History

UJ's history coverage spans more than a millennium: from Kofun-era burial statues to Cold War adoption politics to twenty-first-century disputes over who counts as indigenous. The pieces here don't treat history as background. They treat it as the still-active substrate beneath today's headlines.

We don't have much interest in the version of Japanese history that reads as aesthetic spectacle: samurai as noble archetypes, the Edo period as a golden age, geisha as ornament. What we look for instead is the pressure points: the places where official memory and lived experience diverge. Our sources include Japanese-language historians, English language scholarship on Japan, local archives, and the communities most affected by the events being described.

We love to talk about anything and everything in Japanese history. (Especially our Editor-in-Chief Noah Oskow, whose knowledge surpasses the word "encyclopedic.") For example, we write a lot about the Ainu people's dispossession and their ongoing fight for recognition runs from profiles of early twentieth-century Ainu poet-activists to live coverage of Sapporo permitting denial exhibits in 2024.

The long tail of wartime violence (the disinformation campaigns that preceded the Kanto Massacre, the cultural losses of the Pacific War in Okinawa, the mixed-race children funneled through Cold War adoption networks) is something we visit regularly. So does the history of how areas like Tokyo's Shinjuku evovled from their pre-city origins through occupation-era reconstruction. And throughout, figures who didn't make the standard history books - such as a geisha who brought down a prime minister, a high schooler whose village exiled her for exposing corruption, and a journalist who hated every minute of being an astronaut.