That landing was one small episode in Japan¡¯s least-remembered wartime venture. Tokyo tried to prise India away from British rule through espionage, sabotage and alliances with the people who lived along its eastern frontier.

The stakes rose in March 1942, when Rangoon fell and Japan cut the Burma Road, the route by which the Allies supplied Chiang Kai-shek¡¯s China. The victory solved nothing. The Americans simply rerouted supplies through Assam, first by air over the Himalayas and then along the new Ledo Road, and Northeast India became the lifeline Japan most needed to sever. Controlling that frontier, Tokyo believed, could end the war with China and open the way to driving Britain out of Asia altogether. The tool for doing it already existed in outline. In September 1941, Major Fujiwara Iwaichi had been sent to Bangkok to build ties with Indian revolutionaries there, and out of that contact came the Indian National Army, formed from prisoners of war captured in Malaya. On 17 February 1942, at Farrer Park in Singapore, a British officer formally handed several thousand captured Indian soldiers over to Fujiwara, who passed them to the INA¡¯s new commander, Mohan Singh. Overnight, prisoners became volunteers, and Japan had a homegrown force to send against British India.

It also had a growing archipelago of training schools. At Gilani¡¯s Penang School, seventy Muslim prisoners of war were narrowed down to twelve for what became known as the Pasni Party, landed by submarine on the Baluchistan coast in February 1944 to establish contact with Subhas Chandra Bose¡¯s supporters in Delhi. British surveillance found them within weeks. At the Thingangyun School in Rangoon, ninety trainees passed through in early 1943 learning disguise, sabotage and propaganda. At the Swaraj Institute in Penang, agents were prepared in courses as short as six weeks, which left many so poorly briefed that local police identified and arrested them almost as soon as they landed. A parachute team calling itself the Chandgadar, the Bats, dropped near Sunamganj in April 1943 and was rounded up within days, its members tried and sentenced to death. Only one man, Zahur Ahmed, was never found.

None of this happened without India¡¯s frontier communities. As Japanese forces pushed toward Imphal and Kohima in 1944, the Kuki and Naga peoples of Manipur and the Naga Hills became targets of a deliberate courtship. Japanese agents through Hikari Kikan and Nishi Kikan offered arms, autonomy and respect for local custom, and they leaned hard on old grievances. Many Kukis still remembered the suppression of their 1917 to 1919 uprising and the land taxes that followed it, and Tongkhothang, chief of Chassad, crossed the Chindwin in November 1943 to offer the Japanese his support. Others, like Ngamkhothang and Am Zalit, had already been recruited into intelligence work months earlier. Among the Nagas, agents invoked the memory of the Battle of Khonoma, fought against the British sixty years before, and one operative arrived in Ukhrul styling himself the Nippon Government and Naga Commissioner. Angami Zapu Phizo, who would later lead the movement for Naga independence, made contact with the Japanese and with Bose himself, hoping wartime chaos might deliver self-determination where decades of petition had not.

The alliance never became what Japan needed. Requisitioning and looting by hungry, overstretched Japanese troops burned through whatever goodwill existed. Most Nagas stayed loyal to the Allies throughout, working as guides and scouts and, in June 1944, feeding intelligence that let the Allies bomb Japanese supply dumps directly. What Nagas thought of their supposed liberators survives in one grim remark recorded after the war. They disliked the Indian nationalist agents even more than the Japanese, of whom it was said they must be another kind of animal, not human beings at all.

Even where the alliance held, it was riddled with mutual contempt. The INA had its own derisive name for Hikari Kikan, the Japanese agency meant to be its partner. They called it Murghi Butai, the Chicken Department, a joke about an organisation the Indians thought useless and overbearing. Hikari Kikan wanted the INA under its command. The INA wanted recognition as a sovereign army. Neither trusted the other with supplies, and in March 1944 a planned INA raid on British positions near the Shuganu-Palel road had to be abandoned because Hikari Kikan simply never delivered the promised ammunition. When the monsoon broke in June, radios fell silent, malaria and dysentery spread faster than any battle casualties, and the retreat from Imphal turned into catastrophe. Of the roughly two hundred and seventy INA intelligence agents who had gone into the field, only forty came out.

Japan had entered this war with almost no prior knowledge of India. It had few Hindustani speakers, no established contacts, and a diplomatic history in which British India had never been more than an afterthought. Every network described here had to be built from nothing after December 1941, hurriedly, by men studying a country¡¯s geography from books while running an intelligence war against it. Fujiwara himself later admitted that many of Japan¡¯s celebrated early successes in Southeast Asia owed less to skill than to what he called divine providence. Against British counterintelligence, monsoon terrain nicknamed the Green Hell, and a Naga and Kuki population whose loyalties never resolved the way Tokyo hoped, providence was not enough.

What lingers from this story is the gap between the rhetoric of Pan-Asian liberation and its reception on the ground. Kuki collaborators fought alongside Japan for reasons rooted in a 1917 uprising, a grievance decades older than any talk of a Co-Prosperity Sphere. Naga communities weighed two occupying forces against each other and, for the most part, chose the one that seemed less likely to burn their villages. The frontier that Japan hoped to turn into a gateway for Asian solidarity instead became the clearest evidence of how thin that solidarity really was once armies, spies and hungry soldiers arrived to test it.

This post is based on the article Sitlhou, P., & Mishra, B. (2026). Intelligence, espionage, and tribal collaboration: the Indian National Army and Japanese involvement in Northeast India during the Second World War. Japan Forum, 1¨C34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2026.2719592. .

The post Spies, Tribes and the Fight for India¡¯s Eastern Frontier appeared first on bajs.

The instruments came from wherever they could be found. A foreign circus called Chiarini was leaving Japan, so the founders bought up its cornets, French horns, trombones and basses, collecting them from a cheap Yokohama hotel known as the Chabu Ya, or ‘Chop Inn’, a lodging house for circus performers, sailors and travelling Westerners. When they still came up short, they asked an acquaintance bound for Shanghai to buy more there. For uniforms they chose a glittering gold French style and put it together piece by piece, because they could not afford the whole outfit at once.

This was the Tokyo Shich¨± Ongakukai, the Tokyo City Band. By the following spring, it was already performing publicly. Almost everything we know about it comes from an interview that Ikeda Tatsugor¨­, one of its founders, gave to a music magazine in 1942, half a century on. While it must be read critically, this source offers a rare glimpse into the world of Meiji-era commercial musicians, and what it reveals rarely makes the textbooks.

What the textbooks leave out

The familiar account centres on the state. Western marches arrived with foreign troops from the 1850s. Missionaries brought hymn singing once the ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873. From 1878 the government mandated song lessons in primary schools and set up the body that became the Tokyo Academy of Music. All of this built the infrastructure. It explains far less about how ordinary people came to enjoy the stuff.

Demand grew in places the state had not planned for. Weddings, garden parties, shop openings, sporting events and vaudeville shows all wanted music, and by the 1880s the appetite for it had outrun what the official military ensembles could supply. Retired military musicians, pushed out as the armed forces professionalised, saw the gap. They had the training and could get the instruments. They formed bands as commercial ventures, played for hire, and turned a parade-ground skill into paid entertainment.

