The world faces overlapping crises of global scale and consequence. Given limited attention and capacity, which crises garner attention and framing as important? Which are neglected in ways reflective of broader, systemic concerns that challenge established institutional arrangements? Here, we place gender inequality, a key topic raised by Japanese governmental and non-governmental organizations, in conversation with national level open-response survey data from over 30,000 Japanese participants, collected in March 2020. Using a combination of automated text analysis, manual keyword curation, and discourse analysis, we reveal how expressions of abiding social concern are articulated throughout Japan. We found that the most frequent issue raised was shōshi kōreika (low birth rate, aging population), while phrases related to ‘gender inequality’ were sparse. A subsequent discourse analysis of the open-ended survey responses revealed distress and broader anxiety around gender disparities folded into the phrase shōshi kōreika. We conclude, then, that shōshi kōreika operates as a macro-level ‘idiom of distress,’ a shorthand capturing a dissatisfaction with gender inequality. The significance of this is twofold: (1) it offers insight into how collective concerns are expressed or obscured within dominant narratives of crisis; and (2) it suggests the absence of a national level of concern for gender inequality that is nevertheless complexly embedded in many aspects of daily life.

Can ‘re-wilding’ at ‘earthquake disaster remains (shinsai ikō)’ introduce a new paradigm of memorializing the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami? What sacrifices do conventional formulas of memorialization and heritagization demand of the 3.11 tsunami-affected residents and municipalities? This paper explores these questions by examining two atypical ‘earthquake disaster remains’ in Miyagi Prefecture: the former police box in Onagawa, and the concrete foundations of housing in Arahama. Brimming with vegetal desires for life, the two sites look viscerally chaotic and alarmingly unkempt, defying most people’s expectations. My analysis shows that conventional formulas of memorializing the sites of trauma require vigilance against weathering and decaying, lest changes in appearance threaten the authenticity of the sites. In this context, by foregrounding the earthquake disaster remains’ physical mutability through ecological entanglement, I argue, the two atypical sites under investigation distill the inherent contradictions and problematics that our ingrained practices of memorialization take for granted. Through re-wilding, what I call ‘partial forgetting by design’, will emerge as a possible intervention into imagining a life and future in the disaster-prone areas around the world in an era of planetary climate change.

This article examines the reasons for the emergence of dozens of anonymous reporter accounts on the social network X (formerly Twitter) in the early 2020s. It is based on a qualitative analysis of a database of 195 anonymous accounts and a series of interviews with journalists. While some choose anonymity because of their company’s internal policies, others seek to protect themselves from online harassment campaigns that have been exacerbated by the rise of anti-media discourse. The article also points out that this anonymization is taking place against the backdrop of a weakening traditional media facing growing economic and political pressures. It highlights the tension between journalists’ increased visibility on social networks and their need for protection from criticism and attack. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the mutations of journalism in Japan in the digital age and the issues surrounding anonymity in the online public sphere.

In April 1938, the international celebrity painter, Fujita Tsuguharu (also known as Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita) arrived in Okinawa for a two-month stay during which he toured the islands, frequenting the Tsuji brothel district, visiting traditional fishing villages and painting the landscape and its inhabitants. Fujita’s Okinawan works offer us critical insights into the complex role of art in negotiating the asymmetries of what scholars have come to call the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 2008). Equally important, they provide us with a lens through which we can re-interrogate paintings of Okinawan women produced over the same period (1938–9) by his Okinawan colleagues: artists and admirers such as Ōshiro Kōya, Nadoyama Aijun and the little known Tōma Yukio, all of whom struggled to visually reconceptualise the relationship between the mainland and its colonial subject. Examining rarely discussed pre-war paintings of Okinawan women by both mainland and Okinawan artists, this essay explores ways in which representations of the female body – the canonical object of the exoticising gaze – offered both coloniser and colonised a means to investigate the ambivalences, contradictions and brutalities of the colonial endeavour. These paintings, this essay argues, were deeply imbricated in wider discussions of colonialism and subordination, and they have been implicated in debates that have produced a new perspective on tensions between Okinawa and mainland Japan.

Online eikaiwa (English conversation) tutoring is popular in Japan. Although the Philippines has been the most significant contributor to this popularity, Serbia is now emerging as a new source country of online English teachers. Focusing on blog entries written by seven Japanese individuals, this article examines the positioning of Serbian teachers in Japan’s online eikaiwa industry. Analysis of these texts demonstrates that Serbian teachers are easily objectified as gendered entities (“handsome men and beautiful women”). They are also frequently constructed as providing good value for money to Japanese learners, which the bloggers believe is possible due to the poor economic conditions of Serbia (“the high unemployment rate”). Drawing on these findings, the article argues that this ideological positioning of Serbian teachers and Serbia shows an interesting parallel with the notion of peripheral whiteness, which describes the ambivalent racialization of Eastern European migrant workers in Western Europe. Situating these phenomena of Japan’s online eikaiwa industry in a broader cultural–political and socioeconomic context, this article suggests that online eikaiwa lessons may serve as a site in which Eastern European labor is exploited through English language teaching and English language learning.

