Author: Masae Yuasa
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000966135
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Is Japan abandoning its pacifism? The Japanese government has claimed it is doubling its defense spending and has announced a plan to equip itself with the capability to “counterattack” enemy bases overseas, a departure from the nation’s postwar consensus. Shedding new light on Japan’s pacifism and Hiroshima’s role in it, Yuasa investigates the events of postwar Japan and how it catalyzed a range of challenges to public sentiment. Japan’s Constitution stipulates the renunciation of war and forbids using force to settle international disputes. This radical shift has been led by Fumio Kishida, the prime minister, whose constituency is Hiroshima, the atomic-bombed city symbolizing Japan’s postwar pacifism. This book is about Hiroshima’s local nuclear politics and popular consciousness about pacifism. Based on published and unpublished local documents and participant observation, it describes how postwar global and national power has formulated local politics and discusses the impact of local struggles on national and global politics. The key concept is “imaginary”. Institutionalized imaginary effectively channels people’s suppressed desires and emotions into coordinated action in the society. The current political crossroad of Hiroshima and Japan is interpreted as a terrain constructed over the last half century by three paradoxically coexisting and competing pacifist imaginaries, namely constitutional, anti-nuclear, and nuclear pacifism. They were, however, significantly destabilized by the Fukushima nuclear disaster and a newly invented “proactive pacifism”. This book is an essential reading for scholars and students interested in Japanese postwar history and nuclear issues in general.
Author: Tom Phuong Le
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553285
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Since the end of World War II, Japan has not sought to remilitarize, and its postwar constitution commits to renouncing aggressive warfare. Yet many inside and outside Japan have asked whether the country should or will return to commanding armed forces amid an increasingly challenging regional and global context and as domestic politics have shifted in favor of demonstrations of national strength. Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan’s reluctance to remilitarize that foregrounds the relationship between demographics and security. Japan’s Aging Peace demonstrates how changing perceptions of security across generations have culminated in a culture of antimilitarism that constrains the government’s efforts to pursue a more martial foreign policy. Le challenges a simple opposition between militarism and pacifism, arguing that Japanese security discourse should be understood in terms of “multiple militarisms,” which can legitimate choices such as the mobilization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces for peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief missions. Le highlights how factors that are not typically linked to security policy, such as aging and declining populations and gender inequality, have played crucial roles. He contends that the case of Japan challenges the presumption in international relations scholarship that states must pursue the use of force or be punished, showing how widespread normative beliefs have restrained Japanese policy makers. Drawing on interviews with policy makers, military personnel, atomic bomb survivors, museum coordinators, grassroots activists, and other stakeholders, as well as analysis of peace museums and social movements, Japan’s Aging Peace provides new insights for scholars of Asian politics, international relations, and Japanese foreign policy.
Author: Dr. Jeffrey Record
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786252961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 105
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Book Description
Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.
Author: Yasuhiro Takeda
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003817238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
In 2004, Japan instituted a system to protect citizens against military attacks and terrorism for the first time after World War II. Faced with the Tokyo subway attack (1995), the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001), and the changing security environment in East Asia, the Japanese government was forced to implement the most extensive reform of its domestic crisis management ["kiki-kanri"] system in the postwar era. Japan’s civil defense system is now called civil protection ["kokumin-hogo"]. Two world wars in the 20th century led to the development of national institutions based on civil defense in Western democratic countries (including the United States and Canada). As times have changed, most countries have adopted a comprehensive crisis (or emergency) management system, integrating civil defense and disaster management (against natural and technological hazards). However, Japan continues to take a different path. Why has a comprehensive crisis management system yet to be formed? How do complex and fragmented institutions work? This book examines the institutions and policies of civil protection (i.e., Japan's civil defense) and further analyzes their effectiveness and issues. Furthermore, it also examines the trade-offs resulting from the coexistence of two independent institutions: civil protection and natural disaster management. A valuable read for scholars of Japan’s public administration and security/ defense policy, as well as for those researching and comparing disaster-preparedness across countries.
Author: Erez Joskovich
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003837492
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
This book explores the emergence and growth of Zen as a non-monastic spiritual practice in modern Japan. Focusing on several prominent lay Zen associations, most notably Ningen Zen, it explores different aspects of lay Zen as a lived religion, such as organization, ideology, and ritual. Through a combined approach utilizing Buddhist text, historical sources, and ethnographic fieldwork, it explains how laypeople have appropriated religious authority and tailored Zen teachings to fit their needs and the zeitgeist. Featuring the findings of three years of fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, the book comprehensively describes various Zen practices and explores their contemporary meaning and functions. It undermines the distinction between traditional or established Buddhism and the so-called New Religions, emphasizing instead the dynamic relations between tradition and interpretation. Written in accessible language and offering insightful analysis, this book brings to light the essential role of lay Zen associations in modernizing Zen within Japan and beyond. It will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, particularly those studying Buddhism, Japanese society, and culture.
