Japanese Activists Research Articles

Japan’s Forgotten Korean Forced Laborers: The Search for Hidden Wartime Graves in Hokkaido

Abstract The return of remains of Korean forced laborers who died in Japan between 1940 and 1945 has been a major controversy for over half a century for Koreans. These deaths reveal the tragic consequences of Japan’s World War II forced labor system. Japan forcefully mobilized nearly 800,000 Koreans who were taken to at least 1,589 worksites in Japan and 381 worksites in Hokkaido. Over 10 percent of all Koreans forcefully mobilized throughout the empire are estimated to have died or disappeared, but the precise number of Korean forced laborers’ deaths inside Japan remains unknown. Until 1989, remains recovered from graves throughout Japan by local people were immediately cremated by Japanese Buddhist priests, making cause of death and precise identities forensically impossible. This account relates the first and only comprehensive effort to exhume Korean forced labor graves without immediate cremation, coordinated by Korean and Japanese activists and academics based in Hokkaido. This effort helped revive a neglected aspect of Korean forced labor history while focusing on the concerns of bereaved Koreans seeking the remains of their lost family members. Nevertheless, the project had serious limitations due to working in a difficult political environment and neglect of forensic science protocols in mass grave excavations and identification. This complex situation prevented identification of victims’ names and cause of death that could have held the Japanese government and companies involved accountable.

A Recent History of Activism for Accessibility in Japan (1981–2006)

In this article, I consider how Japanese activists for accessibility localized concepts born out of American and European advocacy, reinterpreted them in light of domestic conditions, and then used them to pass policies for some physically disabled communities between 1981 and 2006. My analysis, which examines newspapers, magazines, state records, and documents from disability organizations, highlights how Japanese activists negotiated global understandings of Independent Living and capitalized on local concerns about the nation’s aging population to convince policy makers to promote the creation of barrier-free facilities and implementation of Universal Design. I conclude that the study of disability in Japan and other parts of the world must include the study of successes and failures of activism for accessibility in differing cultural contexts, and that further research on Japan is needed to continue improving the inclusivity of our increasingly global society.

Traffic in Asian Women

Traffic in Asian Women

After the New Left: On Tsumura Takashi's Early Writings and Proto-“Contemporary Thought” in Japan

This article positions the early career of the Japanese activist and writer Tsumura Takashi as anticipating, from an intellectual and historical-media standpoint, the surge of interest in gendai shisō (“contemporary thought,” i.e. French theory) in 1980s Japan. Often understood as the devolution of theory into a mere commercial fad, the gendai shisō boom—in its reliance on a host of writers who worked at a distance from traditional academic publishing networks—promoted an ethos of interdisciplinary and transgressive knowledge production. Tracing Tsumura's interest in structuralism and post-structuralism as an outgrowth of his participation in the student movement, the article provides a prehistory of gendai shisō in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that Tsumura's creative appropriation of structuralism and post-structuralism took place at a crucial juncture when the academic print networks that had legitimated intellectuals in postwar Japan were being hollowed out from within and without.

