Stanford University Press Blog

Tokyo’s Red-Light District

Selling love, romance, and companionship for wealthy women seeking an escape.

by AKIKO TAKEYAMA

Interior of a Tokyo red-light district host club. June 2015. Copyright Akiko Takeyama (used here with permission).

Tokyo has always had a magical effect on me. I grew up in Hamamatsu, a mid-sized industrial city known for producing Yamaha motorcycles and pianos. In contrast to my ordinary life there as an office assistant in the mid-nineties, I found Tokyo to be extraordinary—with its splendid commercial districts, dense population, and urban sprawl.

Tokyo’s host clubs evoke ambiguous feelings of pleasure, danger, risk, and reward among people seeking temporary escape and entertainment.

After studying in the United States for seven years, I returned to Japan in 2004 as an anthropologist to conduct research on Tokyo’s red-light district and the host clubs where men cater to female consumers for exorbitant sums of money. While living there, I saw firsthand how rapidly Tokyo had changed since my youth in the nineties. For instance, Roppongi Hills, a 54-story mega-complex of apartments, offices, bars and restaurants, designer boutiques, galleries, and a movie theater had just opened. Real estate developers, politicians, and journalists heralded the project as a vivid symbol of Japan’s future. Tourists took advantage of the building’s rooftop observation deck not only for its panoramic views of the city but also the excitement and even optimism that these scenes of urban life often provoke. While visitors enjoyed the view, global investors were privy to a different vision: such urban developments are also sites of intense speculation.

A Man-Made Disaster

On the role of human error in the Fukushima nuclear accident.

by EDWARD D. BLANDFORD and SCOTT D. SAGAN

IAEA experts visit the Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to examine recovery work, April 2013. Photo by Greg Webb. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

It has been five years to the day since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake shook the coastline of Japan’s Honshu island, leading to the tsunami that killed over 15,000 people. Beyond this real disaster, this tsunami also caused a major accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which displaced hundreds of thousands more. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resultant tsunami destroyed offsite and onsite power supply to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, causing the fuel of three reactors to melt and substantial amounts of radioactive material to be released out of the plant. The environmental and economic consequences of the Fukushima accident were significant. An estimated 200,000 Japanese were forced to relocate from their homes and their return awaits a massive land remediation effort that will take decades to complete.

The environmental and economic consequences of the Fukushima accident were significant.

Not surprisingly, much of the coverage of the incident tends to emphasize the resilience of Japanese society during the emergency and the fact that no individuals were killed immediately by the nuclear accident. The over 15,000 who were killed because the Japanese tsunami protection system did not warn or protect them all too often appear to be forgotten today. But these accounts overemphasize the role of good fortune over good planning and pessimists see the fact that the Fukushima accident did not produce massive fatalities in Japan as “homage to plain dumb luck.” The appropriate perspective on Fukushima must, however, include a basic awareness that the disaster could have easily been much worse in terms of loss of life and economic damage to Japan, and even surrounding countries. Equally, with modestly better advance preparation, none of the Fukushima reactors would have suffered any fuel damage. Due to a lack of preparation, the natural disaster of the 2011 earthquake set off a major man-made accident, caused by human error and institutional shortcomings, and from which we stand to learn many lessons in order to redouble efforts to improve nuclear safety.

Why Do I Live Here?

On Muslim youth growing up on the front lines of nationalist politics in Denmark.

by REVA JAFFE-WALTER

Refugee children from Syria at a clinic in northern Jordan. Photo by the UK Department for International Development. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In 1943, when other European governments watched while Jews in their country were rounded up and deported to concentration camps, the Danish organized a nation-wide effort in which Danish fisherman carried close to 8,000 Jews across the Oresund sea to safety in nearby Sweden. Similarly, in 1983 when refugees were fleeing the Iran/Iraq war and violence in Palestine, Denmark welcomed them and led Europe in having the most generous humanitarian refugee policies offering the right to asylum, full legal rights and the same social benefits as Danish citizens.

Today, in stark contrast, Denmark has some of the most restrictive immigration and refugee policies in Europe. These policies reflect a dramatic shift from a posture of humanitarian outreach and compassion towards refugees to one focused on the increased restriction and policing of migrants and immigrants. Danish police patrol the border and the bridge between Sweden and Denmark to prevent Syrian refugees from entering. New laws emerge to deter migrants from seeking refuge in Denmark—such as the passage of a national law allowing the government to seize the personal assets of those applying for refugee status. Other laws, meanwhile, target Muslims already living in Denmark—including local mandates targeting school-age children that require that pork be served in elementary school lunch programs.

Denmark has some of the most restrictive immigration and refugee policies in Europe.

