Digital Commons Network^™

Japanese Development And Iranian Uneven Development: A Gramscian Perspective, Marziyeh Asgarivash, Karim Pourhamzavi

International Gramsci Journal

Why Iran is underdeveloped and significantly dominated by imperial Western powers has been debated among Iranian intellectuals for more than a century. Japan’s rise in the late 19th/early 20th centuries and its defeat of Russia in 1904-5 made it something of a model that Iran might follow in order to catch up with the developed capitalist world. Approaches which focus on this have been essentially liberal and “cultural” in nature. The aim of the current study is to re-examine the question of Iranian underdevelopment, using Gramsci’s heritage to compare the actual contexts and material/historical roots of Japanese development and Iranian …

Bridging Troubled Waters: China, Japan, And Maritime Order In The East China Sea. By James Manicom. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2014. Softcover: 266pp., Lowell Bautista

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this book, James Manicom contests the orthodox view that the strategic rivalry between China and Japan will escalate into a fullblown military conflict. The book concedes that the East China Sea will be the likely medium for Sino–Japanese military rivalry and cyclical tensions will persist; however, it makes the compelling case that cooperation will endure.

Enduring Debates: Closing The Gender Gap In Japan, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Women in Japan voted and stood for office for the first time on 10 April 1946. It was the country's first postwar election and the first election after the Japanese government amended the Electoral Law to include women. Of the 79 female candidates, 39 were elected to Japan's national parliament, the Diet. Seventy years on, what is the state of gender relations in Japan? What issues now stimulate feminist campaigns and activism?

Sex, Censorship And Media Regulation In Japan: A Historical Overview, Mark Mclelland

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Over the past several decades alarmist reports about the supposed dangers of the sexualised nature of much Japanese popular culture have regularly featured in the English-language press. It has been claimed that Japan is 'awash' in all kinds of pornography, including child pornography (Larimer 1999; Fallows 1986: 38) and that insufficient attempts are made by the authorities to properly regulate the expression of sexual matters. A major concern of such reporting has been the supposed 'dark side' (McGinty 2002) of the manga (comics) which are ubiquitous in Japan and, since the 1980s, have become popular with young people worldwide. International …

'How To Sex'? The Contested Nature Of Sexuality In Japan, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

There has been a tendency in English and other European-language reporting on Japan to stress the strangeness and otherness of Japanese values, particularly in regard to sexuality. Reports of Japanese immorality go back as far as the sixteenth century when the first Jesuit visitors to the country were appalled by open displays of cross-dressing and male-male sexual relations (Cooper 1965). After the ‘opening’ of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian visitors were alternately intrigued and shocked by the government-regulated prostitution that took place in Japan’s many pleasure quarters. Commentators have noted how the figure of the geisha, in particular (albeit …

Introduction: Art And Activism In Post-Disaster Japan, Alexander Brown, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

On 11 March 2011, the northeastern area of Japan, known as Tōhoku, was hit by an unprecedented earthquake and tsunami. The disaster damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, one of a number of such facilities located in what was already an economically disadvantaged region.2 This led to a series of explosions and meltdowns and to the leakage of contaminated water and radioactive fallout into the surrounding area. Around 20,000 people were reported dead or missing, with a disproportionate number from the aged population of the region. Nearly four years later, hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced: evacuated …

Migrant Workers In Contemporary Japan: An Institutional Perspective On Transnational Employment., Hironori Onuki

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Migrant Workers in Contemporary Japan is primarily concerned with changes in social institutions within the context of globalization and the implications of these changes for the lifestyles of people living and working in Japanese society.

New Media, Censorship And Gender: Using Obscenity Law To Restrict Online Self-Expression In Japan And China, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The widespread take-up of Internet technologies from the mid-1990s has proven challenging to nation states that seek to limit access to ideas, information or images that the political class considers dangerous or inappropriate for the general population. As a largely deterritorialized technology, the Internet allows access to material that circumvents national legislatures and ignores local ratings systems and in so doing facilitates all kinds of inter-cultural and transnational flows of communication. Different countries have different sensitivities regarding the kinds of material that should not be freely available to their citizens and although the entry of such material is closely scrutinized …

The Developmental State Model: A Comparative Analysis Of Japan Approach And The New Developmental State In South America, Gabriel Garcia

