Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
On August 21, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) reported that a rare document listing the names and ranks of members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious wartime Unit 731 (the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army) had been discovered in Tokyo. It (...)
The major capitalist economies of Europe and North America have been experiencing low rates of economic growth and population increase. Japan has been in that position since the 1990s, and its experience offers some important clues about what the future holds.
During the 1980s, Japan seemed (...)
In the early decades of the 20th century, people grappled with the sounds modernity wrought. Some heard only noise. Others found great beauty.
Cash machines, elevators and escalators that talk. Jingles in department stores, train stations, supermarkets and shopping arcades. Loud speaker (...)
A scholar of Japanese religion explains the connections that Japan’s political parties have with several religious groups and how religion is tied in with the legacy of Shinzo Abe.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s alleged shooter, Tetsuya Yamagami, told the police that he was (...)
As efforts to revive him faltered in the crucial hours after he was shot by a gunman last Friday, the world began taking stock of the sizable influence that former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe wielded in many areas of public life. Even as he resigned in 2020 for health reasons, after (...)
Shinzo Abe’s murder is the latest political attack in Japan, a country which has strict gun laws.
Our reaction upon hearing the news of the shooting of former prime minister Shinzo Abe was one of shock and incredulity in equal measure. What followed was a frenzy of trying to piece news (...)
In World War II, the Japanese Army forced women and girls into sexual slavery. With ‘Me too’ gaining momentum, it’s time to reckon with the past
On 23 January 2012, I sat in front of the Japanese Embassy in London, my skin and kimono coated entirely with a thick layer of bronze water-based (...)
Historians often neglect Japan’s New Left protest movement in the late 1960s, but it was one of the largest in any country. Radical student activists brought the university system to a halt — and changed the future of Japanese politics.
Global surveys that look at the protest movements of (...)
Gavin Walker on his new edited volume on the story of Japan’s forgotten ’68 in a global context and its relevance to contemporary struggles.
1968 was not only a pivotal year in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world in general, but also a key moment for a new anticolonial and anticapitalist (...)
Tokyo, 20 March 1995, morning rush-hour.
Millions of commuters step out into a bright spring morning and on to one of the world’s busiest underground systems.
Also on board the trains: five bags filled with liquid nerve agent, left by members of a doomsday cult.
The packages were (...)
A communist league of students founded in 1948 in Japan, the Zengakuren amassed power over two decades, creating tremendous tensions in the US-Japan Cold War alliance by challenging standard concepts of democracy, peace and the history of imperialism.
Conventional narratives of the Japanese (...)
Seventy years ago today, the United States needlessly killed almost 100,000 people in a single air raid.
Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo, World War II’s deadliest day. More people died that night from napalm bombs than in the atomic strikes on (...)
The stories of Japanese communist Takiji Kobayashi represent the best of proletarian literature.
In 2008 one of the best-selling novels in Japan was an eighty-year-old novel: Kanikosen (Crab Cannery Ship) by the communist author Takiji Kobayashi. The book is a story about a crew of (...)
Shomi Yoon gave this talk as part of Marxism 2014 in Melbourne. Marxism 2015 will take place from April 2 – 5 .
“What sort of woman are you? Demonstrating when you should be at home looking after your children?” This was the question Sadayo Nakasone faced by the arresting officer for (...)
Last week in this column, I suggested that Caroline Kennedy, the American ambassador to Japan, would be well advised to get the ball rolling on U.S. apologies for past misdeeds.
The anniversary of the Tokyo firebombing provides an opportunity to do so.
On the night of March 9-10, 1945, (...)
Education ministry to require textbooks that hew to gov’t views on history, disputes
The education ministry decided on a new system of textbook screening reform on Nov. 12, in which descriptions in schoolbooks will reflect the government’s views on territorial disputes and historical (...)
OSAKA — A war museum funded by Osaka Prefecture and the city of Osaka has unveiled a proposal to put more emphasis on air raids against the city, raising the possibility that display content on Japanese aggression during World War II may be reduced.
The Osaka International Peace Center has (...)
The stir caused by a textbook’s descriptions of the mass lynching of Koreans following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake has prompted Yokohama’s board of education to order schools to collect the books from students.
In an unprecedented move, the board ordered municipal junior high schools to (...)
Introduction - The Servile and the Autonomous
As Japan moved to conduct House of Representatives elections in December 2012, attention in Western media and academic circles turned, as it does from time to time, to the question of whether the country was in decline, or even in some sort of (...)
Since Shinzo Abe began his second stint as prime minister, observers in both Japan and abroad have been on high alert over Japan’s political swing to the right. In this series, we ask politicians and intellectuals where they think the Abe administration is headed, and whether the direction (...)
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