Building the band

The Tokyo Shich¨± Ongakukai was among the first and most ambitious of these ventures. In 1888 it was incorporated as a joint-stock company and attracted investment from twenty-five shareholders. Among them was Shibusawa Eiichi, the industrialist often called the father of Japanese capitalism. Its capital of 10,000 yen was, in Ikeda’s words, ‘a very large amount at the time’, and within about a year the band had returned nearly three times the investment. Part of that came down to controlling costs. Of thirty-two members, twenty-six were unpaid students.

The founders wanted a Western face at the front, and the search produced one comic failure before it yielded success. Their first hire, an American cornet player named R.S. George whom they had met at the Chop Inn, turned out to be unable to read music or conduct. They took him on regardless, apparently because a foreigner lent the band a certain authenticity. He lasted a month before he ‘could not stand living’ in Tokyo and quit. Their second choice, an Italian called Lizetti, was the real thing. He led the band while playing the cornet and, through his connections, won it a contract to play four times a month at Yokohama’s Grand Hotel, the grandest address on the waterfront. The same musicians who dealt in the shabby world of the circus and the Chop Inn now played its chandeliered rooms, and it was the Japanese players who decided whether a Westerner was good enough to hire.

What audiences wanted

What the audiences wanted shaped what the band played. They ran through marches by Sousa and Pryor and numbers from the comic opera Geisha, but according to Ikeda, one piece stood out above the rest. ‘Hiawatha went down very well,’ he recalled. ‘No march was as well received as that. We had encore after encore.’ Each encore had a price. An audience paid around ten yen to get one, and on a single night the band took 300 yen in encore fees. Western music had become something people queued up and paid extra to hear again.

Success bred friction. Living and travelling together day after day wore on a group of proud and talented men, and tensions eventually boiled over into what Ikeda delicately called ‘a clash of feelings’. The band split. Ikeda and others founded a rival outfit, the T¨­y¨­ Ongakukai, and the two competed for slots at the very same Grand Hotel. Lizetti later led a breakaway group to Kobe. The market could carry all of them, and brass and wind bands were multiplying across Japan’s port cities.

The strangest turn in Ikeda’s story took him out of Japan altogether. A guest at the Grand Hotel, the American general William Worth Belknap, wanted woodwind added to the all-brass band of the warship USS Omaha and asked Ikeda to join. The German bandmaster did not trust his playing, so Ikeda was made to audition, sight-reading the William Tell Overture and a clarinet part for a polka he had never seen. He passed, and became the first Japanese musician to serve on a US navy vessel. He sailed with it to California, studied there for two and a half years, and came home only when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894 and he was called up. A man who had started out scrounging instruments from a circus had crossed the Pacific on an American warship.

Boys in Scottish uniforms, bands in the street

The commercial logic that drove the Tokyo Shich¨± Ongakukai spread into other corners of city life. In 1909 the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo founded a boys’ band, a sh¨­nen gakutai, to amuse and attract customers, with the children dressed in military uniforms modelled on a famous Scottish regiment. Behind the performances lay hard work and little glamour. The boys, aged ten to fifteen, rehearsed after school in a paper warehouse, and many of them cried because they found the music too hard to read. The director handed out sweets to keep their spirits up. Their first public performance was voted the most interesting attraction of the store exhibition where it took place, and within a few years rival stores in Nagoya and elsewhere had copied the idea. The programmes mixed European and Japanese music freely, running from Donizetti and Verdi to a passage of kabuki nagauta scored for brass and wind.

If the department store band brought Western music into the controlled space of the shop, the jinta carried it into the street. Small troupes of costumed musicians, also called chindon-ya after the percussive clatter of their playing, walked the cities with a trumpet, clarinet, bass drum and cymbals, carrying banners and handing out leaflets to advertise a shop or a coming attraction like a circus or a film show. One critic remembered them playing ‘Western music for the people’, parading ‘in a joyful, sometimes comical, sometimes serious way’.

For some listeners, these street bands left a lifelong mark. The conductor Konoye Hidemar¨­, three years old around 1901, was so taken with a band that advertised a cigar shop near his home that he and his sister climbed over the garden gate one morning to follow it, got swept up in the crowd, lost sight of the band and ended up in a police box. The composer Takagi T¨­roku, hearing a three-man jinta advertise a moving-picture show in his home town in 1911, said the clarinet and trumpet sent him into ‘a hallucination that my entire body was being electrified’. What moved him most, he said, was ‘hearing a sound that I had never heard before’. Both men grew up to become professional musicians.

Why it worked

The encounter with Western culture in Meiji Japan is usually told through the state and its institutions of reform. The bands tell a different story. For many people, Western music arrived through musicians who were trying to make a living, in hotels and parks and shops and on the street. Above all, it arrived as entertainment. People paid for repeated encores of popular Western pieces because they enjoyed them. Commercial bands did not simply perform Western music; they created audiences for it. That, as much as any government policy, is how the new sound took hold.

This post is based on James Walsh, ‘The Tokyo Shich¨± Ongakukai: Commercial Bands and the Informal Spread of Western Music in Meiji Japan’, Japan Forum.

The post Encores and Entrepreneurs: how commercial bands taught Meiji Japan to love Western music appeared first on bajs.

Conventional scholarship has treated Kabuki under the Tenp¨­ Reforms mainly as an object of oppression, viewed through Tokugawa administrative and institutional history. The reforms, directed by Mizuno Tadakuni, the Chief Senior Councillor (R¨­j¨± Shuza), pulled the discussion in that direction. Yet the relationship between early modern Edo society and Kabuki was closer and stranger than that. Move past the purely political dimension and it becomes clear how particular plays and role-types (yakugara) led to the arrest of Danj¨±r¨­ VII, and what ¡®collective mentality¡¯ (sh¨±g¨­ shinsei) his performances stirred among the people of Edo. (He was performing under the name Ebiz¨­ at the time and is referred to here as Danj¨±r¨­ VII for consistency.)

Kagekiyo breaks out

In June of the thirteenth year of the Tenp¨­ era (1842), Torii Y¨­z¨­, Magistrate of the South Magistrate¡¯s Office (Minami-Machi Bugy¨­), sentenced Danj¨±r¨­ VII to banishment from Edo, beyond a ten-ri radius of about 40 kilometres. Just before the arrest, the Kawarazaki-za theatre had been staging Kagekiyo, one of the celebrated plays of the Kabuki J¨±hachiban. That performance was the direct trigger for his banishment.

Playing the warrior Kagekiyo, Danj¨±r¨­ VII tore through the wooden bars of his cell, shattering the symbols of authority and scattering armed soldiers in a display of fierce, stylised mie. This prison-break was the climax of the play. It offered the people of Edo a profound catharsis, a moment of release from the daily weight of oppression, at a time when they felt suffocated by the Bakufu¡¯s controls on ordinary life. The audience projected their own grievances onto Kagekiyo¡¯s struggle and vented, through the actor¡¯s body, a resistance to the regime they could not otherwise express.

