Suchergebnisse

Japan's departure from the League of Nations in 1933 over the Manchurian issue has often been portrayed as an act of national self assertiveness signifying a willingness to defy international opinion and pursue an independent course in world affairs. The physical act by Matsuoka Yosuke and his delegation of walking out of the League Assembly on 24 February promotes an image of a firm and uncompromising attitude on the part of Japan; and as time passed, the interpretation recorded in 1944 by Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942, became a standard one: 'Nobody could miss the political significance of Japan's decision to quit the League of Nations. It marked a clear break with the Western powers and prepared the way for Japan's later adherence to the Axis'.

Ever since its occurrence, the 'Manchurian Incident' of September 1931 has been interpreted, by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers, as a crucial event in modern Japanese and, indeed, world history. Not least, it has been identified as the beginning of Japan's 'fifteen-year war'. Whether or not such judgements are accepted, it must be recognized that the Manchurian Incident and subsequent events significantly affected the workings of Japanese politics in the 1930s, the relationship between civil and military authorities and Japan's international image in the years leading up to the Pacific War.

Post 9/11, governments and large corporations are placing a stronger emphasis on security. This, together with the fact that the majority of our interactions are now conducted remotely online via a computer or smart device, means that various forms of identity management have developed; passwords, wearable tokens and more recent innovations in biometrics such as face recognition. These forms of identity management are also shaping our concept of self. Through Richard Grusin's lens of "premediation," [1] in which multiple futures are alive in the present, we are able to identify the taboos of identity management and discuss how art and design practices are part of this wider media phenomenon. Within scenarios of identity management the line dividing taboos from desires is often blurred, and a taboo can quickly flip into a desire, if the conditions under which that interaction take place change. We discuss the tensions between technology and the body and how many art projects are raising awareness of the loss of anonymity and privacy through the use of masks and other organic materials. We conclude that we are all becoming "new model cyborgs" [2] – a mixture of the organic and the digital in a continual process of engagement, separation and re- engagement between our bodies and technology. Finally, supporting this paper we created an interactive presentation where people can give their opinion, answering and posting questions, about current technologies and how they work with identity management. [3] Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 240.Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).IMprints, official Website, 2012, http://www.imprintsfutures.org/dissemination/ (accessed October 11, 2013).

Detention camps in Asia have held hundreds of thousands of people - political dissidents, prisoners of war, and civilian populations. This volume examines why states detain, the conditions of detention, and the effects of detention systems on society as a whole.