in Japan, disseminating it to a wider audience. This research study analyses two Japanese film-texts—Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’sSketches of Kaitan City(2010) and Sand-Il Lee’sHula Girls(2006)—which serve to illustrate current trends of both Japanese urban shrinkage and cinema. The main objective underlying this analysis is to stress the relationship between cinema and urban space; and how the cinematic vision of cities helps to understand the complex socio-spatial processes from contemporary urban transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines changes of the place that film has occupied in the public policy of the Japanese government, including not only cultural policy per se, but also industrial and economic policy. After describing some of the distinctive features of the Japanese film market, this paper discusses the inadequate basis of the government’s cultural policy for film. Film in recent years has received some attention as an industry with export potential, particularly with the rise of ‘Cool Japan’, the policy of promoting Japanese culture abroad as a tool for economic and diplomatic aims. In the chequered history of economic growth strategies and nation branding of recent years, the film industry has had some good news but received no serious attention either as a sector with economic significance or as a form of national culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rationale: Public health and preventive medicine (PHPM) has been recognized internationally as a physician specialty, but national parallels and differences exist between training contexts. This paper reviews PHPM training and employment in Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Methods: Information gathered from relevant accreditation bodies and literature searches was used to create descriptive profiles of national training demographics and structure and a narrative outlining trends and challenges facing the specialty. Results: Notable similarities and differences exist between national contexts. Key themes were differences in training strategies and practice scope, specialty stakeholders, certification structure, and funding. Recognition challenges faced the specialty across all six countries. Other challenges included unclear competencies and training strategies and a need for PHPM specialists to highlight their role in combating population health threats. Additional differences existed between comparator countries on the structure of training, funding sources for training programs, availability of training posts, and linkages with other physician specialties. Conclusion: Highlighting these themes is a first step to fostering training collaborations between PHPM specialist physicians to augment transnational action on global public health challenges and also supports PHPM physician educators with innovative solutions from abroad that might address domestic specialty challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the governance of education for older people in Japan and Korea. The findings revealed that the overall mechanisms of governance for the education of older people shared a number of similar features such as the structure of relevant laws, ministries, and policies. However, differences were also found regarding independence of education administration, contracting out of public institutions, and participation of voluntary institutions. Our findings suggest the need for promotion of interministerial cooperation and the development of more “educational” programs for older people in both countries. In particular, the findings indicate that Japan should evaluate the effectiveness of the national policy of contracting out and the local policy of subordination of the educational administration to the general administration. With regard to Korea, the findings suggest that both the national and local administrations of education should change their school education-oriented policy and promote education for older people. In addition, Korea needs to facilitate education for older people at voluntary institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Japan is periodically wracked by "Great Earthquakes" (daijishin) - seismic events so destructive that they leave massive amounts of textual and graphic evidence, much of it produced by people who did not experience the events directly. Using this cache of information, it is possible to see how the idea of the "disaster victim" has changed over time and circumstance. My paper traces this role across five Great Earthquakes that spanned roughly 150 years (1855-2011), a period convergent with modern Japan. I will argue that the sense of who and what has been victimized by the shaking of the earth - who has suffered, what weight to attach to their loss, what actions to take and emotions to feel regarding their situation - has changed regularly, and surprisingly, over this rather short period. There is, in other words, no common Japanese experience of victimhood, even in the context of one disaster type over a relatively short historical period. The article is one contribution to an as-yet unexamined history and comparative study of the modern role of disaster victim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of continuity and transmission, as well as relationship to the community, have long occupied an important part of folk performance scholarship. These topics take on a different urgency in disaster-affected communities, where preexisting socioeconomic issues become more pressing and endanger not only the continuity of folk practices but the communities themselves. The aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami has seen a surge of folk performance revivals in affected areas, hinting to the depth of the ties between local folk performance and community. Following an ethnographic approach, this paper explores the case of the community of Ogatsu (Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture) and its folk performance, the Ogatsu hōin kagura, as one expression of the revival process in an isolated, rural community extensively affected by the 2011 disaster. Putting in perspective