More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan by Dennis J. Frost

Reviewed by: More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan by Dennis J. Frost Wolfram Manzenreiter More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan. By Dennis J. Frost. Cornell University Press, 2021. 336 pages. ISBN: 9781501753084 (hardcover; also available as e-book). Not much has been known about the history of Japanese disability sports until recently, neither among the general public in Japan nor among specialists in the field of disability sports studies. English-language material on this subject matter has been close to nonexistent, and the few scholarly surveys of Japanese sports in general, including my own book Sport and Body Politics in Japan (New York: Routledge, 2014), are tellingly silent on sports in the service of medical rehabilitation or social inclusion of people with physical impairments. The situation is somewhat better in regard to Japanese-language sources, though even there the gap between academic discourse and general knowledge proved large enough to prompt the organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games to dedicate considerable attention and resources to raising public awareness in the long buildup toward the occasion. For an international audience particularly in the domains of Japanese contemporary history and disability sports studies, Dennis J. Frost has meanwhile produced a fine and accessible historical account that draws on the results of a decade of largely archival work. More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan covers a period of roughly sixty years between Japan's first international sports event for the disabled, held on the occasion of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and the most recent edition of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games held in 2021. These events are discussed in depth in the first and last of five chapters, respectively. The three chapters in between retell the history of other seminal sports events that have arguably slipped from memory among the largely Euro-American group of Paralympic historians: the Far East and South Pacific Games for the Disabled (FESPIC), a multisport and multidisability competition held from 1975 to 2006; the Oita International Wheelchair Marathon, staged annually in the city of Ōita (capital of the prefecture of the same name) since 1981; and the 1998 Winter Paralympics in Nagano. Frost's analysis clearly reveals not only the long-standing engagement of Japanese activists in the promotion of [End Page 378] disability sports at both domestic and international levels, but also the social constructedness of disability and its changing perception through the decades. As the first chapter, "Tokyo's Other Games," reminds its readership, disability sports in Japan as elsewhere had their roots in medical therapy and rehabilitation exercises. European experiences with the effectiveness of sports in the treatment of war veterans provided the background for the establishment of the first international competition for disabled athletes, the Stoke Mandeville Games, and inspired medical doctors in Japan to promote their own vision of sports in the service of disability rehabilitation training. In marked contrast to the explicit focus of the Stoke Mandeville Games on athletes suffering from severe spinal injuries, Japanese pioneers and, ultimately, the organizers of the 1964 Tokyo Paralympics pursued a more inclusive approach. These "other games" combined the established tradition of the Stoke Mandeville Games with two additional days of competition by multidisabled athletes gathered from all of Japan as well as invited from Europe. Private-sector sponsorship secured the additional funds needed to carry out the historically unprecedented task of putting together an international multidisciplinary and multidisability sporting event. Frost records major donations from the Lions Club as well as the Japanese Automobile Manufacturing Association and Japanese Bicycle Promotion Institute, though I think it should have been mentioned here or elsewhere in the study that the latter two organizations, which in part oversee government-sponsored gambling, are required by their constitutions to transfer part of their income to the promotion of sports and welfare-related projects. Frost's account particularly honors the manifold contributions of Nakamura Yutaka, a medical doctor based in Ōita Prefecture, to disability sports and the Paralympics. Nakamura was one of a small number of individuals and representatives...

Strategies of Ambivalence

AbstractIn recent years, Japan has witnessed the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, a rise in racist hate speech, and the reinterpretation of the constitution to enable state militarization. In response to these crises, a segment of Japanese activists has adopted antifa to bolster their ongoing participation in antinuclear, antiracist, and antiwar social movements. This intervention focuses on what the author calls liberal antifa. Informed by its vexed relationships to the Japanese New Left, liberal antifa in Japan attempts to encompass a broad spectrum of political positions including liberal, left-wing, and even right-wing activism. This intervention traces linkages between liberal antifa and the resurgence of protest after Fukushima, drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews to analyze opposition to fascism within multiple, overlapping social movements. The author also shows how liberal antifa borrows from transnational influences to blend radical and popular cultural practices in relation to music, fashion, art, and food.

Local Renewable Energy Initiatives in Germany and Japan in a Changing National Policy Environment.

Our article explores the contribution of local initiatives to the creation of path dependencies for energy transition in Germany and Japan in the face of resistance from entrenched incumbents at the national level. We use a process-tracing methodology based partly on interviews with local participants. In particular, we explore the role of local initiatives in securing "socio-political space" for the expansion of renewable energy and in embedding themselves in "ecosystems" of public and private institutions. German energy activists were more successful than their Japanese counterparts in expanding this space and creating positive feedbacks in part because they were able to build horizontal networks that anchored the energy transition firmly in local communities. Although problems with grid technology have led to retrenchment in both cases, Japanese activists' reliance on vertical networks has limited their ability to weather a backlash from national government and utility actors. Our study demonstrates the interaction of political, economic/technological, and legitimation paths to energy transition and highlights the importance of the latter two.

Colonialism and Sisterhood: Japanese Female Activists and the “Comfort Women” Issue

This article clarifies how wartime/colonial responsibility and sisterhood are mediated in the accounts of Japanese female activists who support so-called “comfort women” or the Japanese military sexual slavery issue, by using interviews of Japanese female activists, this article tries to answer this question. The Japanese female activists experience the changes in the their identities from collective “women” and/or “Japanese” while they continue participating in the movement. The interviewees always emphasize their feeling of responsibility as Japanese, former colonizer and perpetrator as well as Japanese citizen who have not yet settled this issue. At the same time, they sympathize with the survivors as fellow women; therefore, they call for a formal apology and governmental compensation. Nationalism and gender coexist in different dimensions; thus, being a member of a Japanese nation with wartime/colonial responsibility does not contradict the sympathy and compassion with the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery.

