From the Editor
Justin McCurry
It’s with a heavy heart that some of this month’s issue is devoted to the life and work of two FCCJ titans whose deaths have been announced by their families in recent days: Bob Neff and Edwin Karmiol. William J. Holstein, Anthony Rowley, and Suvendrini Kakuchi pay tribute. Elsewhere, Dan Sloan uses a recent visit to Okinawa to look at the island’s continuing conflict with Tokyo and Washington, almost eight decades after the end of the war, Mark Schreiber writes about a journey into Japan’s sometimes violent past, and Stephen Mansfield makes the artistic case for Japan as a nation built not on wood, but on stone. Anthony Rowley reports on a Deep Dive panel discussion on the future of the U.S. dollar, while in their regular columns, Philip Brasor analyzes resistance to a living minimum wage and Eric Johnston wonders what a recent supreme court ruling on the "Hokkaido hecklers" says about Japan’s commitment to freedom of speech and assembly.
Cover artwork by Julio Shiiki