In death as in life, the late prime minister Shinzo Abe divides the nation of Japan. Following Abe’s assassination on a public street in the city of Nara in broad daylight last month, the Japanese government has decided on an official state funeral for Abe to be held on 27 September. The public in Japan is increasingly voicing its opposition to this state funeral, the first such event to be held in this country in more than a half-century. Why should the death of an ultra-nationalist, far-right leader whose policies were so detrimental to democracy in Japan and who was so lowly regarded by so many citizens be honored with taxpayer money? they demand to know.

Janice Mirikitani and a friend are walking down the sidewalk, as the friend’s recollection goes, in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California, USA — one of the city’s poorer and more merciless areas. Coming down the sidewalk toward them is a man of the streets who is making loud barking and growling noises like a dog; he is obviously in need of some help.

The friend instinctively grabs Mirikitani’s arm to pull her away and out of the path of a perceived danger looming ahead. Just as instinctively, Mikiritani pulls the friend back close to her and keeps walking straight ahead, her stride intact. Soon, the man and Janice are standing face to face on the sidewalk and the friend’s heart is racing, fearing what might come next.

Folktales abound in ancient cultures and countries of some vainglorious king who is hoodwinked by a dishonest tailor and made to believe he is wearing a magnificent suit of fine regal robes, when, in fact, he is wearing nothing at all — as he finds out only after he leaves the castle walls and parades himself to a gawking public that sees his royal highness in all his nakedness.

India has just such a folktale dating back to around 1200 AD; Spain too has a story like that from back in the 1300s. For most of us in the modern world, though, the most famous version of this tale is The Emperor’s New Clothes, written by author Hans Christian Anderson of Denmark in 1837.

We walk the streets of the old neighborhood this afternoon, remembering another place, another time. Our former apartment building is still there on the south side of JR Koshienguchi station in Nishinomiya, but the cozy third-floor unit where my wife, son and I first lived as a new family, apartment #303, is now being rented out to some local business. The family-run liquor shop just across the way from us in the local shopping arcade is still there, as is the old family-run stationery shop, the shelves filled with office supplies and paper that seemed unmoved since 17 January 1995, the day of the big quake.

Welcome, dear readers, to Aichi Trienniale 2019, one of the largest Japanese contemporary festivals in the country. Held every three years since 2010, this festival attracts artists from around Japan and the globe, while promoting such lofty goals as “contributing to the global development of culture and art” and “bringing culture and art into people’s daily lives” as its mission.

The exhibitions for year’s Aichi Trienniale are being held at several major art venues in the cities of Nagoya and Toyota (home of the famous Japanese Toyota cars), in central Japan, under the theme of “Taming Y/Our Passion”. The festival is running 75 consecutive days from 1 August to mid-October 2019.

You can always judge a person by the company he/she keeps, as the old saying goes, and nowhere does that hold truer than in the world of global politics. The fake president of the United States (FPOTUS), Donald Trump, for one, has never met a right-wing extremist leader of a nation or a military strongman he didn’t like, and these dangerous leaders have returned the love to the American fake president in kind.

An independent journalist decided earlier this month to travel overseas to the Middle Eastern nation of Yemen, hoping to cross over legally into the war-torn country and report on the dangerous situation there. Saudi Arabia, using military weapons supplied in part by its ally, the United States, has joined the civil war in Yemen, one of the poorest nations in the Arab world, and the result is one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time. This particular journalist decided to take a risk and try to get into Yemen, with the idea of telling the world what is really happening there on the ground. That is what journalists do, after all.

But when the journalist tried to board an airline flight to the Middle East, he was stopped cold at a major international airport in Japan by an unexpected source: the government of his own country. Passport officials invalidated his passport right there at the airport and ordered him to surrender the passport or face the consequences. The journalist was effectively banned from traveling outside of his country and is now prevented from doing his job.

It has been heartwarming and heartbreaking, inspiring and saddening, all at the same time, to see all the tributes to and news coverage about Native American elder and activist Dennis Banks, in the wake of his passing on 29 October at age 80.

Banks is most well known for having co-founded the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s at a turbulent time in modern history and the many confrontations he led or joined in during that time, most notably the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, USA. He was a warrior who stood up when his people most needed him, when the times most demanded it, and for that he will always be remembered and loved.

A 16-year-old Japanese boy lies face down on a hospital bed, his eyes closed and face partially obscured from view. His back and arms, oozing blood and pus, show the severe radiation burns he suffered during the atomic bombing of his city, Nagasaki, just five months before by the United States. He is still clinging to life and the Japanese doctors keeping him in a bath of penicillin to fight off infection seem amazed that the boy is still alive.