The Shogunate arrested Danj¨±r¨­ VII and stopped the production at once, because the stage had begun to work as an instrument of political satire, rousing the collective emotions of the crowd. Inside the theatre, audience empathy and a spirit of resistance met and produced a shared, alternative value system, something the Shogunate saw as a dangerous movement threatening the foundations of its rule. The banishment of Danj¨±r¨­ VII was more than a matter of one actor. It was a confrontation over the representation of power between rulers and ruled, played out through the physical space of the theatre.

Luxury and the sumptuary laws

On 16 October 1842, six months before the banishment, the Shogunate issued a sweeping set of Sumptuary Laws (Shashi Kinshi-rei). Following the pattern of the Ky¨­h¨­ and Kansei Reforms, these nationwide edicts imposed strict controls on the daily life of every resident of Edo, from town officials, the town elders (machi-toshiyori), down to the poorest tenement dwellers. Their true purpose went beyond frugality. It was to harden the status order (mibun chitsujo) that lay at the core of the Tenp¨­ Reforms.

Danj¨±r¨­ VII¡¯s private life broke these edicts openly. He kept buying extravagant miniature doll furniture (³ó¾±²Ô²¹-»å¨­²µ³Ü), lacquered and carved in bright colours, and displayed it on scarlet felt carpets in his drawing rooms, claiming the pieces were ¡®gifts from anonymous townspeople¡¯. He owned objects far above his station: a small chest (ko-dansu) worked in gold paulownia crests using the intricate shakud¨­ nanako metal technique, elaborate iron daggers (kozuka), and finely made oak chests (karabitsu) and framed tablets.

These rules reached into the theatre as well. Convinced that ordinary props would not satisfy his audience, Danj¨±r¨­ VII used real, prohibited leather and iron armour on stage, along with ancestral netsuke (coral-root carvings) and inro decorated in high-relief lacquer (taka-makie inr¨­). For a Kabuki actor, who stood outside the ²õ³ó¾±-²Ô¨­-°ì¨­-²õ³ó¨­ (samurai-farmer-artisan-merchant) order of the Tokugawa system altogether, to parade martial armour and luxuries reserved for the samurai elite counted as a grave breach of the status order. He tried to comply after the edicts, pulling down part of his residence, but his conduct was judged an intolerable departure from his assigned rank, and his home was demolished in full.

The penalties reached well beyond Danj¨±r¨­ VII. Fines fell on a wide circle around him: the landlords and former neighbourhood heads (nanushi) who had failed in their duty of supervision, a Fukagawa pawnbroker who took in the doll furniture without registering it properly, and the second-hand dealers who handled his stage equipment. The crackdown shows what the Shogunate was really after. It meant to dismantle the whole consumer culture that had gathered around the actor, a culture in which people flaunted wealth with no regard for status. The message was a calculated warning, aimed at forcing the customs of Edo society as a whole back into line.

An alternative order

The suppression of Kabuki under the Tenp¨­ Reforms was more than a question of political policy. It grew out of the satire built into Danj¨±r¨­ VII¡¯s performances and the collective mentality of Edo society that answered them. The theatre he created became a space where social cohesion cut across class and occupation. When the loyalty of the audience (hiiki) locked onto his performance, the shared values of that space produced an alternative social order, one wholly distinct from the rigid, status-based hierarchy with the Tokugawa Shogun at its top. The Shogunate imposed a ten-ri banishment precisely because it saw that this theatrical domain threatened the established logic of rule.

The arrest and banishment of Danj¨±r¨­ VII was more than a punishment for luxury or for breaking regulations. It was a deliberate, forceful attempt by the state to sever the self-governing social networks that the theatre had built.

This post is adapted from Ryo Kimura, A Historical Study of Ichikawa Danj¨±r¨­ VII (Tokyo: Yoshikawa K¨­bunkan, 2014). Read more about the author¡¯s work at .

ÍâÍøÌìÌà the author

Kimura Ry¨­, PhD, is a theatre historian of early modern Japan specialising in the Kabuki tradition, the Ichikawa Danj¨±r¨­ lineage, and regional social networks. He is a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at Gifu Women¡¯s University and a Visiting Researcher at the Toyo Bunko. The author of two monographs on Ichikawa Danj¨±r¨­ VII and VIII, he uses digital humanities and regional archives to explore Edo-period cultural change.

The post [Guest Post] Breaking the Bars: Ichikawa Danj¨±r¨­ VII and the Tenp¨­ Reforms by Kimura Ry¨­ appeared first on bajs.

Except that boundary has never been as stable as it looks. And the ways Japanese writers are bending, ignoring, and playing with katakana conventions today reveal something far more interesting than spelling preferences. They expose how a writing system can become a battleground for questions about identity, belonging, and who gets to define what counts as “Japanese.”

Not just spelling games

Consider the word majika ¡ª a colloquial Japanese expression roughly meaning “seriously?” or “for real?” Under standard romanisation rules, you’d spell it just like that: m-a-j-i-k-a. But a trend among younger Japanese speakers flips the logic. They write it as magica ¡ª modelled on the English word “magic” ¡ª despite it having nothing to do with English and not being a borrowed word at all. The spelling pops up on product names, signage, advertising, social media. It’s playful, deliberate, and technically wrong by every established convention.

Peter Backhaus, who studied this phenomenon through brainstorming sessions with Japanese university students and a collection of public signs, What makes them revealing is the mechanism: writers are taking the orthographic rules normally used to romanise English loanwords from their katakana forms and running them in reverse, applying English spelling patterns to native Japanese vocabulary. The conventional script boundary ¡ª Roman alphabet for romanisation, katakana for loans, hiragana and kanji for native words ¡ª gets cheerfully scrambled.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a gimmick. But Backhaus draws out a subtler point. The fact that Japanese speakers can do this so readily ¡ª and that it feels natural enough to spread ¡ª suggests the phonetic boundary between English and Japanese is far less categorical than the strict script distinctions would imply. The normative system says these are separate domains. Actual practice says the borders are porous.

Writing a foreign word in the “wrong” script

If magica spellings blur the line from one direction, . She investigated what happens when loanwords normally written in katakana appear in hiragana instead ¡ª the script conventionally reserved for native Japanese words.

Through a survey of Japanese university students, Kunert found that reactions to this switch varied enormously depending on the word. Some loanwords written in hiragana struck respondents as perfectly natural; others felt jarring. The factors shaping these judgements turned out to be layered and sometimes surprising: how morphologically Japanese the word already felt, whether an established hiragana or kanji spelling already existed, how frequently people encountered the word, and even something close to synaesthesia ¡ª the visual impression certain characters produced and whether it matched the feel of the thing being described.

What emerges is a picture of script choice as something actively negotiated by individual readers and writers, not mechanically determined by a word’s origin. Writing a loanword in hiragana can function as a quiet claim that the word has been absorbed into Japanese, that it belongs. Conversely, the very presence of katakana around a word can reinforce its foreignness ¡ª not because the word is foreign in any meaningful sense, but because the script marks it that way. The assumed neat correspondence between katakana and foreign vocabulary, hiragana and native vocabulary, starts to look less like a natural fact and more like an ideology.