Japan’s global peace moment

This article examines the organization and activities of the Dai Nippon Heiwa Kyōkai (Japan Peace Society, founded in 1906), a group that was loosely affiliated with peace societies in Britain, the US, and other countries, as well as with the International Peace Bureau in Berne. The paper examines Japanese initiatives in the context of the global campaign to identify and implement strategies for the peaceful resolution of international disputes, in the global ‘peace moment’ of the early 1900s. The paper describes the activities of the Dai Nippon Heiwa Kyōkai and reviews its successes, but also analyzes some of the complexities and contradictions inherent in the movement. Foremost among these was the propensity of Japanese peace activists to focus on dispute resolution with the European and American powers, while ignoring or condoning Japanese militarist imperialism on the Asian mainland. While some were motivated by pacifist ideals, the senior members of the society – many of whom were members of Japan’s political elite – tended to see peace activism as an extension of Japan’s cooperative diplomacy, seeking practical solutions (including military aggression) that ensured Japan’s continued status as one of the world’s great powers. Their vision of cooperative governance within a global imperial system was, however, severely undermined by Euro-American racist discourses. The strength of anti-Japanese sentiment – as reflected in American exclusion laws and global discourses of a ‘yellow peril’ – ultimately swung many peace activists into the camp of outright imperialist militarism. However, from the threads of Japanese peace activism in the 1910s emerged a vision of global governance that helped establish the framework for Japan’s participation in the League of Nations, and in the multilateral peace-keeping institutions of the post-Second World War era.

Fights on the Right: Social Citizenship, Ethnicity, and Postwar Cohorts of the Japanese Activist Right

In the late 2000s, a new wave of xenophobic activism known as the ‘Action Conservative Movement’ (ACM) began to engage in prominent actions against ethnic minorities. Its aggressive use of hate speech confirmed fears of a rightward shift in Japan, echoing the rise of nationalist movements elsewhere around the globe. However, as the ACM moved from online organizing to high-profile public protest, pre-existing factions of rightist activists challenged ACM methods and viewpoints on multiculturalism. These ‘fights on the right’ highlight the diversity of rightist groups that are often treated monolithically in academia and the media. The critique some rightists made of the ACM’s xenophobic activism was based on a view of ethnicity that embraced Japan as a multi-ethnic empire—an iconoclastic view itself, and a reflection of Cold War geopolitics, the dynamics of domestic political polarities, and Japan’s colonial legacy manifested by ethnic minorities. It built as well from the cultivation of a particular form of anti-establishment ethos. Based upon my ethnographic fieldwork since 2005, this article offers a detailed typography of several generations of right-wing activism in Japan and an examination of how their diverse views of social citizenship, activist method, and ideological commitment have come into conflict as they grapple with ethnicity in contemporary Japan.

Living together: Sympathy and the practice of politics

What place is there for sympathy in politics or politics in sympathy? This essay takes inspiration from the Japanese formulation of multiculturalism ( tabunka-kyōsei or “the living together of multiple cultures”) to explore the sympathetic politics of living together. Following a group of Japanese activists on a solidarity trip to Chennai, India, the essay builds a definition of politics—the creation of venues, scenes, and opportunities in which we might practice ourselves as we want to become—that relies on the cultivation of fellow feeling. Rooted in the history and contemporary practice of Japanese activist trips to India, this essay specifies a definition of politics and sympathetic engagement that complicates recent discussions of humanitarianism and politics that tend to place these two efforts in opposition against each other.

Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement by Simon Avenell

Reviewed by: Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement by Simon Avenell Peter Wynn Kirby (bio) Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement. By Simon Avenell. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2017. xii, 318 pages. $65.00. The following vignettes animate Simon Avenell's Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement: [End Page 480] 1. A young Japanese physician examines the contorted bodies of victims of Minamata Disease (methylmercury poisoning) for the first time and, appalled by the discrimination and poverty they suffer, dedicates the rest of his life to antipollution activism—also resolving wherever possible to visit victims in their homes to understand the wider context of their condition and their suffering (pp. 48–51). 2. After a United Nations environmental conference held in Stockholm during the Vietnam War, a Japanese activist and journalist asks herself during a speech whether whales were more important than "yellow people" to Americans (p. 87). 3. Agitating in Japan in 1980, a Tinianese antinuclear campaigner threatens to bulldoze colonial Japanese cemetery war remains into the sea in his small island nation if Japan proceeded with plans to dump steel canisters of nuclear waste in waters near his Micronesian homeland (p. 167). Soon after, Japan's Science and Technology Agency director proclaimed the canisters were "completely safe" and that he wouldn't mind hugging them or "sleeping with them" in his bed (p. 157). This impressive and original history of the transnational dimensions and influences of Japanese environmental activism bristles with nuggets of historical detail, bringing important chapters of Japan's twentieth-century environmental awakening to life for readers. Avenell burrows into troves of Japanese-language primary sources to unearth telling vignettes and key debates between Japanese activists and their adversaries and also nuanced deliberations within Japanese environmental movements during a fertile and eventful period when the foundations for global environmental activism and domestic activism were being laid. Indeed, this book shows that Japan's early devastating experiences with extreme industrial pollution forged a powerful sense of concern over the local human fallout of such contamination, creating a sense that Japan served as a sort of augury or early warning system for the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world. This fostered a strong sense of obligation and public service on the part of some dedicated activists, featured in the volume, as well as a sense of victimhood that came under challenge when Japanese corporations exported pollutant operations to other nations. The book grapples with dense, important questions regarding activists' revisionist theorizations of capitalism (and its culpability in extreme industrial pollution debacles), as well as their early reactions toward globalization and environmentalism, highlighting a pocket of underscrutinized non-"Western" critique. The scale of Avenell's achievement is difficult to communicate. Not only has he brought to light an important element of Japanese activism and environmental development that has been relatively underemphasized in other studies of the subject, but also his dogged perusal and keen understanding of obscure documentary sources—as well as, significantly, the [End Page 481] connections between them—is difficult to accomplish. Avenell evidently dedicated a sizable amount of research time to a demanding set of research questions and produced a study that will be a reference point for these issues for some time to come. In the introduction, Avenell identifies and sketches out an "environmental injustice paradigm" (p. 4) that has served as an ongoing motivating force for Japanese activists and others. The following passage gives a sense of the rationale for the volume: The agonizing experience of industrial pollution victims in local communities throughout the archipelago inspired some Japanese activists to look abroad, and it profoundly shaped the messages they sent to the world—even when interest shifted from localized pollution to the global environment in the late 1980s. For many Japanese activists who became involved transnationally, industrial pollution victims represented living proof of an unbreakable chain linking political and economic power, environmental degradation, and the violation of basic human rights. (p. 4) Victims of extreme pollution in Japan therefore became living exhibits of a sort, flying to international environmental conferences to "put a face" (or a body) to the outrageous toxic depredation of environments and humans that served...

Challenging the empires from within: the transpacific anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan

This article explores the transpacific anti-imperial solidarity of American and Japanese anti-Vietnam War activists through a focus on the international anti-Vietnam War conference held in 1969 in Tokyo and antiwar activities engaged in by American and Japanese activists in the areas surrounding US military facilities and bases in Japan. By the late 1960s, the transnational alliances of these activists went beyond protesting the Vietnam War and created spaces in which various critiques of imperialism converged. The author argues that the international solidarity of the 1960s was not merely imaginative but was shaped by experiences of transnational cooperation across national borders.

Toyohiko Kagawa and Reinhold Niebuhr

Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese evangelist and social activist, preached and practiced cooperatives as integral to the nature and mission of the Christian church. Using pulpit, podium, and pen, Kagawa blended a call for heart conversion with a call to establish Christian cooperatives. When Kagawa stumped America promoting this vision in 1936, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr expressed reservations. Unlike Kagawa, Niebuhr saw cooperatives as no panacea, though lending his support to an experimental cooperative in the U.S. that was doomed to fail. Kagawa faced opposition from within the church, but shared the podium with Billy Graham during the young evangelist’s Tokyo crusade in 1956. This essay draws from Kagawa’s vision and Niebuhr’s critique insights for the church today: the need for visions without illusions, the difficulty of linking church and cooperatives, and the value of reforming the church’s approach to mission through reflection and a deeper analysis of the human condition.

