Island Studies Journal 11(1), Book Reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Consult the official map of Japan, titled 'Japanese Territory', available off the website of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs at http://www.mofa.go.jp/territory/.The map highlights three island areas, all of which are deemed "inherent territory of Japan": Dokdo, an island known as Takeshima to the Japanese, currently controlled by South Korea; the South Kuriles, known as the Northern Territories to the Japanese, administered by Russia/Soviet Union since 1945; and the Diaoyu islands (known as Diaoyutai to Taiwan, and Senkaku to the Japanese), currently administered by Japan as part of Okinawa prefecture, but claimed by China (and Taiwan).In Japan's border issues: Pitfalls and prospects, English language readers will finally be able to dig their teeth into a full-length academic text and delve into Iwashita's pioneering research into border issues.This slim volume comprises seven chapters that distil Professor Iwashita's thoughts, analyses and experiences of Japan and its border issues, focusing specifically on its three pending, and festering, territorial squabbles with its neighbours.Small or marginal islands can loom large in the national psyche.The author makes very interesting and valuable points that can help lead to a situation where cooperation and resolution over such border issues become more realistic and feasible.The key point is to climb down from populist and nationalist-friendly positions that claim islands as indisputably integral parts of national territory, and which by definition render any form of resolution impossible.Instead, a dialogue on regional (rather than national) history, with the more pragmatic and flexible voices and intent of local stakeholders, holds richer promises for solution.Regional cooperation offers opportunities for non-state actors, plus local government, to broaden agendas and recover a cross-border discourse that acknowledges and privileges mobility, connections and migrations rather than sovereignty and territoriality.Iwashita has been actively involved on this front, leading a series of initiatives that have explored regional cooperation between Taiwan and the Yaeyama islands, as well as Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.These projects are vividly documented in an excellent series of DVDs, also available with English voice-overs and translations.For island studies scholars, this book makes pertinent reading for two main reasons, the first being the more obvious: all these three pending issues deal with islands, reminding us that Japan is an archipelago nation with no (current) land borders with any other country.The implications of this are that such border issues that Japan faces cannot be properly addressed without due process and care to maritime issues as well: these include fishing rights, navigation rights, rights for sea bed mineral exploration, the right to stop and search vessels and detain foreign sea captains and crew as may be felt necessary.The second is more subtle and would require readers to look at Iwashita's professional past.As a professor of Sino-Russian border issues based at the Slavic and Eurasian Research Centre, Hokkaido University, the author has spent a considerable number of years in his career looking at the chequered history that led to the resolution of all border issues between Russia and China: at over 4,000 km, this is the world's sixth-longest international border.A significant stretch of this border lies along the Amur river, and the determination of the ownership of various islands along this river, and therefore the exact location of the international border, consumed many hours of tense diplomacy between Moscow and Beijing,
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".