Katakana as social commentary

Wesley Robertson’s research shifts the lens from how words are written to . Analysing discussions on Yahoo! Chiebukuro and Girls Channel ¡ª two major Japanese online platforms ¡ª Robertson found that debates about katakana loanwords are rarely just about language. They become vehicles for characterising and evaluating the people who use those words.

In these online exchanges, using too many katakana loanwords might mark someone as pretentious, out of touch, or performatively cosmopolitan. Avoiding them might signal linguistic conservatism or nationalist sentiment. The words themselves become proxies for social identity: attitudes toward katakana index not just feelings about foreign influence on Japanese, but distinctions of class, generation, and self-presentation within Japanese society.

Robertson also examined how these debates appear ¡ª or rather, don’t appear ¡ª to foreign learners of Japanese, through analysis of the Reddit forum r/LearnJapanese. The layered social meanings that native speakers navigate intuitively remain largely invisible to learners, who tend to encounter katakana as a straightforward functional category. The gap highlights how much of what a script “means” lives not in the writing system itself but in the social knowledge surrounding it.

Who tells the story in an English textbook?

Naoko Hosokawa’s contribution traces Examining English-language textbooks used in Japanese compulsory education, she identified a gradual trend: character names that were once written in the Roman alphabet are increasingly rendered in katakana, regardless of whether the character is Japanese or foreign. This runs parallel to a broader change in which textbook narratives have moved their settings from the United States to Japan, with Japanese characters taking on greater prominence.

On the surface, using katakana for names in an English textbook seems counterintuitive ¡ª why not use the alphabet for the language you’re trying to teach? But Hosokawa argues the shift reflects a deeper reorientation of who the principal storyteller is. Katakana here functions as a cultural marker, positioning the narrative perspective as Japanese. The script choice reshapes agency in the learning environment, foregrounding Japanese identity rather than framing English as something accessed through an external, English-speaking world.

Why spelling matters

What connects all of these studies is a refusal to treat script as simply technical ¡ª a set of rules you either follow correctly or get wrong. The conventional account of Japanese writing assigns each script a domain: kanji and hiragana for native and Sino-Japanese vocabulary, katakana for loanwords, Roman letters for romanisation. Deviations are errors. But, , the research gathered here demonstrates that those deviations are where the interesting social work happens, revealing that orthographic variation ultimately reflects social transformation. Every time a writer chooses katakana where hiragana might go, or hiragana where katakana is expected, or English spelling where standard romanisation should apply, they’re doing something with meaning ¡ª playing with foreignness and domesticity, marking belonging or distance, performing identity or subverting expectations.

This matters beyond Japanese linguistics. Writing systems everywhere carry ideological weight, but it’s often invisible precisely because it’s been naturalised ¡ª we learn the rules as children and stop seeing them as choices. Japanese, with its multiple scripts operating in parallel, makes that process of choice unusually visible. Katakana sits at the intersection of globalisation, national identity, and the everyday creativity of ordinary language users. Paying attention to how it moves tells us something not just about Japanese, but about how all writing systems quietly shape the way we think about who we are.

This post is based on the Volume 8, Issue 2 Special Issue “Deconstructing Katakana” edited by Blai Guarn¨¦ and Naoko Hosokawa (2026):

The post What Katakana Reveals ÍâÍøÌìÌà Japanese Society appeared first on bajs.

Our study, based on 22 interviews and 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, asks how that shift in perception occurred. How does an invisible, persistent threat come to feel first urgent, then tedious, then unremarkable? We approach this question through the lens of vigilance, the study of how human attention is socially and culturally shaped and linked to societal goals. We ask how the very texture of daily urban life in Tokyo shaped pandemic sensitivities.

While almost all readers will have had similar experiences, Japan is particularly interesting for finding answers to these questions. There were no legal lockdowns, no mask mandates, only recommendations and repeated calls for jishuku (self-restraint). Compliance was nonetheless high, for reasons variously attributed to communitarian discipline, social pressure, or a sense among citizens that the state wasn¡¯t doing enough on its own. Thus, resilience against the pandemic depended heavily on citizens¡¯ vigilance in daily life.

Tracing experiences: From fear to indifference

In the early months of 2020, our research participants became concerned about the medical risks of COVID-19, as illustrated by Haruka¡¯s story. The virus was new, its infection pathways unclear, and the symptoms reported in the news were alarming. Part of what made this phase frightening was that nobody quite knew how scared to be or what to even look out for.

After the first state of emergency was lifted in late May 2020 and public spaces reopened, a different kind of risk began to emerge: the social risk of being seen as the person who caught it, or, worse, as the one who behaves carelessly. As one participant noted, the scary part wasn¡¯t the illness. It was the prospect of standing before an after-school club and having to explain yourself for getting the club¡¯s activities cancelled because everyone had become a ¡°close contact¡± because of you.

In 2021, Tokyo spent 196 of 272 days under a state of emergency. This had worn down participants¡¯ mental resistance, and the psychological risks of the pandemic became apparent to them. To cope, they began pulling their masks off when they got off the train, walking the empty stretch home unmasked even though that still seemed shameful, because constant precautions were grinding them down. Most pandemic precautionary practices were still in place due to perceived social or medical risks, but exceptions were quietly carved out to address psychological stress.

Starting in 2022, participants frequently heard from friends who had been infected and recovered quickly. At that point, the virus had mutated into something more transmissible but less severe, and vaccines were further reducing the severity. Through this experience, COVID-19 became just another everyday risk, on par with catching a cold for most participants. The medical risk was still there, as was part of the social and psychological risk, but alertness towards them had waned, marking the practical end of the pandemic for most people.

Four factors influencing pandemic sensitivities

Governments everywhere called for constant vigilance during the pandemic. But staying alert to a threat you cannot see, day after day, for years, is not something humans do well on their own. We depend on social and technical support systems¡ªcultures of vigilance¡ªthat govern how best to distribute human attention, e.g. by assigning guard duties. With this analytical framework, we can see four factors that influenced attention to the pandemic.

Practical knowledge: Hearing about a disease on the news kept it abstract. Catching it or experiencing someone close to you catching it and recovering made it concrete. As one participant put it plainly, it was the experience of people around her getting sick that finally changed how she perceived the illness. In the beginning, the anxiety directed all attention towards the invisible threat, and when practical pandemic literacy increased through direct exposure, alertness waned.

Rhythm: Pandemic life had a beat, formed by infection waves, states of emergency, and the accompanying news coverage. So did the school year, the fiscal year, Obon, and the New Year holiday. People learned to read the cadence of these events and the infections that followed, adjusting attention accordingly. Some participants used the word kugiri (junctions) for these breakpoints, the natural seams of life in Japan that gave shape and predictability to rising and falling case numbers. Once they got used to the pandemic¡¯s ostinato¡ªits endlessly repeating pattern of waxing and waning waves¡ªthey were lulled into a sense of safety, requiring less attention over time.