The sight of huge gaudy billboards, one next to another, advertising some of the biggest names in Japanese electronics: Sony, Panasonic, Fujitsu — that was my first image of Japan. That was how Japan presented itself on the world stage back in the 1980s, and several decades later that is still the strongest memory I have of the country I’ve long called home.

The date was 23 December 1986, exactly 30 years ago today. It was the day I first arrived in Japan.

It is always worth a celebration when you get a book project finished. You naturally want to share with the world the results of your labor, and you watch with great anticipation how your work is being received one way or the other. These past few years I’ve been lucky enough to get at least one book project (and sometimes two) brought to completion in a year’s time.

History was made one month ago when POTUS (President of the United States) Barack Obama landed in the city of Hiroshima, Japan — the first sitting American president to ever visit the site since it was destroyed by a single atomic bomb on August 6, 1945.

Depending on who you are and what your political views may be, the visit to Hiroshima by Obama was: (1) flawless, with one of the greatest speeches of all time (2) a good photo opportunity and little else (3) a great disappointment, since he didn’t apologize to the Japanese for anything (4) an insult to American war veterans for daring to go there in the first place (5) an obvious slight to the Japanese atomic survivors, since he didn’t listen to any of their stories of suffering (6) a missed chance at making a major anti-nuclear policy speech (7) or anything else you can think of.

Nine days ago, March 11, marked Japan’s slide into Year No. 5 of the Fukushima nuclear crisis. So much has happened these past five years, and yet so little seems to have been meaningfully accomplished in the way of resolving what can be called without exaggeration the worst nuclear accident in the history of humankind.

The Japanese press reported widely in early January of this year about the recent death of someone I had known fairly well, Shozo Kajima, of old age. He was 92 years old. He was cited in most of the obituaries as the author of a mega-bestselling poetry book titled Motomenai [Not wanting], published in 2007.

But what most of the media here didn’t report in their brief stories on Kajima were the kinds of things I had gotten to know personally about him in recent years: how he had been among the up-and-coming literary figures in Japan after World War II, how he became a renowned scholar and translator of English-language classics (especially by the U.S. author William Faulkner), how he found a new form of expression in watercolor painting, and how, later in life, he rediscovered his Asian roots in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism and had become known as a respected Taoist philosopher in Japan.

Leaders of three powerful nations were being tried in public in Japan in summer 2004, more than a year after the United States invaded the nation of Iraq, and it was an incredible scene to witness. This was no small matter, either: U.S. president George W. Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair and Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi were being charged with crimes against humanity in connection with the Iraq invasion and/or support for that invasion.

I sat transfixed in the audience of a public hall in the downtown Japanese city of Kyoto, astonished that such a scene was playing out right before me. On stage there were prosecuting attorneys representing the public, defense attorneys representing the three leaders on trial and a procession of witnesses — including some Iraqi exiles who had come all the way to Japan just to testify about the tragedy befalling their country.

The Japanese government’s censorship of nationally used school textbooks — deleting or downplaying the many bad things Japan did during World War II — has been going on for decades. But it is only recently, with a neo-fascist prime minister back in power, that such official censorship is now moving into dangerous areas beyond Japan’s borders and into textbooks used in overseas countries.

Japan as a nation is still mourning, as I write these words, the recent killing of two Japanese citizens — especially independent journalist Kenji Goto — in the Middle East.

It was with a heavy heart that I, too, watched the videos of Goto and heard his emotionally cracking voice reading his captors’ messages, and then saw his beheaded, blood-spattered body lying on the ground. It was such a cold, cruel, senseless killing. Goto’s family loses a beloved father and husband, and the ranks of journalists in Japan lose a valued colleague.

It was a Monday in mid-January of 1995, and as a daily newspaper reporter I had an appointment scheduled for the next day to interview some local activist group. For some reason I can’t remember now, I had been hoping to get out of doing the interview and thought to myself: A big disaster would be about the only way to knock this off my schedule for the day....

No lie; that is just the way it happened. The next morning, almost as if I had jinxed myself (and a whole lot of other people), that “big disaster” came to pass.

Rokude Nashiko, a manga comic book and visual artist based in Tokyo, was arrested in July of this year and detained by police. Her crime? Posting and distributing information pertaining to vaginal art — thinly disguised, sculpted images of her own genitals, to be exact. She faced a possible two years in prison for making such “obscene” images public through her website, which she operates openly and legally.

Thousands of people in Japan, and apparently abroad too, took exception to the heavy-handed Japanese police actions and put a public petition in motion. Within a week Rokude Nashiko (her artistic name and a play on words, loosely translated as “Good-for-Nothing Girl”) was released from custody, the police apparently too embarrassed by the publicity to keep her any longer.