Author: Etsuko Kato
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003820565
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This book explores “self-searching migrants,” a new group of indefinitely globally mobile people whose purpose of overseas stay is the search of true self and the work they really want to do, using Japanese trans-Pacific sojourners as the case study. Utilizing testimonies collected from interviews with Japanese migrants in their twenties to forties who had entered the job market between the early 1990s and 2010 and left for the English-speaking countries of Canada, Australia, and Singapore, the book argues that their practices are both ubiquitous and unique, the products of global and local contexts of a specific time. As semiskilled migrants from an extra-Western, postindustrial country, their struggles show a different picture of the West-centric world power system from those experienced by migrant workers from the Global South. Including extensive qualitative research and interview material collected over a 20-year period, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, cultural anthropology, and migration.
Author: Nadzeya Shutava
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003853633
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
This book explores the recent developments in global and Japanese whaling from the viewpoint of the members of the Japanese whaling community, a perspective that is largely neglected and misinterpreted. Japanese whaling has been one of the most contentious issues in global environmental governance in recent years, and Japan is often harshly criticized for its whaling programs. By distinguishing between the different whaling-related actors and their experiences, this book widens our understanding of why whaling programs continue to exist. Rich in ethnographic data, the book includes in-depth interviews with representatives of the Japanese whaling community, from government officials to fishermen, shedding light on what whaling represents, both historically and today. As an ethnographic study of a divisive and controversial subject, this book will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars, including, but not limited to, those interested in Japanese studies, anthropology, political science, and ocean resource management.
Author: Susan Southard
Publisher: Souvenir Press
ISBN: 0285643282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
On August 9th, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. It killed a third of the population instantly, and the survivors, or hibakusha, would be affected by the life-altering medical conditions caused by the radiation for the rest of their lives. They were also marked with the stigma of their exposure to radiation, and fears of the consequences for their children. Nagasaki follows the previously unknown stories of five survivors and their families, from 1945 to the present day. It captures the full range of pain, fear, bravery and compassion unleashed by the destruction of a city.Susan Southard has interviewed the hibakusha over many years and her intimate portraits of their lives show the consequences of nuclear war. Nagasaki tells the neglected story of life after nuclear war and will help shape public debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history. Published for the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, this is the first study to be based on eye-witness accounts of Nagasaki in the style of John Hersey's Hiroshima. On August 9th, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a 5-tonne plutonium bomb was dropped on the small, coastal city of Nagasaki. The explosion destroyed factories, shops and homes and killed 74,000 people while injuring another 75,000. The two atomic bombs marked the end of a global war but for the tens of thousands of survivors it was the beginning of a new life marked with the stigma of being hibakusha (atomic bomb-affected people). Susan Southard has spent a decade interviewing and researching the lives of the hibakusha, raw, emotive eye-witness accounts, which reconstruct the days, months and years after the bombing, the isolation of their hospitalisation and recovery, the difficulty of re-entering daily life and the enduring impact of life as the only people in history who have lived through a nuclear attack and its aftermath. Following five teenage survivors from 1945 to the present day Southard unveils the lives they have led, their injuries in the annihilation of the bomb, the dozens of radiation-related cancers and illnesses they have suffered, the humiliating and frightening choices about marriage they were forced into as a result of their fears of the genetic diseases that may be passed through their families for generations to come. The power of Nagasaki lies in the detail of the survivors' stories, as deaths continued for decades because of the radiation contamination, which caused various forms of cancer. Intimate and compassionate, while being grounded in historical research Nagasaki reveals the censorship that kept the suffering endured by the hibakusha hidden around the world. For years after the bombings news reports and scientific research were censored by U.S. occupation forces and the U.S. government led an efficient campaign to justify the necessity and morality of dropping the bombs. As we pass the seventieth anniversary of the only atomic bomb attacks in history Susan Southard captures the full range of pain, fear, bravery and compassion unleashed by the destruction of a city. The personal stories of those who survived beneath the mushroom clouds will transform the abstract perception of nuclear war into a visceral human experience. Nagasaki tells the neglected story of life after nuclear war and will help shape public discussion and debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history.
Author: Nobuya Bamba
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 077484356X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Pacifism in Japan contains eight essays which deal, among other things, with such outstanding figures as Uchimura Kanzo and Kagawa Toyohiko. It is an important contribution to the understanding of the pacifist tradition in Japan and shows its development since the end of the nineteenth century. It will be of interest not only to the specialist in Japanese studies, but also to those concerned with war and peace in the modern world.
Author: Hironori Sasada
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000991660
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
This book explores the origins of Japan’s protectionist agricultural policies through an in-depth historical analysis of Japanese agricultural policies between the Meiji period and the end of WWII. It offers a constructivist account for the rise of protectionism, examining the policies of prewar agricultural bureaucrats who played critical roles in the policymaking process. It argues that protectionist agricultural policy in Japan was not originally generated by the "iron triangle" (a political alliance consisted of the Liberal Democratic Party, the Agricultural Ministry, and farmers’ organizations) but by a prewar agricultural bureaucrats’ policy idea called shōnō ron (thoughts on small-scale farming). Ultimately the book reveals how, contrary to suggestions of previous scholarship, the protective measures based on shōnō ron forged the necessary conditions for the emergence of "iron triangle" after the end of WWII, which in turn institutionalized Japan’s subsequent protectionist agricultural regime. Examining such topics as the origin of protectionist policy, the formation of actors’ preferences, and the broader effects of agricultural policy ideas, this book will be a valuable reading for scholars and students of Japanese politics, agricultural policy, and political economy.