Narrative diversification: Early on, all the messages lined up: Stay home. Restrain yourself. Avoid the 3Cs. Later, the decision not to declare any further states of emergency, despite record case numbers in late 2021 and 2022, said the quiet part out loud: get used to it¡ªsomething that was only reluctantly accepted at the time by the general public. However, one participant returned from a trip abroad and found himself genuinely puzzled as to why everyone in Tokyo was still masking. Once other pandemic realities became more visible, the necessity of constant vigilance came into question.

Materiality: The pandemic had a material impact on daily life: partitions in cafes, alcohol pumps at every entrance, floor markers showing where to stand, signage everywhere. When all of this was new, it easily grabbed attention. As it aged, sun-bleached and dog-eared, it instead literally marked the fading of importance. Their disappearance highlights how even these small things have a marked influence on how attention to abstract risks is embedded in only subconsciously perceived elements of daily life.

Vigilance? Why it matters beyond the pandemic

What our participants¡¯ stories show is that pandemic sensitivities were shaped less by factual knowledge of the virus than by what people practically experienced, perceived, and felt in their daily lives.

The mechanisms the study describes through the framework of the cultures of vigilance aren¡¯t specific to pandemics. They are immediately relevant to understanding how we perceive, respond to, and remain resilient to different types of hazards. Using these mechanisms, we can ask more precise questions about why¡ªor why not¡ªwe are able to pay attention to certain kinds of risks. This may help improve the governance of vigilance to build resilience.

As a closing thought, consider climate change. Summers have grown hotter each year, yet the response follows a familiar pattern: alarm during record-breaking heat waves, followed by a return to routine once the season passes. The risks are invisible most days, persistent, dramatised only by sporadic acute events, surrounded by a fractured set of narratives¡ªyet deeply embedded in the very texture of daily life. If a pandemic can teach us anything about how attention fades, perhaps it can also help us understand how to modulate our attention¡ªand how the very texture of daily life affects this process¡ªto stay resilient in the face of slow crises that are still unfolding.

This post is based on Kramer, Paul J., and Christoph Schimkowsky. 2026. ¡°Staying Vigilant during Times of Crisis: What Shapes COVID-19 Pandemic Sensitivities?¡±?Japan Forum, June, 1¨C27.

The post How Tokyo Learned to Live with COVID-19: Vigilance, Habit and the Texture of Daily Life appeared first on bajs.

Johnny & Associates held enormous cultural and economic power. Its performers dominated television, music, and advertising, shaping the image of male idols for generations. Questioning such an institution was difficult, almost unthinkable. Most people assumed nothing could be done. It felt distant, as if it belonged to a different world, separate from their own lives, and that distance made it easier to remain passive. Silence, in that sense, was not always a deliberate choice.

As the allegations gained wider media attention in 2023, another pattern emerged. Many reports and commentaries suggested that a BBC documentary had triggered the Japanese media¡¯s sudden interest in the case. The idea that change comes from external pressure, or gaiatsu (ÍâˆR), is a familiar one in Japan. It captures a common attitude. Problems that go unaddressed at home can suddenly become visible once they are recognised from abroad. People often look for external validation to lend legitimacy to concerns that had long existed at home but were never openly acknowledged. So has the coverage actually changed the system that allowed the silence to continue?

Answering that requires looking at a kind of social force that shapes how people notice, respond to, and sometimes ignore difficult issues in Japan. No single person or institution controls it, and it is written into no law, yet it is widely shared and quietly powerful. At its best it keeps the peace, letting people get along without constant conflict. The same force can also make certain experiences hard to acknowledge, especially when they unsettle what is already accepted. In those moments silence becomes the easier option. People are not always indifferent. Often they lack the information, the language, or the space to respond.

This is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Similar dynamics appear in many societies. In Japan, though, they often take subtler forms. Communication leans heavily on context, implication, and what is left unsaid, and the mood of an exchange can shift quickly. Reading the atmosphere becomes an essential skill. One consequence is that silence itself carries meaning and tends to reinforce itself. To understand it, you have to watch how people interact day to day, verbally and nonverbally. It shows up in major scandals and in small everyday moments alike: a hesitation before speaking, a topic quickly changed, a concern left unvoiced, the quiet habit of taking our cue from those around us. These moments set what counts as normal and what is treated as beyond question. Some would call this ¡®culture¡¯, since the behaviours behind it are long-established and hard to change. But that framing risks making it seem inevitable.

If these patterns are tied to real harm and suffering, they should not be accepted as given. They need to be examined and, where necessary, challenged.

The force that kept people silent in the Kitagawa case may still be at work. The notion that foreign pressure prompted change points to something beyond a reliance on outside validation. It reveals a hierarchy of credibility, in which voices from Europe or North America carry more authority than domestic ones. That, in turn, can discourage people in Japan from speaking out until an issue has been recognised elsewhere, or named as a problem by authoritative outsiders.

In 2025, some victims said that, although many issues remain unresolved, the momentum has faded. As one put it, ¡®For a time, we were able to ride the ¡°black ships¡± of the BBC and the United Nations, but now we find ourselves on nothing more than a small raft.¡¯ Their concern is no longer only the number of victims compensated. It is also how to stop cases of child sexual abuse like these from recurring. They press for real internal reform and greater transparency within the management company. The problem runs deeper still. Even after the case was widely reported, little changed in the web of relationships that held it in place, among government and business, the media and corporations, government and the media, and performers and the companies that managed them.

By early 2026, more than 1,000 people had come forward as victims in the Kitagawa case. Of these, more than 550 had accepted the terms offered by SMILE-UP., the company set up to provide redress. The company posts figures and updates on the process on its website, yet some victims see no sign of sincerity or real improvement. Former performers have filed lawsuits in the United States (2024) and Japan (2025), seeking damages tied to questions of liability. SMILE-UP. filed its own suit in Tokyo in 2025, seeking confirmation that it owes no damages to three people who rejected the compensation framework and one who accepted it but disputed the amount. Both sides are now suing each other over compensation.

Those accounts show that the same force has shaped the case for a long time and still touches some people today. It will keep doing so until we see its effect on them and on ourselves. The lesson here points inward as much as outward, to institutions and to our own habits. Silence is rarely imposed from the top down. It is reproduced through everyday choices and assumptions. Seeing this is not about blaming individuals. It is about recognising how easily anyone can become part of a system that discourages speaking out. Two questions matter, then. Why did people stay silent in the past, and what conditions would let them speak, and be heard, now? Changing those conditions may be slow and hard.

Without that effort, the same patterns will repeat, and other voices will go unheard.

This post is based on Nishikawa, Yukiko. 2026. ¡®The Architecture of Complicity: Media, Power and Conspiracy of Silence in the Johnny Kitagawa Sexual Abuse Case.¡¯ Japan Forum, March, 1¨C23. .

The post Many People Knew, But No One Said Anything: The Silence Around the Kitagawa Case appeared first on bajs.

She was on her way to the first summer camp of Japan¡¯s women¡¯s liberation movement, ¨±man ribu. On the train to Nagano she handed flyers to fellow passengers. At Nagano station she got off, marched through the city centre for two hours, then continued to the camp. Yonezu was 23 years old. Over the next decade, her insistence on making her disabled body visible within feminist spaces would push the movement towards a reckoning with questions it had barely begun to ask.