Transnationalism and the Evolution of Post-National Citizenship in Japan

This article argues that transnational activism has been an important factor in both the evolution of Japanese civil society and the identity formation of civil society actors over the past half century. It reconsiders the Japanese experience in light of recent theorisations on deterritorialised and transnational citizenships which challenge the monopoly of the national state in defining civic identity by proposing novel alternatives based on cross-border affiliations among non-state actors. Different from existing endogenous and institutional explanations of the emergence and development of civil society in Japan, the article highlights the transformative impact of activists’ transnational activities. Until around the late 1960s Japanese activists tended to imagine their situation within a framework of victimised citizens versus a pernicious alliance of the state and industry. The state and corporations were the aggressors and citizens were always the victims. But transnational engagements in the anti-Vietnam War and environmental movements disrupted such assumptions, forcing activists to rethink their victimisation status and consider their complicity in the actions of the Japanese state and industry abroad. The result was an enriched and more broad-minded conceptualisation of post-national citizenship in which victim consciousness was tempered by a concern for those beyond the borders of Japan. This transnational sensitivity in turn contributed to the maturation of Japanese civil society.

East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America by Karen Kuo (review)

Reviewed by: East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America by Karen Kuo Elise Lemire (bio) East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America, by Karen Kuo. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Xi + 237 pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4399-0587-6. Within American studies and its various branches, much of the scholarship about sexual and other kinds of interracial encounters focuses on white American anxiety. Karen Kuo broadens our purview considerably. Her wonderfully astute [End Page 120] study finds that even during the period when the United States prohibited Asian immigration, there were literary and filmic texts by and in which white and Asian Americans anticipated greater freedoms through intimate relationships across historical racial boundaries. Deeply invested in examining what she describes as a “mutual gaze” (9), Kuo devotes the first half of East Is West and West Is East to texts that imagine Asians and Asian Americans in the United States and the second to texts that imagine white Americans in Asia. Each of her four largely independent chapters is centered on one text: the Universal picture East Is West (1930), Younghill Kang’s fictionalized memoir East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), the Frank Capra film Lost Horizon (1937), and Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935), by Japanese activist Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto. One of the most compelling chapters in the book, on Capra’s Hollywood film, explores how white men sought freedom from militarized masculinity and other modern constraints in the idea of “Asia.” In Lost Horizon, a group of white men find a kind of gender utopia when their plane crashes in an unspecified region of Asia. Once settled at Shangri-la, the survivors, led by a diplomat and former soldier described as Britain’s “Man of the East,” learn to appreciate a new kind of community in which people barter for goods and services and work together on various initiatives. Safe from capitalism and the modern nation state, the white men are able to adopt a new kind of masculinity associated, as Kuo shows us, with “pacifism, nonaggression, cooperation, and even, at times, nurturing” (99). Ultimately, however, the film’s vision is limited by the fact that the Asians living in Shangri-la exist solely to serve the white population. There’s also the problem of a weak ending in which it is unclear if the Man of the East stays in Shangri-la in order to remake the world or retreat from it. Indeed, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Capra had little trouble doctoring the film so that it could be re-released as an anti-Asian propaganda film. The “alternative masculinity” that the Man of the East finds at Shangri-la “cannot be fully imagined as anchoring a new global world” (130–31). In another richly detailed chapter, Kuo convinces us that a text long regarded as intensely anxious about interracial sex and Chinese immigration is in fact using these issues to manifest more general concerns about white women’s sexuality. In the film East Is West, a white California family is distressed when son Billy falls in love with the recently arrived and provocatively named Ming Toy. Their concern evaporates instantly when it is revealed that Billy’s rather racy beloved is in fact the daughter of white missionary parents whose deaths resulted in her adoption by a Chinese family. It seems the film is less concerned about Chinese women’s sexuality harming white American men than about the possibility that there is [End Page 121] little distinguishing Chinese women’s sexual behavior from white women’s. Here, again, American culture used the idea of “Asia” as a mirror in which to see and explore something about itself. Again and again, Kuo is able to tease out often surprising tensions in the various texts she examines, using their production and publication histories as well as contemporary reviews to provide the thickest possible context for her readings. Kuo explores, for example, the friendship between Ishimoto and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger in order to show how Ishimoto’s...

