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In 2016 The Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre will publish a book commemorating the lives of the Japanese-Canadian men who selflessly risked their lives fighting for Canada during the First World War. At a time when Japanese immigrants faced discrimination and racism the question as to why they volunteered has gone largely unanswered. When the government of British Columbia denied their requests to enlist for no other reason than their ethnicity, these brave men made the arduous journey to Alberta where they would find acceptance. Facing countless injustices, Japanese-Canadians were anxious to prove to their fellow Canadians that they were worthy of equal treatment and the right to vote. Having conducted research, reading first and second hand accounts of these veterans and their family, I have come to the conclusion that fighting for Canada was seen as a way of achieving the status of being a citizen. And while this effort was unsuccessful in the short run, their heroism and selfless contributions to the war effort marked a social shift in terms of recognising Japanese-Canadians as citizens even if the government would drag its heels for decades to come. Despite providing a context for which to analyse the lives of Japanese immigrants to Canada, the main purpose of this research is to shed light on the personal and individual lives of these veterans in an attempt to keep their stories alive for future generations and to commemorate the brave men who in the face of great injustice fought for the rights we take for granted today. These are their stories. ; Arts, Faculty of ; Geography, Department of ; Unreviewed ; Undergraduate

This article argues that popular culture can make an important contribution to security studies, and especially critical security studies, either by offering alternative narratives that challenge the dominant view of security or by deconstructing the process of securitization. It then examines a genre of popular culture that until now has been largely ignored by security studies, noir police procedural novels, and shows how the contemporary police detective can no longer be viewed in the same way as the defender of the status quo depicted in the traditional police procedural. At the same time, he or she does not correspond to the portrait of the security professional, a member of those forces that contribute to the way security is officially defined. He or she has become, instead, a critic of prevailing security practices. To illustrate how this has happened, the article takes novels from two well-known authors of noir procedurals – Faceless Killers by Sweden's Henning Mankell and Rounding the Mark by Italy's Andrea Camilleri – and explores how their two very different police detectives, Kurt Wallander and Salvo Montalbano, treat the fears, anxieties and insecurities aroused by immigration in their respective societies and, in doing so, assume in their own way the role of critical security analyst.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War have forced Japan to question its defence policy. In the past this policy has been firmly based on a purely defensive posture which relied totally on Japan's alliance with the United States. Because the Cold War dragged on in East Asia for much longer than in Europe, Japan could carry on the same defence policy as before. Japanese defence planners found it convenient to emphasize the « Soviet threat » as a way to maintain annual increases in the military budget, and refusing to normalize their relations with the Soviets, until the question of the Northern Territories had been settled.
They can no longer ignore the various signs of détente in East Asia. Yet they have had limited effects on Japan's defence policy. The Americans have called on Japan to play a role more commensurate with its economic power but want to avoid any hint of an autonomous Japanese defence policy. They pressured Japan into playing a more active part in the Gulf crisis and the ensuing war, but the government failed to muster sufficient support, at home and amongst the other countries of East Asia, for any role for its military outside Japan, even in a non combat capacity.
So Japan has sought other regional and global security policies to compensate for this handicap and has met with mixed success. The recent failure to pass legislation allowing its Self-defence Forces to participate in UN peacekeeping operations has seriously jeopardized Japan 's search for a more active role in regional affairs. But will the Japanese continue for much longer to play a second role in the United States' System of bilateral alliances in the Asia-Pacific region which that country can afford less and less ? This is the real dilemma of Japanese defence policy : it can neither remain as it is nor can it easily change direction.