Barricades and blind spots

Three years earlier, Yonezu had enrolled at Tama Arts University to study design, a profession she could pursue without physical limitations. She arrived at a campus about to explode. In January 1969, students barricaded all entrances to protest a planned relocation, and the occupation lasted nine months.

For Yonezu, the barricades were a revelation. She had grown up in 1950s Japan, where a disabled child was treated as a mark of ancestral karma or familial shame. She had never spoken about her disability with anyone. Behind the barricades, students talked openly about what angered them. ¡®It was the first time that I realised that although I have a bad leg and people stare at me and all kinds of things, it was not my fault.¡¯

But these revolutionary spaces also reproduced the hierarchies they claimed to oppose. Male activists divided women into workers and love interests. One incident crystallised the contradiction. When male students tried to use toilets that women had cleaned (the men having destroyed others as a ¡®demonstration of strength¡¯), Yonezu¡¯s classmate Mori Setsuko furiously declared the space women-only. Yonezu¡¯s own response troubled her more. Her body had begun to gesture the male students through, a reflexive »å¨­³ú´Ç (¡®here you go¡¯), before her mind could intervene. Years of socialised femininity had inscribed a deference that operated below conscious thought. Liberation, she realised, meant working on the body as well as the mind.

When riot police cleared the barricades in October 1969, male students returned to mainstream careers. Women had no such path prepared. Yonezu and other female activists formed their own groups, eventually joining the growing ribu movement, which aimed to dismantle the family system and gendered division of labour that underpinned Japanese capitalism.

Cropped at the waist

At the 1971 summer camp, Yonezu¡¯s visibility strategy was deliberate. Disabled people in Japan were stared at as spectacle while remaining invisible as political subjects. She inverted this, demanding attention on her own terms as a disabled activist. During the camp she undressed alongside other women, an experience she later wrote about. But a weekly magazine published a nude photograph of her from the camp, cropped at the waist to remove her disabled leg. Her disability had been amputated from the frame.

Her published response went beyond personal anger. She drew a sharp distinction between indifference and liberation. ¡®Liberation is not the same as becoming indifferent,¡¯ she wrote. Ceasing to feel pain at the gaze of others was not freedom. It was the numbing of internalised oppression. If the ¡®ugliness¡¯ attributed to her body derived from aesthetic norms shared by both viewer and viewed, then challenging those norms required confronting the value system itself.

Three years later, Yonezu turned this logic outward. She sprayed red paint on the security glass protecting the Mona Lisa during its Tokyo exhibition, shouting ‘You are excluding the disabled!’ The exhibition had restricted disabled visitors to a single day to reduce costs. She was arrested, detained for a month, and fined 3,000 yen. The National Museum subsequently designated specific days for disabled visitors.

Feminists and disability activists talked past each other

The confrontation that reshaped °ù¾±²ú³Ü¡¯²õ politics came over Japan¡¯s Eugenic Protection Law (EPL). Enacted in 1948 and drawing on wartime eugenic legislation, the EPL did two things at once. It permitted abortion under specified conditions, most significantly for ¡®economic reasons¡¯, providing the legal basis for most abortions in post-war Japan. At the same time, it authorised the sterilisation of people diagnosed with hereditary disabilities or mental illness, often without consent. Approximately 16,500 people were subjected to eugenic sterilisations between 1949 and 1996.

When conservatives moved to revise the EPL in 1972, proposing to remove the economic reasons clause while adding a ¡®foetal clause¡¯ enabling abortion based on detected disability, ribu campaigned under the slogan ¡®A woman decides whether to have a baby or not.¡¯

Disability activists, led by the radical cerebral palsy group Aoi shiba no kai, were furious. If women claimed the right to decide while the foetal clause allowed selecting against disabled foetuses, then ¡®women¡¯s freedom¡¯ amounted to freedom to eliminate disabled lives. Yonezu understood both sides. She later reflected: ¡®What the women¡¯s movement meant ¡­ is that the state should not control women. However, I think now that we should have been a little more aware that ¡­ it sounded as if it was a woman¡¯s decision to choose whether or not to have children with disabilities.¡¯

Through painful, sustained dialogue, ribu revised its slogan to ¡®For a society where we can give birth! Where we want to give birth!¡¯ (Umeru shakai wo! Umitai shakai wo!). Yonezu¡¯s position at the intersection of both movements let her see what each missed on its own. The economic reasons clause and the foetal clause were joint mechanisms of the same logic: the state regulating bodies according to their perceived productive value. A gender-only analysis could not explain why the state simultaneously enabled abortion for some women and sterilised others. Only by holding gender and disability in view at the same time did the underlying structure become visible.

What one body made inseparable

When conservative forces again moved to revise the EPL in 1982, Yonezu co-founded the ¡®82 Liaison Group to Block the Revision of the Eugenic Protection Law¡¯, later renamed SOSHIREN. Its founding principles articulated what a decade of coalition-building had produced: the abolition of the EPL and the decriminalisation of abortion as a single, inseparable demand.

The arc of Yonezu¡¯s activism, from the barricades to the T-shirt to the Mona Lisa to SOSHIREN, traces how one person¡¯s embodied experience of overlapping oppressions generated political insights that reshaped entire movements. Her body, marked by both gendered subordination and disability stigma, was the ground from which she articulated connections that neither feminism nor the disability movement could see alone. Wherever reproductive policy operates through interlocking logics of gender and disability, that perspective remains indispensable.

This post is based on A. V. Vittinghoff, ¡®”Look at me!”: Yonezu Tomoko and the politics of intersectionality in post-war Japan¡¯, Japan Forum, ahead of print. .

The post ¡®Look at Me!¡¯: Yonezu Tomoko and the Politics of Being Seen appeared first on bajs.

These classes exist because of a gap, not a plan. A lack of public funding, a drive to cut costs, and a shortage of professional teachers created the conditions for volunteers to step in. Their unpaid labour has reinforced a common assumption: that any native speaker can teach their language to foreigners. This is one reason why the professionalism of certified language teachers is so often undervalued, with many qualified teachers working under insecure conditions.

Since the mid-1980s, the number of migrants in Japan has risen steadily, with only a brief dip during the COVID-19 pandemic. Falling birth rates and an ageing population have left many sectors facing severe labour shortages. Foreign workers are expected to fill the gap, but many arrive with little or no Japanese and generally have no opportunity to learn, except through volunteer-run local classes.

To address this, the ¡®Act on the Promotion of Japanese Language Education¡¯ was introduced in 2019, establishing clear roles for professional language teachers, coordinators, and volunteers as support staff. In practice, however, this intended division of labour often conflicts with conditions on the ground. Figures from 2021 tell the story plainly: about 50% of Japanese language teachers in local communities are volunteers, around 40% are part-time, and only 10% are full-time.

One common route into language support is through training courses offered by local authorities, which equip volunteers with basic knowledge of Japanese grammar and teaching technique. But research has revealed a tension at the heart of this arrangement: the more enthusiastic non-specialist volunteers are about helping foreign residents learn Japanese, the more foreign residents may become conscious and anxious about their lack of Japanese proficiency.