A couple of books that I have been involved with again this year (one here in Japan, one in the United States) are finally out and available to the people — always a good reason to celebrate. So while the presses are still hot, let me share with you a couple recommendations for some good year-end reading and/or teaching material....

Article 9. [1] Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

[2] In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

This historic and important clause in Japan’s postwar Constitution, ratified in 1947, stands unique in the world for its clear renunciation of war and “war potential” as a policy of the state.

The Fukushima nuclear crisis of March 2011 revealed many unsavory truths about the Japanese press, the nuclear power industry and the government’s so-called nuclear regulatory agencies that had lay hidden and mostly unreported for decades here in Japan.

But recently we have been getting a close-up look at just how arrogant the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has been in dealing with the Japanese public — and indeed the world — in this post-Fukushima age we now live in.

I got a phone call one day from my boss, an overweight, middle-aged publisher of a small, weekly newspaper in my town in southern California, to go to a nearby hospital and interview some person for a story. The guy had something to say about some kind of nuclear accident, my boss said, look into it.

A young cub reporter in my early 20s, fresh to the scene and always hungry for a scoop, I called the man at the hospital and made an appointment. It was circa 1980-1981, and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 was still a hot news topic in the United States. A nationwide grassroots anti-nuclear movement was then being born. I was curious about what the man at the hospital wanted to talk about.

I have been reflecting a lot these days on Democracy Now!, the daily TV/radio news show that broadcasts from New York, and the important role it serves as a much-needed independent media organization in a world dominated by corporate versions of news. So, before any more time goes by, let me share a few thoughts on this topic with you.

The idea of establishing an independent news media in Japan on the model of Democracy Now! is something I have been floating among progressive friends for a few years now. Or if that was not possible, I maintained, we at least need to invite Democracy Now! someday to broadcast live from here in Japan.

When I was invited a couple of years ago to contribute a chapter for the book Censored 2013, published by the media watch/media literacy group Project Censored in the United States, I knew exactly what angle I wanted to take in writing it.

The nuclear power plant meltdown at Fukushima, Japan on 11 March 2011 immediately raised a lot of questions in the Japanese and overseas press that focused on the urgency of the accident: How serious is it? What levels of radiation are being released? What precautions should people take in protecting themselves? What measures are being taken to contain the crisis?, and so on.

In my first few years working as a journalist in Japan in the late 1980s, I immersed myself in covering issues pertaining to the Korean community. It was as good an education as any young, eager reporter in this country could get: One of the hottest issues I was covering at the time was the forced fingerprinting that tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans living in Japan had to go through from age 16, and the identification they had to carry on them at all times.

Never mind that many of these Koreans were born and raised in Japan, yet not allowed to vote under Japanese law or even to obtain Japanese citizenship. They were a kind of stateless minority in Japan, and were tired of being treated that way.

Thanks in great part to its “honorary white” status in apartheid South Africa, Japan in 1990 was one of the largest trading partners of South Africa, following the sanctions that other western countries had implemented in cutting their economic ties with the isolated apartheid regime.

Nelson Mandela had been out of prison eight months when he was invited by the Japanese government to Japan on a six-day visit as a state guest. A month or so before Mandela’s arrival a high-ranking Japanese government minister happened to make disparaging public comments about Black people that ignited a firestorm of criticism within and outside Japan. It was against this backdrop that Mandela visited Japan for his first-ever visit to the wealthiest country in Asia.

Two days after Nelson Mandela’s memorable welcoming rally in the Japanese city of Osaka, Mandela stood before a joint session of Japan’s Diet (parliament) in downtown Tokyo on Tuesday, 30 October 1990 to make his appeal for support directly to the government and people on the national stage of Japan.

It was indeed a rare honor for a private citizen to be invited to address the Diet, reportedly only the second time in Japanese history that such an event had happened. It was a measure of the high esteem in which Mandela was held in Japan and in the other countries around the world that he had been visiting in the eight months since he was released from 27 years of imprisonment in South Africa.

I’m a firm believer in honoring our elders, heroes and inspirations while they are still with us in this life, that we may deepen our respect and remember anew how they lived, what they stood for and how they changed our lives in their own special ways.

Since no one has had for me a more positive impact and influence than Mr. Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, and since he is still with us, I'd like to post here a few thoughts of my own about him.

Last night in Kyoto I had the humble honor of being in the presence of one of the great philosopher-activists of our time, Mr. Satish Kumar of India. He is currently on a speaking tour of Japan, and I was fortunate to have attended his lecture here to several hundred Japanese audience members. It was a real spiritual boost for me, offering much inspirational food for thought and shining a light of hope in these uncertain times.

Kumar, a former monk of the Jain religion in India and follower of the nonviolence teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, is perhaps best known today as a peace activist, ecologist and editor of the magazine Resurgence based in England, where he lives with his family.