Geography Archives: Japan

Missile units on southern islands, troops moving on civilian ferries, command bunkers dug underground: a grassroots movement across Japan is trying to halt the drift back towards imperial confrontation. Remembering the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Despite the heroic struggle of the people of Hiroshima, 81 years ago today, and of Nagasaki, the horrors of 1945 have too often been forgotten or ignored, says Peter Kuznick.

The current yen crisis could only be resolved by a sharp rise in Japanese interest rates to encourage investors to hold Japanese financial assets. 

Japanese workers get the bill first: a weaker currency, costlier food and fuel, and wages that buy less. They had no say in the war being waged in their name.

The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in the deaths and fatal injuries of more than 210,000 people, who either died instantaneously or within months.

What happened in the final hours before the first atomic attack.

Living with radioactive hot spots and stigma as Japan’s government pushes for more reactors.

A snowstorm vote, scripted social media praise, and a distorted electoral system converge to consolidate ultra-right power in Japan, revealing how spectacle and structural bias combine to hollow out democratic representation.

Thomas Bass shows how insistence that nuclear power is a safe answer to energy needs is contradicted by the reality of the Fukushima disaster’s aftermath, finds Elaine Graham-Leigh.

It’s oddly encouraging that the New York Post had to bring up its kookiest rightwing propagandist on Friday to argue that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who heads the LDP, has intensified his rhetoric on issues appealing to conservatives, the core LDP base.

A new documentary that began airing on PBS this month (The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today) highlights one of the most surreal stories from World War II.

The U.S. military is preparing for war on China. It has missile systems in the Philippines aimed at major Chinese cities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the USA is turning “Japan into a war-fighting headquarters”. Silicon Valley Big Tech oligarchs are making hugely profitable investments.

Toshiyuki Mimaki, co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese organization honored with the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its anti-nuclear activism, drew comparisons between the plight of children in Gaza and those impacted by the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The U.S. and UK ambassadors to Japan will not attend the Nagasaki atomic bomb victim memorial on August 9 due to the Nagasaki administration’s decision not to invite the Israeli envoy.

In Asian media this week: Dangerous turn adds new anti-Beijing flashpoint. Plus: Bangkok banks used to supply Myanmar military; Why Hindu nationalists back Israel; Thais opt for neutrality in great-power war; How to stop China slipping into Japan trap; Online gambling an Indonesian epidemic.

The Russian economy has overtaken Japan to become the fourth largest in the world in PPP terms (purchase power parity), according to revised data from the World Bank released at the start of June. As bne IntelliNews reported in August, Russia had already overtook Germany to become the fifth biggest economy in adjusted terms. Hit by multiple shocks […]

In early April 2024, the navies of four countries—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States—held a maritime exercise in the South China Sea. Australia’s Warramunga, Japan’s Akebono, the Philippines’ Antonio Luna, and the United States’ Mobile worked together in these waters to strengthen their joint abilities and—as they said in a joint statement—to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight and respect for maritime rights under international law.”

The vastly different treatment of Cuba and Israel illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the Western order, an order that is being taken less and less seriously in the global South. North-South relations are tilting, not only economically, but also ideologically. A new era is beginning.

I. To summarise the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task.1 In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific, and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although it remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism […]