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| 1 |
ID:
161724
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| Summary/Abstract |
The March–May 1937 Nagoya Pan-Pacific Peace Exhibition (NPPPE) promoted the Nagoya region as an industrial and cultural center of the empire. Though intended to show the city prospering in free-trade, capitalist peace, it was a ‘mega-event,’ large and complex enough to permit alternative interpretations, resistance, and even discord. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) objected to a ‘peace’ expo, extracting various concessions from NPPPE organizers, including a national defense hall and live-fire demonstrations. This made the event appear a cynical misappropriation of the concept of ‘peace.’ However, underneath this bellicose veneer is evidence that even on the eve of all-out war, local business and government elites clung to a 1920s style vision of peace through international trade and intercourse rather than through autarky and military force. Nagoya could not prevent military interference in the peace expo, but the city’s commitment to an agenda diverging from those of the IJA and Tokyo testifies to the continued political diversity of Japan in the mid to late 1930s.
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| 2 |
ID:
161726
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This article focuses on the life history of Yoshihei Carlos Nakatani (1910–1992), using two intimate memoirs provided by his family and heretofore unknown to the historiography. Nakatani, who immigrated to Mexico in 1932, is known as the inventor of the cacahuate japonés (Japanese peanut), a toasted peanut covered in soy-sauce-flavored flour that is now a mainstream snack in Mexico. Nakatani’s life story is distinct in that his invention of cacahuate japonés demonstrates how he actively adapted to Mexican society. This article takes Nakatani’s life as one example of a Japanese immigrant’s lived experiences in Mexico and highlights aspects of his process of integration into Mexican society. Unique sources reveal the importance of emotion and personal histories for Japanese immigrants’ negotiation of their immigrant self-identities during the historical events of World War II. It argues that Nakatani’s experiences illustrate that Japanese immigrants in Mexico had starkly divergent experiences from their countrymen in the US, despite analogous experiences with economic struggles, racism, and displacement. Nakatani’s cacahuate japonés thus offers a locus through which to re-conceptualize Japanese immigrants’ experiences and trajectories in which integration into the host country could paradoxically include reliance upon Japanese heritage.
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| 3 |
ID:
161725
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The director and scriptwriter Itami Mansaku was a major proponent of the revisionist movement in prewar Japanese period film. However, with only a handful of his screen works surviving, Itami’s reputation arises mostly from his contemporaries’ accounts and his own critical writings. Caught between the restrictions imposed by a debilitating illness and government censorship, during the war years Itami strived to stay in touch with the Japanese film world by continuing to work on scripts as well as write criticism from his sickbed. This article discusses Itami’s creative and critical efforts, which were to have a considerable impact on subsequent Japanese filmmakers. Particular attention is paid to examining Itami’s scenario reviews, serialised in the journal Japanese Cinema between 1941 and 1942, where he took an actively interventionist stance quite different from what is conventionally allowed for film criticism.
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| 4 |
ID:
161728
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyzes how strategies for capitalist accumulation drove the industrialization of chicken husbandry and increased consumption of chicken products in Japan. By the start of the Showa era, leaders in the Japanese chicken industry sought to promote larger and more productive operations through the adoption of Western breeds. Following the upheaval of World War II, the US facilitated three major changes for Japanese chicken husbandry: expanded grain exports from the US in the 1950s; the importation of specialized breeds in the 1960s; and the Japanese industry’s emulation of American corporations in the 1970s. The connections between Mitsubishi and KFC-Japan illustrate how Japanese firms implemented new organizational structures that allowed them to profit from the chicken industry in multiple ways. I suggest that the increases in consumption of chicken meat and eggs in the Japanese diet indicate the advancement of capitalist strategies for overcoming the barriers to industrialization.
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| 5 |
ID:
161730
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 2013, Japan established its first-ever National Security Council (NSC) as the leading edge of ambitious reforms to its foreign-policy-relevant institutions. Within weeks, Japan’s new national security tripod was firmly in place: the top-level, political NSC ‘control tower’ as well as Japan’s first-ever National Security Strategy and National Security Secretariat. Ever since, the NSC has played a central role in every major aspect of the Japanese strategic trajectory that has attracted so much global attention (and controversy) in the ‘Abe era’. This study analyzes the motivations driving Japan’s decision to establish an NSC, the institution’s key characteristics and functioning, and offers a preliminary assessment of the current and likely future implications of this historic institutional reform. Beyond the NSC’s impact on policy, of potentially greater long-term significance is its effects on Japan’s foreign-policy decision-making processes: in particular, expanded Kantei-centered political leadership of national security affairs and more ‘whole-of-government’ approaches specifically designed to transcend the ‘vertical hurdles’ traditionally dividing Japan’s powerful bureaucracies. The goal of these reforms is as straightforward as it is ambitious: to transform Japan’s ability to flexibly and independently cope with a rapidly changing, increasingly complex, and ever more uncertain security environment in East Asia and beyond.
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| 6 |
ID:
161727
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This article discusses the relationship between the writings of fiction author Ogawa Yōko and the Konkōkyō sect of Shinto. It describes Ogawa’s religious upbringing at a Konkōkyō shrine and the religion’s beliefs in order to explain elements of her fiction. While a consideration of Konkōkyō is not necessary to enjoy Ogawa’s writings, it offers an important way of interpreting her work. Most published critics have focused on common themes of postmodern literature to categorize her writings such as depictions of dilapidation and moral degeneration. In contrast, this article builds on the research in this area of literary critic Yamazaki Makiko, who argues that according to Konkōkyō, the greatest spiritual realizations may occur at times of strife and in situations typically judged as degenerate and immoral. I argue that since the publication of Yamazaki’s research, Konkōkyō-related motifs have become increasingly central to Ogawa’s stories, which corresponds to her own statements about the changing focus of her later writings.
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| 7 |
ID:
161729
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| Summary/Abstract |
Since the 1970s, many critical Japanese Studies scholars have problematized nihonjinron discourses, which overemphasize Japanese uniqueness and its exclusive nature, as a manifestation of cultural nationalism for establishing ethnonational identity. Similarly, Japanese journalists and online writers have also begun to criticize the recent rampant praise of Japan in mass media as cultural nationalism. The present study explores this issue through a close analysis of a television variety show entitled Bukkomi Japanīzu 3 [Sneaking in a Japanese Expert 3] aired in 2014. Recent years have witnessed increasing nationalistic tendencies in Japan, expressed in both overt hate speech and political activities and in covert cultural nationalism. This article focuses on the latter, offering a textual and discursive analysis of a television show that features non-Japanese people engaging in Japanese cultural practices outside of Japan. It examines the structure, narrations, and interactions of one episode of the show as an ‘encoding’ process, which is followed by a ‘decoding’ of the show through the analysis of online viewer comments. Thus, the present study discusses how the show constructs the essentialist view that Japanese culture belongs exclusively to Japanese people and how audience members respond in diverse ways in online commentary.
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