February 1, 2025
In this deeply stirring account, Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi share their field research, conducted over years of travel and relationship-building, into the Japanese antinuclear movement. As the people and environment of Fukushima continue to be impacted by the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011, the No-Nukes movement has grown in response, encompassing aspects of society ranging from artists and monks to fisherfolk and intellectuals.
November 1, 2015
The hard-won lessons of Japan's wartime defeat are enshrined in its National Constitution and Article 9 in particular.… For the past seventy years, Article 9 remained a fundamental principle of Japanese diplomacy, undergirded by memories of the Asia-Pacific War and the U.S. occupation, buttressed by important revisionist histories of Japanese imperialism. A politically recovered, economically restored Japanese populace still appreciates the Constitution and the relevance of Article 9. But conservative politicians who never believed in the Constitution's ideals repeatedly challenged and worked around Article 9 despite the majority's support for it.… Today, once again, Article 9 stands in danger of abandonment by interpretation rather than revision by constitutional processes.
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June 1, 1998
What's the matter with Japan? According to today's conventional wisdom—i.e., what we are told by the media and the syndicated pundits—almost everything. Its economy, the second largest in the world, is in a long-term crisis that affects on everyone else, most severely the United States, and it stubbornly refuses to do anything about it despite the friendly advice and frustrated pleas of its partners in the developed capitalist world.
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March 1, 1998
A striking feature of the mountain of talk about the Asian crisis is that its root cause is all too often ignored The focus of the media and the pundits is on weak banks, bad management, corrupt officials, heavy indebtedness, excess speculation, and the fragility of the financial markets. Typically, the disaster is viewed as a regional affair. A rare exception is the statement of Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan's vice-minister for international finance: “This isn't an Asian crisis. It is a crisis of global capitalism.” (Business Week, January 26, 1998) But he too was apparently thinking of financial markets, concerned with effects, not causes.
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