Transnational struggle for workers’ rights and missing domestic links: the case of Japanese activists’ involvement in the Toyota Philippines dispute

The case of Japanese activists’ protest against Toyota's abuses in the Philippines will be analyzed to illustrate the potential for and obstacles to enforcing worker rights, such as the freedom of association in Japanese multinationals. The mainstream trade unions chose not to engage in the defense of workers' rights. The case reveals the presence of a network of labor movement organizations and groups, which can be mobilized at the local level. The background of members of the support group formed in Japan will be used as an example to understand the context of resistance-building against corporate abuses in Japan. This resistance building effort is rooted in the divisions in the Japanese labor movement that took place in the 1970s and new social movements.

Living with people with childhood disabilities: making the world more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable

Introduction : When a person with a disability participates in an academic meeting of multidisciplinary professionals in the field of childhood disability, he/she can stimulate these experts’ debates and develop accessible social attitudes toward persons with disabilities. Disabled initiative : Dr. Lauro S. Halstead and Dr. Nancy Frick, both polio survivor physicians, identified the Post-polio syndrome (PPS) and its connection to a specific personal behavioral type contributing to finding better solutions for the vicious circle of these conditions. Similar to PPS, one of the authors, Kiyoharu Shiraishi, a Japanese activist with cerebral palsy (CP) and his colleagues conducted a large survey on adults with CP. Findings : From our research results, the people with CP who got the competitive job position in younger days might be at the high risk of functional deterioration such as need for neck surgery. They also tend to delay the use of a power mobility than any other people with CP in different lifestyle. Power mobility appeared to be the optimal choice of mobility for individuals living with CP in a lifelong perspective. Conclusion : This is where researchers with childhood disabilities, such as CP, can impact our society as ‘experts’ at being lifelong disabled, inspiring professionals without disabilities. Keywords: disability; lifelong perspective; inclusion; overuse; cerebral palsy (Published: 10 September 2014) Citation: Journal of Assistive, Rehabilitative & Therapeutic Technologies 2014, 2 : 23346 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jartt.v2.23346

The Borderless Archipelago: Toward a Transnational History of Japanese Environmentalism

Abstract This article reconsiders the contemporary history of Japanese environmentalism through the lens of transnationalism. From as early as the antipollution struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese activists looked beyond the boundaries of their archipelago in search of allies and environmental knowledge. In the process they became involved in the nascent global environmental movement and helped support victims of industrial pollution and natural degradation in Asia, Europe and North America. Crossing borders empowered Japanese activists to challenge the developmentalist agenda of their country, to address the environmental impact of Japan's economic expansion into East Asia and to advocate a globalist agenda often at odds with the logic of the nation-state. Rather than a simple evolution in which global consciousness replaced commitment to the local and the regional, the article suggests an increased spatialisation of activists' environmental consciousness derived from mutual recognition within an ever-expanding web of transnationally networked movements. The article argues that our understanding of Japanese environmentalism is enriched by attention to the multifarious and multidirectional transnational flows of people and ideas over the past half century.

A Meeting in Tokyo:Komatsu Kiyoshi, Wesley Fishel, and America’s Intervention in Vietnam

In the summer of 1950, American political scientist Wesley Fishel met the Japanese writer and political activist Komatsu Kiyoshi who introduced the professor to the Vietnamese nationalist leaders Cuong De and Ngo Dinh Diem. This encounter had great importance for Fishel’s career as he became one of the early U.S. specialists on Vietnam as well as an academic who actively sought to influence U.S. policy in Vietnam. The talks also presented Diem with the opportunity to widen his contacts with Americans who could help him in his effort to become the leader of an independent Vietnam. This article describes Fishel’s meetings with the Vietnamese as well as Komatsu’s attempts to promote their political fortunes. It also discusses the consequences that these discussions had for the individuals involved, especially Diem and Fishel, as well as the shared conviction of Komatsu and Fishel that foreign powers could play a constructive role in guiding Vietnam toward independence.