The town of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture has a history of hunting cetaceans that dates back hundreds of years. Over the last half century, a group of local fishermen have regularly hunted dolphins and small whales for slaughter or sale to aquariums, which has drawn criticism and protests from mainly western activists. This criticism coalesced into a global prohibition regime that broke into the mainstream with the scathing documentary The Cove, which won an Academy Award in 2010. Despite widespread international support for this regime to end Taiji’s dolphin hunts, they have continued with strong domestic support. This study examines why the global prohibition regime against Taiji’s dolphin hunts failed to take root in Japan, through the voices of those that were in the town for its early stages.

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Though it is a known fact that Naha citizens who evacuated to Northern Okinawa suffered severe famine during the battle of Okinawa and the early US occupation period, detailed situations of the damage still remain unveiled. This is because their evacuation during the war and forced relocation afterward have been told and recorded separately for different time periods. Their dispersion as a result of repeated relocation also made it difficult to see the whole picture. This article focuses on the famine among Naha citizens during these periods and describes their overall migration experiences transversally across the years, illuminating the situation that the poor and fallen food supply system of the occupation forces led to many deaths. Whereas returning home for people from areas other than Naha was the start of “reconstruction,” for Naha citizens, their processes of returning home were a series of desperate struggles to survive.

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The purposes of this study are to clarify the actual learning/teaching situation of Japanese education in Viet Nam before Doi Moi era and to explore the personal mean-making toward their job by analyzing oral histories of three Vietnamese who learned Japanese language in either USSR or North Korea. By examining their oral histories, the study shows in detail how they learned Japanese language in USSR or North Korea, and how they managed the Japanese language courses at higher education in 1960-80s. The study also finds that they eventually built the personal attachments toward their jobs which brought social affirmation to them even thought at first, they reluctantly accepted Japanese language learning/teaching as their allocated mission.

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This paper focuses on so- called “tacit farming”, farming and related activities done by locals in the military lands in Okinawa. After the WW2, the US military secured large-scale military lands to build bases in Okinawa. By the late 1950s, not a few people “tacitly” started farming in these lands. Tacit farmers lost their “tacit farm” whenever the military decides to lock them out, and they get no compensation. And, traditionally, land ownership is absolutely superior to the right to till in Okinawa and tenant rights are not secured. However, “Tacit farming” plays important roles not only in Okinawan agriculture but also in keeping connection with old “Sima”, or the ancestral space with their sanctuaries. In this paper I would like to show the significance of the “tacit farming” and the right to till, referring to interviews from my fieldworks in middle part of Okinawa.

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In Japan, homeless people have been “supported” to be independent by a policy of Jiritsu-Shien-ho of 2003, a law aiming to enhance the self-support of homeless people. Since independence in the post-industrialized society has just meant earning living cost by yourself, feminists and other scholars specializing in poverty and homelessness criticize its narrow meaning. This paper traces the narratives of homeless people in Europe and the US to grasp their counter perspectives of independence. By examining their life stories of The Big Issue Japan, a magazine sold by homeless people, the author figures out some issues of the concept of independence which the post-industrialized society forces and the new possibilities of the counter perspectives of independence.

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