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This is a working-in-progress paper on the Developmental State Model: a Comparative Analysis of Japan's Approach and the New Developmental State in Brazil. The case of Brazil was the topic of a book published in 2013 edited by Trubek, Alviar Garcia, Coutinho and Santos titled 'Law and the New Developmental State, the Brazilian Experience in Latin American Context'. The volume contains contributions that argue a 'new' developmental state model is emerging in Brazil. A preliminary literature review suggests that the Brazilian government has incorporated in its development policies some of the features that defined the Japanese developmental state a few …

Book Review: The Art Of Censorship In Postwar Japan. Studies Of The Weatherhead East Asian Institute. By Kirsten Cather, Rowena G. Ward

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The practice of censorship is a divisive issue that is often justified on moral reasons rather than aesthetic or legalistic ones. It is perhaps because of the claims to morality rather than to the law that it is relatively rare for censorship (or more accurately in Japan’s case, obscenity) to be the subject of criminal trials. Yet, in Japan, from the occupation years through to the present day, there has been on average one high profile censorship trial per decade. In The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, Kirsten Cather considers seven such censorship trials held between the 1950s and …

Conclusion: Reflections On The Rhythms Of Internationalisation In Post-Disaster Japan, Vera Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

On 7 Jul 2012. a concert was held at Makuhari Messe near Tokyo. The concert was part of a growing movement against nuclear power in the wake of the triple earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster in northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011. The headline performers were the Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra and the German band Kraftwerk. Since the earliest days of Yellow Magic Orchestra. band leader Sakamoto Ryuichi has forged an international career as a performer and composer, moving between Tokyo, New York and other global cities. In recent years, he has used his public profile to argue for environmental sustainability, so …

Gigantic Shipbuilders Under The Imo Mandate Of Ghg Emissions: With Special References To China, Japan And Korea, Yubing Shi

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

To address greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping, the International Maritime Organization has adopted technical and operational measures, and discussed the possibilihj of adopting market-based measures. China, Japan and South Korea are major shipbuilding nations in the world, and have differing responses towards the IMO's regulatory initiatives. This paper conducts a comparative assessment of these three countries' positions on regulatory principles of the greenhouse gas issue, and concludes that their differentiated perspectives on this matter reflect their different regulatory interests. It is significant to take their differentiated interests into account in the developing regulatory regime to avoid disproportionate burdens being …

The Rise And Fall Of Activity Based Costing In Japan, Hiroshi Ozawa, Anura De Zoysa

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Activity Based Costing (ABC) has come to light in an era where there was worldwide attention for Japanese management systems and management accounting practices. Despite the worldwide hype for ABC as a method capable of producing more accurate product costs, ABC gathered very little interest from the business community in Japan. However, in contrast, Japanese management and cost accounting researchers took a positive view on the concept and attempted to discuss its applicability to Japanese companies as a viable alternative for their existing cost systems. Although, the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy in early 1990s provided some impetus for …

New Women, Modern Girls And The Shifting Semiotics Of Gender In Early Twentieth Century Japan, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

Academic Employment And Gender Equity Legislation In Australia And Japan, 1970-2010, Kirsti Rawstron

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the rate of change of men and women's employment as university academic staff in Australia and Japan; and, drawing on quantitative methods, show differences in the rate of change since the introduction of anti-sex discrimination legislation. The author also includes a discussion of programmes designed to increase female participation in academic positions to provide background to the existing changes.

Design/methodology/approach - Using statistics published by the Ministries of Education of both countries, a time series of female participation at each level of academic staff was constructed. Breakpoint analysis is used …

Japan's Biopolitical Crisis: Care Provision In A Transnational Frame, Vera Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this article I consider recent policies on care provision in Japan, including the employment of immigrant workers. My discussion is framed by Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’: a mode of governmentality focused on the management of populations. In the current age of economic globalization, however, biopolitics also crosses national boundaries. Raewyn Connell has described a ‘global gender order’ whereby gender relations are shaped by power structures which transcend the level of the nation-state. This involves the connections between different local gender orders and gender orders which transcend the scale of the nation-state. The migration of care workers …

