Based on excerpts from the author’s book, Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019), this article explores the passage and early implementation of Japan’s infamous prewar law, the Peace Preservation Law (Chianijihō). Enacted in March 1925, this law was utilized to arrest over 70,000 people in the Japanese metropole and tens of thousands more in Japan’s colonial territories until being repealed by order of Allied Occupation authorities in October 1945. Proponents initially explained that the law was to suppress communists and anticolonial activists for threatening the national polity, although how to exactly define such threats remained ambiguous. By the 1930s the purview of the law expanded and was used to detain academics, other activists, and members of religious groups who were seen as challenging imperial orthodoxy. This article focuses on the interpretive debates over the law’s central category—kokutai, or national polity—and how its interpretation started to transform as the law was first applied in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The occasion of the Peace Preservation Law’s centennial invites us to consider its history and legacy, especially as policing and state power have expanded since the so-called war on terror.

The landscape of the Meiji Jingu Gaien area of Tokyo is famous; it has a gingko-lined avenue and various sports facilities, including national stadiums and facilities used by ordinary citizens. The large-scale redevelopment of this area has been planned and implemented on the basis of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s district plan in 2013 in the wake of Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games. This paper examines the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s actions since the formation of this plan, mainly on the basis of the Metropolitan Government’s official documents and Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly minutes and considers their implications.

This paper explores the differences between the historical trajectory of jazz in mainland Japan and in Okinawa, where a stronger presence of American military bases monopolized employment for jazz musicians. In the turn of the 70s, while the leftist youth of mainland Japan embraced avant-garde free jazz for its anti-war messages, the economic dependency of Okinawan jazz musicians on American bases divorced the genre from involvement in protests for reversion. Through oral accounts and written records, this essay examines the politics of “Okinawan jazz” and the place of its musicians in the realm of reversion protests.

Events such the Great East Japan Earthquake or 3.11 force us to rethink our ways of life in relation to nature. Even in the midst of disasters, people have the desire to create and to express themselves—as does nature. How can we understand relational creativity in the aftermath of such disasters, and how might creative works assist recovery processes? This article focusses on the “Lost Homes” Scale Model Restoration Project. The project, initiated and led by architect Osamu Tsukihashi of Kobe University and his students, is a collaborative community project with residents in the disaster region as well as with students and professors of architecture across Japan.

This introduction to the special issue “Performance, Projection,Provocation! Relational Creativity in Contemporary Japan” presents ahistory of group-based creative practice in Japan, from the amateur endeavors ofsākuru (circles) to the professional creativity of internationalproduction companies. The special issue applies the concept of“relational creativity” to a series of case studies to betterunderstand how creative practices shape relationships and other social forms,institutional and less institutional.

Virtual YouTubers, also known as VTubers, are entertainers who use two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) computer-generated characters to create entertaining virtual content online. This article explores a group project called the “MetaBirthday,” in which VTubers and their followers collaborated to write lyrics, compose music, design stage outfits, and shoot a music video. Through semistructured interviews with the group’s participants and close reading of their published textual material, this article interrogates how VTubers harness virtual and physical spaces to create a sense of mutual benefit, inspiration, and satisfaction in tension with the everyday realities of these spaces.