the underlying dynamic of continuity and change that characterizes folk performances, the objective is to explore the nature and usage of the kagura and its relationship to the post-disaster community as it responds to changing circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Japan's declining birthrate has been perceived as a major menace to its society since the 1990s, pronatalist policy approaches are again a source of social and political concern. This paper focuses on a number of political measures involved in ameliorating low birthrates - measures that emphasize the necessity of educating individuals about reproduction and fertility in order to enable them to make informed decisions. Investigated will be the question of how the new trend in the narrative of countermeasures focusing on education about reproduction can be evaluated, particularly regarding the question of how the notion of "autonomy" is to be understood in this context. The reference points in this deliberation are two dimensions of autonomy that have been carved out in various fields of scholarship: (i) autonomy as empowerment and (ii) autonomy as a neoliberal government technology. Furthermore, and constituting an additional level, are the issues of how gender is depicted in this narrative, and how its representation has to be evaluated in the context of autonomy. The argumentation is based on the analysis of the political narrative on pronatalist policy, concrete examples of its implementation, as well as contributions from sources critical of the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese children with disabilities have traditionally been educated in special schools, specifically dedicated to one type of disability, and often isolated from the rest of society. However, in 2006, in the course of the general reform of education, special education was reformed to promote the principle of "inclusive education" - that is, education in mainstream schools along with non-disabled peers - and, in a broader sense, education meeting the needs of all children, regardless of their particularities in terms of abilities, command of the Japanese language, ethnic/social/family background, etc. This paper aims at assessing the results of this reform after almost ten years of implementation. To what extent has the 2006 reform contributed to improving the integration of disabled or less-abled children into Japanese society? Based on quantitative and qualitative data, the argument shows that it has achieved mixed results in practice, with large variations depending on the type of disability considered. The observed evolution can be interpreted as an extended individualization of pedagogy in mainstream schools, still enrooted in the framework of strong control processes. Even though new structures are created in order to meet everyone's needs, the implemented approach remains based on a willingness to externalize difficulties, rather than the promised radical transformation of schools toward the recognition of a general diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how diverse stances toward nuclear energy were produced and reproduced among Japanese labour unions from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and how these stances of the formative period influenced the subsequent development of inter-union politics before and after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011, based on content analysis of union bulletins and other materials of pro- and anti-nuclear energy unions. This article asks three research questions: (i) what factors contributed to proor anti-nuclear energy stances of labour unions?; (ii) what elements constituted or framed unions' arguments on the issue of nuclear energy?; and (iii) what impact did these stances and arguments formed in the early period have on the subsequent development of inter-union politics over nuclear energy, especially in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster? The paper shows union ideologies and institutional integration were the factors influencing unions' stances on nuclear energy. It also analyses the worldviews of pro- and anti-nuclear energy unions based on the three policy styles of technological enthusiasts, moralists and cost-benefiters. The Fukushima disaster reinforced the previously formed division of union ideologies, but considerably weakened the discourse of technological enthusiasm stressed by pro-nuclear energy unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extended deterrence relationships between the United States and its allies in Europe and East Asia have been critical to regional and global security and stability, as well as to nonproliferation efforts, since the late 1950s. These relationships developed in different regional contexts, and reflect differing cultural, political and military realities in the US allies and their relations with the United States. Although extended deterrence and assurance relations have very different histories, and have to some extent been controversial through the years, there has been a rethinking of these relations in recent years. Many Europeans face a diminished threat situation as well as economic and political pressures on the maintenance of extended deterrence, and are looking at the East Asian relationships, which do not involve forward deployed forces as more attractive than NATO’s risk-and-burden-sharing concepts involving the US nuclear forces deployed in Europe. On the other hand, the East Asian allies are looking favorably at NATO nuclear consultations, and in the case of South Korea, renewed US nuclear deployments (which were ended in 1991), to meet increased security concerns posed by a nuclear North Korea and more assertive China. This paper explores the history of current relationships and the changes that have led the allies to view those of others as more suitable for meeting their current needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines civil activities to protect and conserve the underground war-related sites in contemporary Japan. Conservation movements rooted in local communities and centred on the Japanese Network to Protect War-Related Sites are