Feminism And The Nation-State In Japan, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The first Japanese edition of the book appeared at the height of debates about the interpretation of the Asia-Pacific War, debates which were also linked to conflicts about how the past should be represented in school textbooks.2 Much of this controversy revolved around the issue of enforced military prostitution/military sexual slavery.3 In 1991 Kim Hak-Sun (1924–1997) was one of the few women to come out in public in her own name to narrate her experiences in the enforced military prostitution system and demand an apology and compensation from the Japanese government. She was soon joined by survivors from Korea and …

Post-3.11 Australia-Japan Co-Operation: Facing Non-Traditional Security Challenges: Items Of Sentimental Value, Anne A. Collett

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

To those for whom this talk and the photographs that accompany it may cause distress, I apologise, and hope that what I have to say will be taken in the spirit intended - that is, as a tribute to those who worked to find ways to alleviate distress, heal wounds, offer comfort and repair damage. This talk offers me (and I hope you as an audience) an opportunity to think through the meaning of 'connection', and the meaning of photographs, their relationship to collective memory and community, and their capacity to allow survivors and those who witness tragedy intimately or …

Sex And Censorship During The Occupation Of Japan, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This chapter entitled “Sex and Censorship During the Occupation of Japan” is excerpted from Mark McLelland’s Love, Sex and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation (Palgrave MacMillan 2012). The book examines the radical changes that took place in Japanese ideas about sex, romance and male-female relations in the wake of Japan’s defeat and occupation by Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. Although there have been other studies that have focused on sexual and romantic relationships between Japanese women and US military personnel, little attention has been given to how the Occupation impacted upon the courtship …

Book Review: Sato And Imai (Ed): Japan's New Inequality: Intersection Of Employment Reforms And Welfare Arrangements., Kirsti Rawstron

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Japan’s New Inequality is a study of the effects of changes in welfare arrangements and employment reforms in Japan since the collapse of Japan’s Bubble Economy in the late 1980s. This volume draws heavily on theories and methods of social stratification studies to explore three general areas: regular and non-regular divisions in labour markets (i.e. between permanent full-time and non-permanent part-time employees); changes in employment structures for women and the self-employed; and changes in family structure, the ageing population and welfare provisions. This volume provides a concise and up-to-date picture of income, wealth and employment inequalities in Japan.

The Philippines And Japan In America's Shadow, Peter M. Sales

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This book grew out of three intensive workshops and a great deal of collective brainstorming. The hard work has been worthwhile. As edited compilations go, this is a valuable collection that provides a number of insights into the occupation by the US of the Philippines from the beginning of the twentieth century and of Japan after the Pacific War. The project as a whole bears out the value of a collective enterprise that is planned and executed carefully and with a commonality of purpose. Many of the ideas that emerge from the shared focus are illuminating.

Evaluating Women’S Labour In 1990s Japan: The Changing Labour Standards Law, Kirsti Rawstron

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article outlines the legislative changes regarding Japanese working women in the 1990s, specifically the changes to the Labour Standards Law. Th is Law was altered in 1997 (effective 1999) by the removal of a number of provisions known as the Women’s ‘Protection’ Provisions (josei hogo kitei). These gender-specifi c provisions restricted Japanese women from working particular jobs and hours, and limited overtime and holiday work. The role of these gender-specifi c provisions is examined through a collection of articles from four of Japan’s mainstream daily, widely-circulated newspapers: the Asahi Shinbun, the Mainichi Shinbun, the Nihon Keizai Shinbun, and the …

Changing Media Understandings Of Gender Relations: Japan's Equal Employment Opportunity Law In 1985 And 1997, Kirsti Rawstron

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper examines the portrayal of gender relations and issues in theJapanese media through a case study of discussions in mainstreamnewspapers surrounding the introduction in 1985 of the Equal EmploymentOpportunity Law (EEOL) in Japan. This law was introduced as part of Japan's ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of AllForms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The debate surroundingthe changing EEOL is examined through articles from three mainstreamdaily national newspapers, notably the Asahi Shinbun, the Nihon KeizaiShinbun and the Yomiuri Shinbun. The articles reflect and reinforce thechanging cultural understanding of gender relations in Japan over thisperiod. The newspapers …

Seapower And Japan's Martime Coalition Building, Daisuke Sekine

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Seapower can be an ambiguous concept, difficult to understand and research, because it is composed of a number of factors across specialized areas, which mutually affect each other. It is a difficult duty for governments, which need national support to weave the components of seapower into a national engine for the sake of developing seapower in defence of national interests.

