Violent Memory: Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Modern information technologies have radically transfigured human experience. The extensive use of mnemonic devices, for instance, has redefined the subject by externalizing aspects of inner consciousness. These transformations involve the incorporeal but deeply felt, violent dislocations of human experience, traumas that are grounded in reality but which challenge symbolic resources because they are difficult to articulate. I am interested in how the unseen wounding of mnemonic intervention is registered in the “impossible” language of speculative fiction (SF). SF is both rooted in the “real” and “estranged” from reality, and thus able to give form to impossible injuries. This paper argues that Haruki Murakami uses the mode of SF in his novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to explore how mnemonic substitutes interfere with the complex process of remembering World War II in Japan. I will demonstrate how, through SF, Murakami is able to give form to an unseen crisis of memory in postwar Japan, a crisis marked by the unspeakable shock of war and by the trauma that results from the intrusion of artificial memories upon one’s consciousness of history.

In the Name of Human Adaptation: Japanese American “Hybrid Children” and Racial Anthropology in Postwar Japan

By focusing on the emergence and integration of “hybrid children” (konketsuji) anthropology into the Human Adaptability section of the International Biological Program (HA-IBP) in Japan during the 1950s and 1970s, this paper presents how transnational dynamics and mechanisms played out in shaping and maintaining the racist aspects while simultaneously allowed them to be included in the HA-IBP framework. It argues that they operated a double play between their national and transnational spaces—that is, they attenuated racist aspects of their research in their international activities while authenticating race in their national work. This paper will conclude with reflections on the transnational nationalism of konketsuji anthropology.

Antibiotic Resistance, the Horrendous Consequences of Bacterial Sex

This chapter reviews how bacterial sex explains the rapid emergence of superbugs that are resistant to multiple antibiotics, the so-called MDR pathogens. Millions of years before humans evolved, bacteria invented antibiotics and the defensive molecules that make some bacteria resistant to an antibiotic. Therefore, antibiotic resistant genes pre-exist in many bacterial strains, literally lying in wait to emerge in superbugs. In postwar Japan, bacteriologists discovered the first MDR pathogens during dysentery outbreaks. Researchers demonstrated that the genes for resistance to several antibiotics were transferred by bacterial sex—from normal flora to the dysentery pathogens—all together and “at one stroke.” Methicillin was intentionally designed to treat penicillin-resistant infections. Only three years after its introduction of, hospitals began to find methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Gerard Wright coined the term resistome to signify “the global collection of resistance genes that have been readily available to pathogens for millennia.”

Cold War Undercurrents: The Extreme-Right Variants in East Asia

This study examines the mobilization of the Far Right in Korea and Japan in the 2000s and probes how and why the actors and political claims of East Asian extremists differ from their counterparts in Europe and North America. The Far Right forces in Korea and Japan are politically regressive in glorifying the authoritarian or colonial past and cling to unchanging ideological claims from the postwar decades in their current targeting of old-time, internal “others.” This divergence is explained by the United States–led Cold War geopolitics in Asia, under which Far Right elites were fortified in postwar Japan and Korea. The Cold War that has not ended in Asia as opposed to Europe or North America further allows the institutional sustainability of the radical Right and the political resonance of its old ideology of anticommunism and colonial racism. As such, democratic politics in East Asia is predicated on Cold War undercurrents.

Developments of the Perception of Climate Change and Abnormal Weather in Postwar Japan

Climate research has been presented as a largely Anglophone and European affair, while other regional contributions and concerns have been left largely unexamined. An investigation of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s ‘Abnormal Weather Reports’ and related literature instead reveals the concerns of an island nation anxious about immediate weather abnormalities, causes of climate variability, and predicting the consequences of global warming within a geographically vulnerable Japan. Researchers initially focused on the topic of global cooling in the 1970s, sparking fears about Japan’s self-sustainability in the event of a long-term decline in temperatures. By the 1980s, though cooling fears persisted, focus also turned to how El Niño cycles provoked climatic variability, even as initial concern with global warming resulting from human activities, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and ozone depletion grew. Following the Kyoto Protocol’s recognition of anthropogenic climate change and creation of a global cooperative framework, research has begun to focus on the consequences of global warming in exacerbating Japan’s meteorological risks and on mitigating further anthropogenic temperature increases.

Elements of Max Weber’s model of rationalization in the political analysis of Maruyama Masao

Maruyama Masao was one of the most influential political theorists and social scientists in postwar Japan. Many of his works were translated into other languages and his theories are still often discussed in fields like the history of ideas and in political science. In this paper, some theoretical elements in Maruyama’s work borrowed from Max Weber’s sociology of religion, notably his theory of ethical development and its relation to the sociology of law and the political sociology are scrutinized. Reconstructing these links enables us to better understand Maruyama’s theoretical approach. For this purpose, first, Weber’s model of ethical development is explicated, and, second, its influence in three of Maruyama’s influential texts are highlighted.