Japan

Japan’s ideal and less ideal victims

The brutal murders of Japanese hostages Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa at the hands of ISIS have understandably captured the interest of the Japanese nation. Opinions on the victims have ranged from the deeply sympathetic to the victim-blaming. Moreover the Japanese public seems more willing to embrace Goto as a true victim than Yukawa. These […]

Japanese politics at the crossroads

At the time of writing, there is every sign that Japanese politics is at an historical crossroads. In December 2012 the Japanese electorate voted the conservative Liberal Democratic Party back to power after a three-year break from 2009. Before then, the LDP had governed the country almost uninterruptedly since the onset of the Cold War. […]

One Year On: A Symposium Commemorating ‘311’, the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011

On 8th March, the Alexandersalen was the venue for the symposium ‘One Year On: A Symposium Commemorating ‘311’, the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011’. The event was held with Danish scholars on Japan and Japanese scholars working in Denmark, who had the desire to do something from Denmark for Japan as people prepared to […]

A female serial killer’s literary roots: Murakami Haruki, 1Q84 and Aomame

Five years after the long novel Kafka on the shore, Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s trilogy 1Q84 was published in Japan in 2009-10 where it quickly became a bestseller. With details of the book kept strictly secret prior to its release, anticipating Murakami readers had to satisfy their curiosity with train posters such as the above. […]

Six Prime Ministers in 5 years – why Japanese Prime Ministers are so short-lived

“What is going in Japan with six prime ministers in five years?” seems to be a frequently asked question these days. In this blog post, I will try to answer this question – or at least shed some light on how we can understand current Japanese politics. We need to understand, firstly, why Kan chose […]

Doing Design Business in Japan: Experiences from Hirameki

Those who have already been to Japan – and particularly the bigger cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya – know that people consume a lot and in a fast pace. Despite the economic downturn in 2008, Japanese people have continued to spend remarkable amounts of yen on designer products. Design products to many Japanese […]

Away from home when disaster strikes : Diary from a UK-based Japanese community after the Tohoku catastrophe

Diary from a UK-based Japanese community after the Tohoku catastrophe

The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake: Unmitigated disaster followed by a New Deal-type reconstruction?

Four moving tectonic plates crowd each other in the eastern vicinity of Japan, and on Friday 11 March at 2:45 in the afternoon Japan Standard Time, pressure that had built up between two of them for years, perhaps centuries, was suddenly released, causing one to slip under the other. The ocean above this rising sea floor also rose, and these displaced masses of water shortly after inundated the northeastern coats of Japan.

Still Repairing Chinese-Japanese Relations by Asger Røjle Christensen

Yes, there has been a serious crisis
recently between China and Japan.

The collision between a Chinese
fishing trawler and a Japanese coastguard patrol boat close to the disputed
islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, prompted both countries
to take drastic measures which resulted in China canceling a number of
high-level ministerial meetings between the two countries. But no, this doesn’t
imply that the region is on the brink of open confrontation. It doesn’t disturb
the general trend towards a more pragmatic cooperative attitude from both
sides.

Separate surnames: the breakdown of families vs. the emancipation of women by Karl Jakob Krogness, Ph.D., Ritsumeikan University

In the last days of August, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) put a decisive end to the Liberal Democratic Party’s  (LDP) half century of practically uninterrupted rule. Soon after, 29 September, the new minister of justice, Keiko Chiba (DPJ), announced she would introduce early next year a bill for revising the Civil Code in order to introduce an optional separate surnames system for married couples. Such a bill would arguably reform the family model that has ruled Japanese social life for over a century.