It can be said that alliance strategy can exert a strong influence on a state. In the Japan context, there are a lot of benefits and risks brought by an alliance. For sea powers, it may be no exaggeration to …

“Kissing Is A Symbol Of Democracy!” Dating, Democracy And Romance In Occupied Japan 1945-1952, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Japan’s defeat at the end of its fifteen years’ war in 1945 saw widespread changes to the family and gender system. Women were given political rights for the first time and were recognised as independent agents at work, in the home and in their romantic relationships. Whereas war-time ideology had brought about the “death of romance” in popular culture, with the relaxation of censorship at the war’s end, there was a sudden proliferation in discussion about the qualities of the “new” or “modern” couple and the popular press saw the rise of an eclectic range of “experts” offering advice on …

Undermining The Occupation: Women Coalminers In 1940s Japan, Matthew Allen

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

During the period from 1943-1945 Japan's big coalmines faces a severe labour shortage. Korean 'colonials' and the Chinese and western prisoners of war were brought in to help meet the dire labour shortage in te coalmines created by conscription, and women who had been sorting coal at he pit-top also found themselves pushed into working on the coalface (Sonoda 1970). This signalled a radical change in policy from large mine owners and their labour overseers, who were forced to address a number of overlapping issues: the shortage of male labour; intensive government pressures to maintain production' and an existing culture …

The Honbako Is Bare: What's Become Of Japan/Australia Fiction?, Alison E. Broinowski

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Complementary opportunities seemed to favour Australia and Japan at the outset. A shared modern history of 150 years might be expected to be long enough for the two antipodal countries to have seeded and cultivated their relationship, and watched it flourish, bear fruit, and multiply. Opposites could be expected to attract, empathy would be stimulated by difference, and cultural interchange should thrive spontaneously without the need for frequent applications of official fertiliser. The harvest should be plentiful, not only for government, business, education, and tourism, but for the two cultures.

Necktie Nightmare: Narrating Gender In Contemporary Japan, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

...the thing I hated most of all was the necktie.
When I wore a necktie, there was just no doubt that I was a man.
The image was of a salaryman! The mainstay of the house! The symbol of manhood!

These are the words of Nomachi Mineko in the autobiographical account of her transition from male to female. The book (adapted from a blog) appeared in late 2006 under the title O-kama dakedo OL yattemasu (I'm Queer But I'm An Office Lady). The book's publication coincided with a range of mainstream representations of trans-gendered lives - in television …

The Role Of The 'Tojisha' In Current Debates About Sexual Minority Rights In Japan, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

‘Speaking as a tojisha’ has become an important strategy in establishing ‘correct knowledge’ about sexual minority cultures in contemporary Japan. Originally developed in a legal context where it referred to the ‘parties’ in court proceedings, in the 1970s tojisha was taken up by citizens’ groups campaigning for the right of self determination for the ‘parties concerned’ facing discrimination and has become a central concept for all minority self-advocacy groups. In the 1990s the discourse of tojisha sei (tojisha-ness) was adopted by gay rights groups and by spokespersons for lesbian and transgender communities in a battle to change public perceptions of …

Interactions Between Deformation And Fluids In The Frontal Thrust Region Of The Nantroseize Transect Offshore The Kii Peninsula, Japan: Results From Iodp Expedition 316 Sites C0006 And C0007, E Screaton, G Kimura, D Curewitz, G Moore, F Chester, O Fabbri, Christopher L. Fergusson, F Girault, D Goldsby, R Harris, F Inagaki, T Jiang, Y Kitamura, M Knuth, C-F Li, L Claesson Liljedahl, L Louis, K Milliken, U Nicholson, N Riedinger, A Sakaguchi, E Solomon, M Strasser, X Su, A Tsutsumi, A Yamaguchi, K Ujiee, X. Zhao

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 316 Sites C0006 and C0007 examined the deformation front of the Nankai accretionary prism offshore the Kii Peninsula, Japan. In the drilling area, the frontal thrust shows unusual behavior as compared to other regions of the Nankai Trough. Drilling results, integrated with observations from seismic reflection profiles, suggest that the frontal thrust has been active since similar to 0.78-0.436 Ma and accommodated similar to 13 to 34% of the estimated plate convergence during that time. The remainder has likely been distributed among out-of-sequence thrusts further landward and/or accommodated through diffuse shortening. Unlike results of …