Texas, Abortion and the Power of the Supreme Court

What's at stake in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt.

by JOSHUA WILSON, Texas Tribune

"Keep Abortion Safe, Legal, and Accessible." Photo by Debra Sweet. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, a case concerning the constitutionality of Texas's controversial 2013 abortion regulations. While the case does not stand to overrule Roe v. Wade and make abortion potentially illegal, it does contest the means and ends of the incremental and indirect fight against abortion. It could make abortion functionally inaccessible in large swaths of the country, furthering the disparities in state-by-state access that have been rapidly growing in recent years and encouraging the anti-abortion movement to increase its efforts. For this, it is the most important abortion case to be heard by the Court since the early 1990s—even before Justice Antonin Scalia's recent passing.

It is the most important abortion case to be heard by the Court since the early 1990s—even before Justice Antonin Scalia's recent passing.

Much of the discussion regarding the Texas abortion laws has focused on the clinics that these regulations have, and still could, force to close and the resulting distances that women in parts of the state will have to travel in order to access abortion. These closures are the result of increasing the costs of clinic operation brought on by a class of laws often called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, which create physical specifications for clinics as well as staffing and licensing requirements. The 2013 Texas state law at issue in this case mandates that abortion clinics meet surgical center standards and that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinic. It also bans abortion at 20 weeks after fertilization.

Flailing in the Dark

On indecision and the international intervention in Afghanistan.

by NOAH COBURN

Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, December 2008. Public domain via Wikipedia.

Last week’s renewed debate between President Barack Obama and Republicans in the Senate, reminds us how murky and poorly defined the goals and strategies of the so-called war on terror remain as it enters its fifteenth year. Nowhere is this ambiguity more apparent than in Afghanistan, the place where most of the Guantanamo detainees were first apprehended.

Beginning in 2006, I spent a year and a half working with a small group of potters in a picturesque town in the mountains north of Kabul. Even while the insurgency spread in the south and the east of the country, the town, which had been leveled by the Taliban, remained staunchly in favor of the international presence. Over the course of the next nine years, however, corrupt elections, an ineffective government and a sense that a small group of former warlords had largely taken over all the key resources, led to the growing sense that the international intervention had failed to fulfill its initial promises. Returning last spring, I was stopped in the grape fields below town by a roadblock set up by the Afghan Army. The soldiers lounging on their armored personnel carriers, gifts from the US Department of Defense, said that there was an ongoing operation in the villages above, to clear it of the Taliban.

The recent news coming out of Afghanistan has not been good. The UN recently reported that 2015 had the highest number of civilian casualties since they began tracking the number.

The recent news coming out of Afghanistan has not been good. The UN recently reported that 2015 had the highest number of civilian casualties since they began tracking the number, Afghans make up the second highest number of refugees after Syrians in the current wave of asylum-seekers, and the Taliban have retaken key districts in the south of the country.

Who is to blame for the situation?

Disentangling Colonialism’s Legacies

Did British colonization foster a rise in ethnic violence in India?

by AJAY VERGHESE

"Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757" by Francis Hayman. Public domain via Wikipedia.

Like many postcolonial states, India—the largest country ever colonized—has dealt with an immense amount of ethnic violence in contemporary times. The 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat, which left thousands dead,are only one of the most recent examples. In seeking to explain these conflicts, many Indians have pointed to the negative legacy of British colonialism. “The Hindu–Muslim problem is a gift of the English,” Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena leader, once bluntly put it; “It was they who took steps to divide Hindu and Muslim, Hindu and Sikh…They got maximum success dividing the Hindus and Muslims. For them, communal riots were games to be relished.” When I arrived in India in 2010 to study ethnic violence, a local priest offered a similar view: “All the conflict these days is because of the Britishers.”

How can we be sure that widespread ethnic violence did not already exist prior to British rule?

But this is a rather difficult thing to prove. For instance, how can we be sure that widespread ethnic violence did not already exist prior to British rule? The earliest recorded Hindu-Muslim riot in India dates back to the south Indian town of Mangalore in the 14^th century, some 300 years before any British official set foot on the subcontinent. A second vexing problem is determining whether or not colonialism simply coexisted with the true factors that created violence. For instance, the increase in Hindu-Muslim violence in the 19^th century that was blamed on British rule coincided with the rise of revivalist Hindu and Islamic religious movements. Suddenly, the links between colonialism and ethnic violence are not so clear.

One way to isolate the effects of colonialism on Indian ethnic violence is to take advantage of a unique feature of British rule on the subcontinent: colonial administrators only governed three-fourths of the population of India. The other one-fourth (in 1901, more than 60 million people) lived in territories called “princely states” that remained under the control of largely autonomous native kings. With the princely states, history has furnished us with something like a “control group” to help us answer the present question: Was it British colonialism that fostered ethnic violence in India, or are other more intrinsic factors also to blame?