Since becoming Japanese’s primary script for loan words, katakana has been a major target of hostility in Japanese metalinguistic discourse. Often lumped into one entity with the words it represents, the script has been blamed for linguistic confusion, critiqued as snobbish, and even accused of destroying the future of Japanese. Despite these negative sentiments, however, the use of katakana itself has not abated, with many studies to date noting how novel applications of katakana continually spawn novel discourse around katakana in public spheres. Drawing upon major developments in academic understandings of ideology in how language variants are used and interpreted since the first studies of katakana use, the current study examines contemporary discourses around katakana and the words it represents to flesh out our understandings of how the script and its users are viewed in contemporary Japan. More specifically, the study builds on prior survey-based attention to nation-wide beliefs about katakana, moving instead to analyze more individual assertions and debates around the script in contemporary Japan. First, the study examines a corpus of hundreds of comments surrounding uses of katakana taken from the major Japanese websites Yahoo! Chiebukuro and Girls Channel, focusing on how links between script, vocabulary, and identity are disseminated in online Japanese discourse. The study then examines discussions of marked katakana use from the website reddit.com/r/learnjapanese, looking for the first time at if and how non-native learners of Japanese grapple with marked script use in contemporary Japan(ese). Across these investigations, the study aims to update and internationalize our understanding of contemporary views surrounding katakana use(rs), and showcase how said views consistently evolve in response to novel social practices, with katakana uses shown to serve as critical sites for debate over culture and identity in contemporary Japan(ese).

This article seeks to find how Japanese animation can function as both protest art and a valid text of ecocinema. It looks at the advocacy for the environment, which can be seen considerably during the late 20th century in four anime productions: Pom Poko directed by Isao Takahata, Nausicaä: Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke directed by Hayao Miyazaki and Blue Gender directed by Masashi Abe. The article seeks to demonstrate that anime, can go beyond mere banal entertainment, acting as protest art and developing a social critique, which creatively protests environmental issues in an increasingly striking manner to encourage the conversation of a global human responsibility from the audience and as a valuable source for ecocriticism.

The well-received framework of the 1955-System in postwar Japan is characterized by the beginning of a high-growth era through the creation of a conservative Japanese party (LDP) and its conformity to America’s security system in East Asia. However, postwar Japanese conservatism was shaped through diverse political, economic and intellectual trajectories. Therefore, the eventual evolution of conservatism to postwar Japanese nationalism needs to be carefully examined. In this respect, Kamikawa Hikomatsu (1889–1988) is an important figure in critical intellectual history. He was a social scientific architect of Japan’s Pan-Asian international order during the wartime period and most of his writings were aimed at rationalizing Japan’s colonial empire. His postwar stance changed dramatically in early postwar Japan. Labelling postwar Japan America’s colony, his notion of Japan as a victim first shows a highly problematic aspect of postwar Japanese studies of international politics. However, Kamikawa hardly pursued any alternative path to Cold War superpower politics. Kamikawa’s call for Japan’s reemergence in postwar international politics revealed the dualistic nature of Japan’s postwar conservative nationalism. His ostensible rejection of America’s interference with Japanese politics such as his strong emphasis on revising the Peace Constitution drew attention from nationalistic audiences. On the other hand, his envisioning Japan as a reemerging power in the international order had little to do with fundamental critiques of continuing imperialism. Therefore, his writings show us an important facet of wartime and postwar Japanese social sciences: a continuing desire to rationalize Japan’s status as an imperial power.

Many identities are originally minoritized products of imposition by majoritized others. Contextualized through the identity of ‘Nihonjin’ (‘a Japanese person’) – one regularly informed by long deconstructed yet still prevalent myths of ‘the Japanese’ (i.e. ‘Nihonjinron’) – I conceptualize minoritization through a three-stage process of imposition, concession, and objectivization. To illustrate this ‘ICO process’ I draw on the experiences of ‘Japanese returnees’ and ‘Japanese biracials’ via in-depth semi-structured interviews. Further supplemented by ethnographic vignettes of those identified as ‘foreigners’ in Japan, I demonstrate how the ICO process can be synonymous with both racialization and culturalization independent from socio-genetics. Negotiable aspects and complex social hierarchies notwithstanding, I emphasize minoritized peoples’ forced concession with navigating lives through identities fabricated by majoritized others.