"State Department's desire to uphold the Atlantic Charter by rejecting territorial expansion; Amamian activists' assertive argument for reversion to Japanese rule; and the Japanese government's work to reach an agreement with the United States. Eldridge draws on original documents from the reversion movement, several volumes of memoirs and remembrances written by participants in the movement, and numerous declassified documents of the Japanese and U.S. governments.

Dynamism in Sino-Japanese relations, of which the Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands dispute constitutes a major part, has greatly overshadowed not only prospects of positive collaboration between China and Japan, but also regional order in East Asia. On the surface, the essence of the dispute focused on sovereignty, which entails competition for maritime resources development and strategic access to the adjacent waters as a critical transportation and military route. What lies at the crux, however, is the conflict between different sets of values, which lead and shape their interpretations of international treaties, changes of governments, and impacts of this upon these Asian states’ attitudes toward how “sovereignty” and “territory” should be understood in contemporary Asia. The Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands dispute has lapsed into dormancy, since intense discussions in the period from 2010 to 2012. However, the disagreement is far from being resolved. This book draws on structural issues underlying the on-going dispute, along with the concomitant, multifaceted challenges that need to be investigated. At a juncture when the prospect of the Sino-Japanese relations remains gloomy, this book provides conceptual and practical insights invaluable to the field of law, history and politics, shedding light on the refinement of relevant international law and rules of engagement in a normative sense.

In 2004, Japan instituted a system to protect citizens against military attacks and terrorism for the first time after World War II. Faced with the Tokyo subway attack (1995), the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001), and the changing security environment in East Asia, the Japanese government was forced to implement the most extensive reform of its domestic crisis management ["kiki-kanri"] system in the postwar era. Japan’s civil defense system is now called civil protection ["kokumin-hogo"]. Two world wars in the 20th century led to the development of national institutions based on civil defense in Western democratic countries (including the United States and Canada). As times have changed, most countries have adopted a comprehensive crisis (or emergency) management system, integrating civil defense and disaster management (against natural and technological hazards). However, Japan continues to take a different path. Why has a comprehensive crisis management system yet to be formed? How do complex and fragmented institutions work? This book examines the institutions and policies of civil protection (i.e., Japan's civil defense) and further analyzes their effectiveness and issues. Furthermore, it also examines the trade-offs resulting from the coexistence of two independent institutions: civil protection and natural disaster management. A valuable read for scholars of Japan’s public administration and security/ defense policy, as well as for those researching and comparing disaster-preparedness across countries.

This book clarifies the geography of the peripheral Japanese islands from a variety of angles. The islands are distributed in the tropical and cool temperate zones, and the most distant inhabited islands are more than 1,000 km from the mainland. In the past, they were Japan's frontier, close to neighboring countries. However, during Japan's modernization process, the islands were positioned as backward regions, supplying food, resources, and labor. Today, the islands are considered to be on the periphery of Japan, with lifestyles different from those of the mainland. The islands are also getting attention as sightseeing locales and emigration regions attracting those who prefer country life—an image of the islands that has been created by the romanticized gaze from the Japanese mainland. The authors describe the various forms of the outlying Japanese islands and at the same time discover their common regional characteristics, as defined by the view from the mainland.

When American occupiers broke up the Japanese empire in the wake of World War II, approximately 1.7 million people departed Japan for various parts of Northeast Asia. The mass exodus was spearheaded by Koreans, many of whom chartered small fishing vessels to ship them back quickly to their liberated homeland, while wartime devastation hampered the return of Okinawans to their archipelago. By the time the officially endorsed repatriation program was inaugurated, however, increasing numbers of people began escaping US military rule in southern Korea and the Ryukyu Islands by smuggling themselves into occupied Japan. How and why did these migrants move across borderlines newly drawn by American occupiers in the region? Their personal stories reveal what liberation and defeat meant to displaced peoples, and how the compounding challenges of their resettlement led to the expansion of smuggling networks. The consequent surge of unauthorized border-crossings spurred occupation authorities into forging exclusionary migration regulations. Through a comparative study of Korean and Okinawan experiences during the postwar occupation era, Matthew Augustine explores how their migrations shaped, and were in turn shaped by, American policies throughout the region. This is the first comprehensive study of the dynamic and often contentious relationship between migrations and border controls in US-occupied Japan, Korea, and the Ryukyus, examining the American interlude in Northeast Asia as a closely integrated, regional history. The extent of cooperation and coordination among American occupiers, as well as their competing jurisdictions and interests, determined the mixed outcome of using repatriation and deportation as expedient tools for dismantling the Japanese empire. The heightening Cold War and deepening collaboration between the occupiers and local authorities coproduced stringent migration laws, generating new problems of how to distinguish South Koreans from North Koreans and “Ryukyuans” from Japanese. In occupied Japan, fears of communist infiltration and subversion merged with deep-seated discrimination, transforming erstwhile colonial subjects into “aliens” and “illegal aliens.” This transregional history explains the process by which Northeast Asia and its respective populations were remade between the fall of the Japanese empire and the rise of American hegemony.

The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal island which offers a way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region.

This book mainly demonstrates the sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands, illustrates the significance, approach and means of peaceful settlement of the Diaoyu Islands dispute, and clarifies China’s principal stand on the Diaoyu Islands issue. According to mode of territorial acquisition, the critical date and the inter-temporal theory in international law, the Diaoyu Islands had been China’s territory rather than terra nullius or a part of Ryukyu before 1895. Therefore, Japan could not acquire the Diaoyu Islands by occupation. Instead, Japan acquired the Diaoyu Islands by cession during the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. In light of the situation and inter-temporal law of the critical date, China resumed her sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands after WWII. China beyond any doubt enjoys the sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands. China upholds the principle of peaceful settlement of the Diaoyu Islands dispute and strongly opposes settling the dispute by means of violence. Studies show that the settlement of the Diaoyu Islands dispute can be analyzed and studied in reference to the operational mode of the International Court of Justice, and China and Japan should take the Franco-German reconciliation model to resolve the Diaoyu Islands dispute politically.