The difficult working conditions faced by many foreign workers make systematic, grammar-focused learning, the kind that requires preparation and follow-up, hard to sustain. To meet their needs, broad knowledge about teaching methods and teaching expertise are required.

At the same time, not all volunteers primarily want to act as teachers. Interviews reveal a wide range of motivations:

¡®I wanted to pursue a meaningful, human-like activity alongside my very demanding and exhausting job.¡¯ / ¡®After my retirement, I looked for a meaningful activity I could continue.¡¯ / ¡®I like meeting people and have many hobbies. Japanese language support is one of them.¡¯ / ¡®I was interested in international exchange before.¡¯ / ¡®I looked for an activity to give back to society, somehow the favours and help I had received when my husband died.¡¯ / ¡®My daughter had stayed abroad before.¡¯

This brings us to the promise, and the tension, of local Japanese classes. The variety of participants makes them a distinctive kind of space: a third place beyond work and family, a site where people can connect with the wider community, a place to be and belong. But this potential is hard to realise when the focus stays locked on school-like teaching.

There is nothing inherently wrong with language instruction. Many volunteers enjoy teaching, and many migrants expect to be taught. For young labour migrants especially, passing the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test offers tangible advantages for work in Japan and for job searches after returning home. Many seek focused test preparation and expect professional guidance from their ¡®teachers¡¯.

The problem is one of framing. When too much emphasis falls on formal instruction, migrants come to be seen primarily as non-native speakers rather than as fellow community members. And volunteers who came hoping to engage with foreign residents and develop new activities may find themselves pushed into a teaching role they never wanted.

For the diversity of local Japanese classes to flourish, migrants need to be recognised as active members of the community. The Basic Surveys on Foreign Residents, carried out annually by the Immigration Services Agency, offer valuable insight here. The 2024 survey found that the longer foreign residents plan to stay in Japan, the greater the proportion who wish to participate in local activities. Some 26.5% of respondents wanted to join club activities with people who share similar hobbies. Another 21.1% were interested in volunteer work such as interpretation and community clean-ups. And 12.0% expressed interest in joining neighbourhood or local community associations.

But when asked about obstacles to social participation, the most common answer was stark: ¡®not knowing what activities are available¡¯.

Some communities are already finding creative responses. In Soja City, Okayama Prefecture, the local authority has developed a programme training foreign residents to become ¡®Foreign Disaster Prevention Leaders¡¯, enabling them to work alongside local government and provide self-help and mutual aid in emergencies. The initiative is striking because it inverts the usual dynamic: foreign residents are no longer positioned as people who receive help, but as people who give it.

Volunteering in local Japanese-language support is, indeed, a double-edged sword. But the people who should not be criticised are the volunteers themselves. The real problem is structural. In the current arrangement, the potential of both volunteers and migrants remains underused. For this to change, municipalities need to hire and adequately compensate professional Japanese teachers. With that foundation in place, civil actors, both foreign and Japanese, might develop their potential and participate in activities driven by their own interests, fostering connections that move beyond the supporting-and-supported dynamic that currently defines too many of these spaces.

This post is based on Gildenhard, Bettina. 2026. ¡°Volunteering in Local Japanese Classes ¨C Insights into a Microcosm between Personal Initiatives, National Language Policies and the Quest for Professionalism.¡±?Japan Forum, April, 1¨C25. doi:10.1080/09555803.2026.2656200. Read more

The post Volunteering in Local Japanese Classes: A Double-Edged Sword? appeared first on bajs.

The walled-in town in Murakami Haruki¡¯s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2024) looks, at first glance, like a refuge. Its walls curve gently, like a binding ribbon. Social harmony is absolute. No one quarrels, no one suffers, no one ages. Residents are assigned roles and carry them out without friction. For the novel¡¯s narrator, a forty-year-old man still haunted by the disappearance of his teenage love twenty-three years earlier, the town promises exactly what nostalgia always promises: that the past can be preserved whole, that loss can be undone. The girl he loved claimed her ¡®real self¡¯ lived inside this town, and so the town becomes the place where he might find her again.

But perfection has a price. To enter, you must surrender your shadow, and along with it your memories, your emotions, and your capacity to change. The girl is there, identical in appearance, but she does not remember him. She is a shell fashioned from yearning, someone to sit beside but never speak to. The town¡¯s flawless surface conceals a void. Its stability costs its residents the things the narrator came looking for.

Scholars have often treated nostalgia in Murakami¡¯s fiction as a dead end, a symptom of disillusionment and the inability to process history. The narrator initially seems to confirm these readings. For over two decades, he has been frozen in place. He keeps the girl¡¯s letters, written in turquoise-blue ink, and her white gauze handkerchief. He rereads them obsessively, lamenting the summer when he was seventeen. He cannot see the point of being with anyone else.

What the sociologist Fred Davis calls ¡®Simple Nostalgia¡¯ captures this condition well: an unexamined, emotionally driven conviction that the past was simply better. At this level, nostalgia downplays hardship, idealises what is gone, and offers no way forward. The narrator¡¯s retreat into the walled town is Simple Nostalgia made architectural, a timeless utopia where no one ages, no one grieves, and no one remembers.

The turning point arrives outside the town, in a modest, pre-digital library in a provincial Japanese town called Z**. The Z** Town Library is everything the walled town is not. Where the town demands conformity and the surrender of personal history, the library is intimate, unregulated, and built from one man¡¯s private grief.

That man is Mr Koyasu, the library¡¯s former director, who becomes the narrator¡¯s mentor. Koyasu has also lost someone: his wife Miri. But he has not retreated into timelessness. He has woven Miri¡¯s memory into a continuing life, and he recognises that his love for her, for all its pain, still sustains him. Under his influence, the narrator begins to do something he has resisted for decades. He questions his own memories. Was his attachment to the girl a mature bond, or a teenage infatuation he never outgrew? Was the town a sanctuary, or a prison he built for himself?

This is what Davis calls ¡®Reflexive Nostalgia¡¯, the moment when the rose-tinted lens cracks and a person starts comparing the idealised past with present reality. It is uncomfortable but also the beginning of movement.

The narrator¡¯s deepening relationship with a woman who runs a local caf¨¦ pushes this further. She asks him to wait for her, just as the girl once did, and the echo forces him to ask what he has been waiting for all this time. Whether he ever really understood what it was. Past and present begin to overlap rather than oppose each other. The narrator realises he is no longer seventeen. What he wants now is something warmer and more uncertain: the gentle warmth beneath another person¡¯s defensive wall, the rhythmic beat of a heart pulsing beneath.

This personal journey carries broader resonances. Murakami has described the tension between individuals and oppressive social structures as a confrontation with a ¡®wall of the system,¡¯ a phrase he uses in Novelist as a Vocation when discussing Japan¡¯s education system, but which echoes throughout his fiction. The walled-in town, read in this light, becomes more than one man¡¯s psychological refuge. It becomes a figure for any structure that holds together by keeping memory out.

