Asian Studies research
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Exploring the Relationship between Global Studies and Ekistics
Author: Ian Fookes
Published: 2021. Ekistics and the New Habitat. Special Issue: The Global Pacific: Coastal and Human Habitats 81(3), 3-9.
Details: This article explains what is understood by the term 'Global Pacific' as it is used in this special issue's title, and thus articulate the position with which the contributors to this issue are associated. To do so, the author discusses the features of transformative global studies, identifying a resistance among global studies scholars to providing any essential definition of their 'boundaryless' discipline.
Yuki Kihara’s ‘A Song about Samoa サーモアについてのうた’: Reimagining the Pacific through Japanese Relations
Author: Ian Fookes
Published: 2021. Ekistics and the New Habitat. Special Issue: The Global Pacific: Coastal
and Human Habitats 81(3), 68-88.
Details: Yuki Kihara’s work ‘サーモアについてのうた [Sāmoa no uta] ‘A Song about Sāmoa’ (2019) is a series of five installations, each made up of garments blending two traditions into one new medium: the siapo-kimono. Focussing on the first two series, ‘Vasa’ [Ocean] and ‘Fanua’ [Land], the present article discusses the ways in which this hybrid medium should be understood in terms of kimono culture, and in the context of other aesthetic appropriations of kimono, such as Serge Mouangue’s WAfrica Project (2007-2017) and the ‘Imagine Oneworld Kimono Project’ (2005-2020).
“Can Respectable People Also Be Infected with Gonorrhea?”: Questions to a Japanese Women’s Magazine in the Interwar Period.”
Author: Haiying Hou and Ellen Nakamura
Published: 2022.
Details: This article explores female readers’ letters to a health advice column in the popular women’s magazine Shufu no tomo 主婦の友 (Housewife’s Companion) in the interwar period, with a focus on sexual health. While syphilis was regarded as the most dangerous sexually transmitted disease from a national standpoint, these letters suggest that gonorrhea, which was frequently transmitted by husbands to their wives, had a greater impact on women’s bodies, leading to gynaecological diseases and infertility.
Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration
Author: Mark R. Mullins
Published: 2021. (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture, Vol. 16). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Details: Although religious fundamentalism is often thought to be confined to monotheistic “religions of the book,” this study examines the emergence of a fundamentalism rooted in the Shinto tradition and considers its role in shaping postwar Japanese nationalism and politics. Over the past half-century, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the National Association of Shrines (NAS) have been engaged in collaborative efforts to “recover” or “restore” what was destroyed by the process of imperialist secularization during the Allied Occupation of Japan.
"Abe and the Revival of Shinto Nationalism"
Author: Mark R. Mullins
Published: 2022
Details: Prof. Mark Mullins contributed a short piece to the Compendium on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Legacy, September 15, 2022 Volume 20 | Issue 16 | Number 11
Popular Culture and the Transformation of Japan–Korea Relations
Author: Rumi Sakamoto
Published: 2022
Details: This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations. Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional conflict and reconciliations between Japan and Korea.
The Advantage of Transnational Co-ethnic Networks: Korean Chinese Entrepreneurship in Innovating and Globalizing Xinjiang Style Barbecue Lamb Skewers Business
Author: Changzoo Song (宋沧珠) and Haiying Li (李海英)
Published: 2021. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 17(2), 318-339.
Details: This is a case study of the cross-ethnicisation and globalisation of an ethnic food by entrepreneurial Korean Chinese. Korean Chinese (also referred to as Joseonjok or Chaoxianzu) in China came from a strong agricultural background with little tradition of commerce and no tradition of consuming lamb meat. However, when Xinjiang-style barbecue-lamb skewers were introduced to their community in the early 1980s, Korean Chinese fell in love with this exotic food.
Diasporic returns to the ethnic homeland: The Korean diaspora in comparative perspective.
Author: Takeyuki Tsuda and Changzoo Song
Published: 2019. New York: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90763-5
Details: Cites specific cases of return migration in South Korea; explores developments of the hierarchies among co-ethnics in ethnic homelands; examines diasporic return migration in the context of policy.