Japan and the Korean peninsula share a troubled history, and the already tense relationships of these areas have been deteriorating over the past few years. Floriano Filho maps out these tensions as well as their symptoms—which include an arms race—while bringing light to their historical roots.
In February 2016, South Korea decided to close the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex in protest against North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests. Previously, it had not framed denuclearisation as a prerequisite for collaboration between the two Koreas – a change of course that may prove ill advised.
A great historian of the English working class, a major intellectual figure in debates surrounding Marxism in the years 1960-1970, and an anti-nuclear activist who initiated an environmentalist critique of capitalism—such were the many faces of Edward Palmer Thompson, whose work deeply permeates the different social sciences to this day.
Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a controversial figure in Japan. And rightly so, for there are a great many contradictions in both his fictional and theoretical work. He is a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and yet continues to celebrate the heroism of the soldier who finds glory through sacrifice.