The parallel with postwar Japan is hard to miss. The nation¡¯s rapid reconstruction after 1945 delivered extraordinary prosperity, but it also involved what some historians have described as a prescriptive forgetting, an implicit agreement not to look too closely at the continuities between wartime and postwar structures. Beneath the surface of a conflict-free, harmonious, modern society lay organisational pillars firmly planted in the unexamined past. The town¡¯s demand that residents relinquish their shadows mirrors this dynamic: peace and order, but at the cost of historical consciousness.

But the novel places its alternative in a small, handmade space. The Z** Town Library, informal, personal, managed in a pre-digital way and free from institutional oversight, might be what Murakami envisions as a ¡®space for individual recovery,¡¯ a place apart from hierarchy, efficiency, and bullying. In the novel¡¯s logic, it is within such spaces that people can dust off their memories, let in fresh air, and begin the slow work of constructing a self that holds together across time.

In the final chapters, the narrator returns to the walled town. This time he is not seeking refuge. He says goodbye to the girl, recognising her at last as a figure the town prepared for him rather than the person he lost. And then he does something no protagonist in Murakami¡¯s earlier variations of this story has managed. He blows out the candle and leaves. Not through the prescribed route, the pool that swallowed previous characters into nothingness, but on his own terms.

To leave the town is to accept that the past cannot be lived in, only revisited. A backward glance that steadies you for what comes next.

The narrator steps out. The wall stays. But time, at last, begins to flow again.

This post is based on Ziwei Xuan, ¡®The Ambivalent Utopia: Layers of Nostalgia and Memory in Murakami Haruki¡¯s The City and Its Uncertain Walls,¡¯ Japan Forum. Read the full article [].

The post Behind the Perfect Wall: Murakami Haruki’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls appeared first on bajs.

The answer that came back most often was a familiar phrase: sh¨­shi k¨­reika (ÉÙ×Ó¸ßýh»¯)¡ª low birth rate, aging population. It topped the list, ahead of economic concerns, pension anxieties, poverty, and even constitutional reform. On its face, this is unsurprising. Japan’s demographic trajectory has been for decades. Fewer babies, more elderly, a shrinking workforce ¡ª the math is grim and well known.

But here’s what’s interesting. When you dig into how people talked about sh¨­shi k¨­reika ¡ª what they folded into it, what they connected it to, what frustrations they packed inside those five characters ¡ª the phrase starts to look less like a demographic concern and more like a shorthand for a much wider set of anxieties. Anxieties that are, at their core, about .

Gender (in)equality didn’t appear

The survey was open-ended and over 30,000 people throughout Japan participated. But across all responses, phrases directly naming gender inequality barely registered. Terms like?danjo by¨­d¨­?(gender equality) or?jendaa gyappu?(gender gap) appeared only a handful of times.

This is, on the face of it, extraordinary. Few countries have thrown more at . The Equal Employment Opportunity Law arrived in 1986. The Basic Act for Gender Equal Society followed in 1999. Womenomics became a headline policy brand under the Abe administration. have been published, targets set, slogans coined. For nearly four decades, “gender equality” has been an explicit item on the national agenda.

And yet, when 30,000 ordinary people were asked what keeps them up at night, almost none of them reached for the phrase. Gender inequality wasn’t rejected. It was simply absent, as though the entire policy vocabulary had failed to take root in everyday conversation.

This absence is telling. Not because Japanese people don’t care about gender ¡ª the survey responses make clear that many do ¡ª but because the way they express that concern is indirect, bundled into the more socially legible language of demographic crisis.

What people actually said

The word gender (danjo) in Japanese is made up of two words: male/man (dan or otoko) and female/woman (jo or ´Ç²Ô¡¯²Ô²¹). A keyword search for on’na (womanÅ®) and otoko (manÄÐ) across the responses revealed 185 and 96 instances respectively. When those responses were examined closely, three clusters emerged: discrimination, gender inequality, and women’s participation in society. The concerns were real and specific ¡ª but they were almost always attached to sh¨­shi k¨­reika.

A woman in her fifties from the Kanto area wrote that “measures to counter the declining birthrate” were the most pressing issue, then linked this to “pension issues, gender equality, work style reform, the implementation of optional separate surnames for married couples, and economic revitalization.” She concluded that efforts were now “too late” ¡ª nothing had been done for thirty years.

A man in his thirties from Kyushu recognized that while Japan advocates for “correction of the gender gap,” women still find it nearly impossible to take maternity leave without consequence, and men face no real solution for the increased burden that falls on them. His conclusion: the employment system itself needs to change.

A woman in her twenties from Kanto was blunter. Her most pressing issue was the “gender gap.” She added: “This country is finished. I don’t want to have children in a country like this.”

Blaming women

Some responses revealed a more troubling logic. A man in his sixties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region wrote: “I believe that the root of the low birthrate and aging population problem lies in women’s advancement in society. As women have become financially independent with jobs, they are marrying later and remaining unmarried, and the birth rate is declining.”

He was not alone. Multiple respondents ¡ª men and women ¡ª framed women’s entry into the workforce as a direct cause of demographic decline. A woman in her twenties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region said she was “against the movement to encourage women to play an active role in society.” Women working, in this framing, means women not bearing children. The blame lands squarely on women’s shoulders, while the structural conditions that make combining work and family nearly impossible ¡ª long hours, absent fathers, inadequate childcare ¡ª go unmentioned.

Other respondents pushed back. One young woman from Kanto asked pointedly: “What has the government, which is asking women to have children, done for pregnant women? Does it mean that if you want to work, you don’t want to have children? If you want to have children, do you have to give up your career?” She described a society that demands women contribute to reversing demographic decline while offering them little structural kindness in return.

An idiom of distress

What emerges from these responses is a picture of sh¨­shi k¨­reika functioning as something more than a demographic descriptor. It operates as what anthropologists call an “idiom of distress” ¡ª a culturally resonant shorthand that gives voice to to articulate directly. The phrase captures not just the literal reality of fewer children and an aging population, but a tangle of frustrations about stagnant gender roles, impossible work-life trade-offs, inadequate policy responses, and a social contract that no longer holds.

Japan offers the most generous paid paternity leave in the OECD nations ¡ª 52 weeks. Yet in 2021, who took any leave at all took less than a month. Company managers, often described as “Sh¨­wa era type men supported by full-time housewives,” simply cannot comprehend why a working man would step away. The policy exists. The culture hasn’t caught up.

This gap ¡ª between policy and practice, between aspiration and reality ¡ª is precisely what sh¨­shi k¨­reika encodes. Gender inequality isn’t absent from public consciousness. It’s hiding in plain sight, folded into the most voiced concern in the country. Until policymakers recognize that the links between demographic crisis and the gender crisis, very little will likely change.

This post is based on Charles D. Crabtree, Paul Christensen, Tom Phuong Le, Charles T. McClean, Lauren McKee, and Cindi SturtzSreetharan, ‘Demographic decline as an idiom of distress: Rethinking gender (In)equality in Japan,’ Japan Forum (2026). Read the full article .

The post Sh¨­shi k¨­reika, demographic decline, and gender inequality in Japan appeared first on bajs.