making efforts to transform the dark heritage of war-related sites into cultural property in an attempt to integrate diverse wartime experiences. In delving into the heritage-making practices, I introduce local movements in Okinawa and Okayama. Okinawa hosts the first underground war-related site to become a cultural property, the Haebaru Army Hospital Bunkers, while Okayama struggles to create another one by making the Kamejima Mountain Underground Plant a dark heritage site. I argue that these conservation movements are challenging the homogenising national war memory by attaching ethnically diversified vernacular memories to the underground sites. In doing so, these underground war-related sites have become public spaces where new forms of social engagement are negotiated and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the work of the Japanese sociologist Koyama Eizō, this paper critically explores the development of Japanese race studies from the late 1920s to the 1940s. During this period, Japanese intellectual discourses on race developed in the context of the need to manage heterogeneous populations within the Japanese empire and contain the growing mobility of populations in and outside of the territory. Reflecting Koyama’s keen interest in racial/ethnic contacts and interdisciplinary perspectives, his intellectual work symptomatically exemplifies not only the convergence of knowledge production and the dominant imperial regime but also the transpacific implications of Japanese race studies. On the one hand, my study examines Koyama’s preoccupation with racial/ethnic contacts in relation to imperial security and also traces how his study intersected with the discourse of American social scientists who were also interested in Japanese migrations. On the other hand, the study examines how the development of the idea of minzoku in Koyama’s discourse coincided with contemporaneous attempts to mobilize diverse populations in the empire. Thus, my research reveals a complex dynamic of integration and differentiation in discourse on Japanese race studies in the interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The demand for less hostile and more humanitarian ways of caring for patients in health care institutions are becoming more widespread and accepted in Japan. In the city of Tsukuba, student groups are leading the way in developing ways in making hospital stays less stressful through arts programs. This paper is the result of direct participation, observation, and assistance by the hospitals, medical staff, and students who are organize hands-on projects and interactive art sessions designed to serve patients directly. The Arts in Hospital program is a useful tool in engaging community participation and communication among students and hospital staff. It provides a learning opportunity to students, and a creative outlet for patients on extended care. Active participation by students has a very positive impact on by giving them practical outlets to exercise their creativity and knowledge, while hospitals benefit through their service, which also cuts costs. Further research is needed to identify the direct benefit to patients, and the future prospects of arts-based hospital projects in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stigma associated with alcoholism is common in Japan, and individuals who suffer from alcoholism often feel that it is a taboo to discuss their problems with alcohol in the general public. This paper describes the way in which the self-help group called Danshukai offers a model for recovery for people suffering from alcoholism in Japan. Since 2006, the authors have been involved in various meetings and conducted conversational and semi-structured interviews with leaders and rank-and-file members of Danshukai. In Danshukai, recovery is viewed as a spiritual process offering the potential for a new life compared to models offered by medical treatment that place little emphasis on the role of spirituality in recovery. While medical models seek to reduce alcohol-related stigma by viewing it as a treatable ‘disease’, rather than a personality weakness, Danshukai encourages members to embrace their identity as a Danshukai member and to engage with a ‘way of abstinence’ that includes a lifelong commitment to Danshukai activities and helping others with similar problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Japan the average age of first marriage continues to rise steadily, and people are spending a greater proportion of their adult life single. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of singles express desire to marry one day. The reasons for the rise in late and non-marriage are varied and complex, but difficulty in finding an appropriate or compatible partner has emerged as one of the key issues. Against this backdrop, thekonkatsu(‘marriage-partner hunting’) industry has emerged, ostensibly to assist singles to find marriage partners. In this paper, we examinekonkatsupopular literature, online matchmaking sites and the perceptions of single women andkonkatsuworkers to consider the ways that contemporary discourses of gender and marriage are reflected, (re)produced or challenged. The ‘male-breadwinner family’ model, based on the functional roles of ‘supportive wife’ and ‘provider husband’, is increasingly both undesirable and untenable for single Japanese women and men. However, values and norms pertaining to gender and marriage as portrayed in matchmaking sites and in somekonkatsuliterature remain remarkably unchanged. In this context, single women’s ambivalence towardskonkatsumay reflect both ambivalence to marriage as a goal per se, and uneasiness with the gendered roles in marriage purveyed bykonkatsudiscourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the changing definition of marriage for young women in Tokyo over the last 10 years. Based on fieldwork research conducted in Tokyo, I examine why women are delaying or refusing marriage, arguing that women’s decisions can best be understood in relation to work. I discuss how young women negotiate their conception of marriage by articulating their desires for self-realization, a career, and participation in society, within the context of a flexibilization of work and the transformation of family in contemporary Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seeking to contribute to recent attempts to rethink the deepest foundations of the field, this paper offers news ways of contemplating time, specifically its relations to self, nihilism, and schooling. We briefly review how some leading Western thinkers have contemplated time before detailing Japanese scholars who have offered divergent, original, and arguably more sophisticated, theoretical accounts. We then illustrate these ideas by sketching how Japan ‘borrowed time’ following the abrupt political rupture of 1868, showing howLinear Timecame to be disseminated and diffused, largely through modern schooling. Last, we spotlight the nihilism that has arisen as consequence. Our primary aim is not empirical elaboration, however, but instead disclosure of a complex of relations that the field of comparative education has yet to discuss. We offer both the experience-cum-thought of Japan and this complex itself as reconstructive resources for the field which remains shallow in its parochial presumptions and unwillingness to engage ontologically. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Japan's economic and political relationship with South Africa has been characterised historically by ambiguity. Throughout the twentieth century, economic ties were underpinned by mercantilist and strategic considerations. During apartheid, this placed Japan in an uneasy position as it sought to balance a relationship of expediency with wider foreign policy objectives in the rest of Africa and beyond. The demise of apartheid created the space for new forms of engagement centred on the pursuit of cognate goals. This has seen the intensification and deepening of economic ties in particular. Yet relations, especially at the political and diplomatic levels, have also been more complex than anticipated, and in recent years, the rise in Africa of other players from Asia and the Global South has had a bearing on South Africa–Japan ties. In this paper, it is argued that two related dynamics pivoting on policy elites’ changing conceptions (or self-view) of the nature of the state they are running and its place in the wider world order help explain the post-apartheid evolution of the South Africa–Japan relationship. First, there has been an apparent shift in South African foreign policy elites’ self-view, mediated by a changing systemic context. The development and manifestation over time of a stronger Global South self-conception in South African foreign policy, fashioned in juxtaposition to what have been considered in the past key Global North relationships, had direct consequences for South Africa–Japan ties. Second, meso- and micro-level dynamics – the role of the general operations in the diplomatic (i.e. bureaucratic) arena, and the personalities and shifting political preferences of individual executive leaders – had major impacts on how South Africa engaged with Japan in the past two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides an interpretive investigation into the social representation of intercultural exchange at one of the newly established international universities in Japan. The author conducted quasi-structured interviews with 5 staff members and 22 students to gain insight into their perceptions of intercultural exchange and interactions. The findings highlight the dominance of nation-bound and instrumental representations of interculturality, and suggest the importance of integrating intercultural interaction issues into formal curriculums while celebrating intercultural connectivity, interchange and hybridity in both institutional and interpersonal levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between outward foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports and imports from Japan, employing an augmented standard gravity model. Several econometric techniques, including the Gamma Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimator, are used to rectify possible problems of heteroskedasticity and zero trade flows inherent in the estimation of gravity models of trade. The major finding is that outward FDI is trade enhancing for the Japanese manufacturing industry. However, we find that whether outward FDI creates or replaces trade depends on the industry under scrutiny. Our results indicate that the complementary relationship between FDI and trade is dominant in Japanese manufacturing, especially in the food and beverages, electric machinery, primary metals, and precision machinery sectors. We find also that Japanese overseas investments substitute for imports of chemical products, and for both exports and imports of general machinery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The presence of seismo-lower ionospheric perturbation for the Kobe earthquake (EQ) has been revisited with a relatively new phenomenon of ULF (ultra-low-frequency) magnetic field depression effect. By using the ULF data in Japan only at Kakioka belonging to Japan Meteorological Agency (because data from Memambetsu and Kanoya were not available), we have found that a very clear ULF depression was observed at Kakioka on 14 January 1995. A comparison with our former result on subionospheric VLF (very low frequency) propagation anomaly indicates that the occurrence of ULF depression exhibits a temporal coincidence (synchronization) with that of subionospheric VLF anomaly. This may be acceptable because the ULF depression can be explained in terms of enhanced absorption of magnetospheric ULF waves through the disturbed lower ionosphere prior to an EQ. The result of ULF magnetic field depression in this paper is likely to provide a further support to the presence of the lower ionospheric perturbation before the Kobe EQ. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the intrinsic relationships between Japanese historiography and the three great historiographical trends of New Historiography, Debates on Ancient History, and Marxist historiography, from the macroscopic perspective of the transformation, development, and early modern growth of modern and early modern Chinese historiography, exploring how Chinese historical researchers selected, deviated from, and assimilated Japanese historiography, while also particularly focusing on how the recipients utilized Japanese historiographical methods and concepts as well as the achievements of Japanese scholars in researching Chinese history to construct their own interpretation of Chinese historiography, in a study of the academic trend of indigenization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An early nineteenth-century British voyager, Captain Hall, published in 1818 an account of his landing at Okinawa Island and encounter with the court nobility of what was still at that time the Kingdom of the Ryukyus: Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo [Ryûkyû] Island in the Japan Sea. The paper asks: Why did the Ryukyuans respond to the unannounced entry into their waters by two British naval ships by a seemingly boundless hospitality? With a sideline view on the Sahlins-Obeyesekere controversy, the author proposes that even as the Ryukyuans were eulogizing the entry of the British by showering them with one-sided attention and acknowledging their royal credentials, they tried at the same time to make a bid for their departure. They might have been deploying ritual techniques apparent still today: of welcoming and (subsequent) sending-off in one single act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The films of Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi in the late 1990s and early 2000s capture the malaise of the ‘lost decade’ (ushinawareta jû-nen) of the 1990s, a period characterized by the end of an economic boom that propelled Japan through two decades of unprecedented prosperity. Facing the decline of high-growth, the country for the first time in two decades could no longer ignore the things that it had suppressed to realize progress: the failure of Japan's radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s and their de-evolution into extremism. As the haze of prosperity dissipated in the early 1990s, Japan was again stunned by a violent uprising more than two decades after the collapse of the student movements – the Tokyo subway gassings in 1995, an event that many associated with the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The attacks served as a reminder of the deep-seated social dissatisfactions that existed among the activist generation and the violence that results from extremism. Utilizing trauma theory, this paper will examine the way Japan's radical past is re-experienced in Kurosawa's films in the years following the gassings. Through an analysis of the cinematic style ofCharisma(Karisuma1999),Pulse(Kairô2001), and other cinematic works in light of their narrative references to radicalism, this article will flesh out the layered process through which Kurosawa's films engage the past while coping with the trauma of post-Aum Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines Japan's policy towards methamphetamine (Japanese:hiropon). Opium has been used in Japan for medicinal purposes since 1722. However, it was strictly controlled. The result was that drug abuse was minuscule. This changed with the introduction of methamphetamine. During the Second World Warhiroponwas given by the military to fighter pilots and the signal corps in order to help them stay awake and alert. After 1945, the large military stockpiles of methamphetamine found their way onto the black market. With society in chaos, drug abuse spread rapidly and ahiroponepidemic emerged. The introduction of a comprehensive anti-drug package in the mid-1950s, including stricter laws, resulted in that abuse having been almost totally eradicated by 1957. Around 1970 a new wave of abuse (‘the second epidemic’) began. It peaked around 1985, after which abuse tampered off, albeit slowly. A temporary increase in the mid-1990s made Japanese authorities declare the emergence of ‘the third epidemic’ that is still said to be ongoing. Official statistics show, however, that Japan has not seen any such epidemic. In comparison with most other Western countries, methamphetamine abuse in Japan is modest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the popularity of hula in contemporary Japanese society in order to understand how Native Hawaiian images and traditions play a role in constructing the image of a ‘paradise’ in Hawai`i. By drawing on the personal experience of the author as a participant observer in hula lessons and performance in Tokyo, it argues that aiming for the sense of cultural authenticity is integral to the Japanese practitioners’ attraction to hula. It also shows how Native Hawaiian hula teachers and performers skillfully appropriate the Japanese desire to discover an ‘authentic’ Hawai`i for their cultural as well as personal gain. Today’s Japanese discourse of ‘Hawai`i as paradise’ derives from the contemporary socio-cultural context of a Japanese society that longs for the authentic culture of the indigenous ‘other’ as well as from the shrewd use of that longing by the ‘other.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of regenerative medicine is to utilize biological properties of cells for therapeutic purposes. Although substantial international investment has been made in this biomedical technology, the issue of which type of cells best serves for these purposes still remains unsettled. Adopting a conceptual framework from Clarke and Fujimura that the rightness of “tools” needs to be socially constructed, this paper examines the interactions of various actors in Japan and demonstrates two kinds of craftwork as examples of attempts to construct the rightness of the cells for the technology. In such attempts, the actors not only produced adoptable packages but also assumed responsibility for their dissemination. However, because the packages are tied to their original practices as well as to their working environment, others would have to bear considerable cost of articulation to adopt them for their job and hence the rightness of the cells has not been firmly upheld. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]