Radhabinod Pal was an Indian jurist who achieved international fame as the judge representing India at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and dissented from the majority opinion, holding that all Japanese “Class A” war criminals were not guilty of any of the charges brought against them. In postwar Japanese politics, right-wing polemicists have repeatedly utilized his dissenting judgment in their political propaganda aimed at refuting the Tokyo trial’s majority judgment and justifying Japan’s aggression, gradually elevating this controversial lawyer from India to a national symbol of historical revisionism. Many questions have been raised about how to appropriately assess Pal’s dissenting judgment and Pal himself. Were the arguments in Pal’s judgment sound? Why did he submit such a bold dissenting opinion? What was the political context? More fundamentally, why and how did the Allies ever nominate such a lawyer as a judge for a tribunal of such great political importance? How should his dissent be situated within the context of modern Asian history and the development of international criminal justice? What social and political circumstances in Japan thrust him into such a prominent position? Many of these questions remain unanswered, while some have been misinterpreted. This book proposes answers to many of them and presents a critique of the persistent revisionist denial of war responsibility in the Japanese postwar right-wing movement.

Japan is a mix of the old and the new, traditional and modern, and old fashion and innovative. It has traveled the road to a modern destination without totally losing sight of its traditions and values. Although some in Japan lament the passing of old ways, Japan has held on to a reasonable amount of its traditions and values. This is easier to find in its arts and crafts and its literature and films as well as in its social habits. This book will introduce the broad sweep of people, events, and trends, including the successes and failures, of postwar Japan. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Japan.

The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today’s dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for “the people.” To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered in a world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy. Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today’s tempests.

"Book Abstract and Keywords: The study of Japanese politics has flourished over the past several decades. This Handbook provides a state-of-the-field overview for students and researchers of Japanese. The volume also serves to introduce Japanese politics to readers less familiar with Japan. In addition, the volume has a theme of "evaluating Japan's democracy." Taken as a whole, the volume provides a positive evaluation of the state of Japan's democracy. The volume is divided into two parts, roughly corresponding to domestic Japanese politics and Japan's international politics. Within the domestic politics part, there are four distinct sections: "Domestic Political Actors and Institutions," covering the Japanese Constitution, electoral systems, prime minister, Diet, bureaucracy, judiciary, and local government; "Political Parties and Coalitions," covering the Liberal Democratic Party, coalition government, Kōmeitō, and the political opposition; "Policymaking and the Public," covering the policymaking process, public opinion, civil society, and populism; and, "Political Economy and Social Policy," covering industrial, energy, social welfare, agricultural, monetary, and immigration policies, as well as social inequality. In the international relations part, there are four sections: "International Relations Frameworks," covering grand strategy, international organizations, and international status; "International Political Economy," covering trade, finance, foreign direct investment, the environment, economic regionalism, and the linkage between security and economics; "International Security," covering remilitarization, global and regional security multilateralism, nuclear nonproliferation, naval power, space security, and cybersecurity; and, "Foreign Relations" covering Japan's relations with the United States, China, South Korea, ASEAN, India, the European Union, and Russia. Keywords: international relations, comparative politics, democracy, international order, alliances, space security, elections, Liberal Democratic Party, multilateralism, remilitarization, international organizations, populism, civil society, coalitions, political parties, trade, finance monetary policy, foreign direct investment, cybersecurity"--

Challenges the persistent orthodoxies of the Tokyo tribunal and provides a new framework for evaluating the trial, revealing its importance to international jurisprudence.

While the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg has been at the centre of scholarly attention, the Tokyo Tribunal has for decades been largely neglected. This is surprising insofar as this tribunal was a well-organized Allied endeavour and prefigured the international courts and tribunals of our day. Eleven national teams were sent to Tokyo between 1946 and 1948 to bring about justice in the aftermath of the Pacific War. This volume offers an innovative approach to the Tokyo Tribunal as an arena of transcultural engagement. It contextualizes legal agents as products of transnational forces, constituted through dialogues about legal concepts and processes of faction-making. The endeavour was challenged by different national policies, divergent legal traditions, and varying cultural perceptions of the task ahead. Contributors are Milinda Banerjee, Anja Bihler, Neil Boister, David M. Crowe, Kerstin von Lingen, Narrelle Morris, Hitoshi Nagai, Valentyna Polunina, Ann-Sophie Schoepfel, Lisette Schouten, James Burnham Sedgwick, Yuki Takatori and Urs Matthias Zachmann.

This is a book about the power ethnic capital and how it drives both the economics of, and the quest for identity in, a Japanese Brazilian commune. Adachi tells readers what this small diaspora community can teach us about how life “in the trenches” looks to those on the outskirts of the exploding transnational world economy. This book explores the various strategies locals use to compete with others with whom they are linked locally, nationally, and globally. Through the story of Kubo daily life, Adachi offers insights into important aspects of social and linguistic theory, as well as explicating how cross-border relations become more and more intertwined. In a sense, Kubo’s story, with its struggles to maintain its identity—even its survival—in an increasingly globalized world, encapsulates many of the problems now faced by smaller communities around the world, be they diasporic or regionally entrenched, or ethnically, racially, or religiously composed. Adachi explores the motivations for racial and ethnic boundary-making based primarily on values and principles rather than purely physiological features by focusing on Kubo and its marketing of supposedly traditional Japanese cultural values, in spite of the commune being located in the interior of Brazil. To do this she incorporates notions from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, including problems of language maintenance, the relationships between language and symbolic power, and the intricacies of language and gender. Doing so helps theorize the tensions between hybridity and purity entailed in the complexities of identity dynamics.