In the 19th century, the massive growth of commercial whaling transformed the face of the Pacific, causing widespread ecological destruction, but also creating new links between island and shoreline communities across the region. By exploring that history from the mobile viewpoint of whaleships as they crossed and re-crossed the ocean, this essay seeks to develop a ‘liquid area’ approach to 19th century transformations in the Asia-Pacific region. Such an approach, I argue, shifts the historical focus to communities that are commonly regarded as ‘remote’ and peripheral to narratives of national history. It helps us to see how the people of these communities responded actively and creatively to the incursions of global capitalism, and how they became participants in networks of interaction and exchange which spanned the region from Chile and Peru to Hawaii, Japan, the Bering Sea coast and the many islands of Oceania.

Bruce Cumings, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, spoke with Haeyoung Kim of the Korea Policy Institute on August 23, 2023 about the current geopolitical landscape in East Asia, prospects for U.S.-Korea relations, and intellectual interventions made over the course of his career.

This article uncovers the journey of a Nepal educator, poet, and writer who found inspiration in a Japanese philosopher's search for the self through love, care, happiness, and the “golden” moments of life. Nandu Uprety opened Kenji's International School to follow Miyazawa Kenji's philosophy of humanity, working for people experiencing poverty, developing society, and nurturing nature. This is not to say that Nandu Uprety did not face challenges, as he sold all his property for this school and never sought donations. Yet he adored the blooming flowers in the gardens, the echoes of Sirbuba, and the happiness in the children's smiles.

In Spring 2024, with funding from the Japan Foundation, we traveled to Japan to interview organic farmers. We talked to Yae Fujimoto, a second-generation organic farmer who carries on her father's mission to return Japan to its rural roots in Kamogawa; Raymond Epp, a farmer and teacher outside Sapporo and the first to translate “regenerative farming” into Japanese; and Takumi Watanabe, who ditched the corporate grind at age 24 to grow persimmons in Ibaraki. Our interviews help us reflect on the future of food in Japan through its nascent but growing organic movement.

This article explores popular music of Japan's Cold War era, with a special focus on singing duo The Peanuts and the film Mothra. It argues that Japanese culture of the Cold War must be understood as participating simultaneously in all three networks of the Cold War order—the First World of capitalist liberal democracies, the Second World of the socialist bloc, and the Third World of the decolonizing and nonaligned Bandung Movement.

In December 2023, the authors screened the film Plan 75, a dystopic meditation on Japan's future as an aging society, with a public audience at Princeton University. The essay offers reflections on the experience of watching the film, the nature of Hayakawa Chie's social commentary and the visual way in which she realizes it, and the present social context for the film's futuristic meditation. The film won the Caméra d'Or Special Mention Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and after screenings at global film festivals and the Japan Society of New York, was made available for streaming in the U.S. in late 2023. The film offers contributions to curricula that deal with issues of aging, global capitalism and degrowth, the anthropology and sociology of care, demographic transitions, neoliberal capitalism, and the emergence of a language of individual responsibility in social welfare.

This article looks at three recent Japanese mass market works about poverty, arguing that each is representative of a different mode of depicting economic disparity and want in contemporary Japan – individualization, nationalization, and generalization. These modes of representation contribute to a comparatively low level of awareness of poverty as a major social problem as well as political inaction. Following Raymond Williams' interrogation of social “keywords” as well as critical discourse analysis to identify the interplay of absences and presences in these accounts, this article will argue that even empathic approaches toward poverty can obscure its complex interconnections, disparities such as its disproportionate impact on Japanese women, and block the thinking of social and economic alternatives.

This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the process of regional welfare-making in the Aso region (Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan). It demonstrates how local stakeholders such as social welfare councils have been promoting the ideal of community-based regional welfare, while adapting to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic hindered social exchange and amplified longstanding processes of community decline, it further complicates the ongoing challenge of activating local communities to realize the vision of a healthy “aging in place” based on mutual support.

This study explores the preparation of food for charitable distribution by Buddhists in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) (Vietnam). Most of those involved in cooking for charity are women. This article shows that HCMC women perceive cooking for charity as an extension of household cooking. Food charity transforms the household duty of cooking into a charitable practice that benefits the wider society. Vietnamese media focuses on this feminine aspect of food charity, portraying it as an act of kindness that increases communal solidarity during adversities such as the Covid-19 pandemic, similar to women's kitchen work in sustaining their families.

This edited transcript of conversations among a group of scholars and practitioners is the culmination of a multi-year, multi-platform dialogue intended to capture the work and motivations of memory activists towards addressing both historical justice and current social and political needs of Asian American communities.

Characterized as everything from a great power to a reactive state, Japan faces many diplomatic challenges. Nevertheless, Japan has become increasingly active on the international stage, reflecting a subtle shift from “exclusive bilateralism to modest multilateralism” (Mulgan 2008). Yet, especially in the Asia-Pacific, contemporary multilateralism is itself challenged geopolitically, geoeconomically, and geoculturally. In this strategic context, and particularly in response to great power contestation, “minilaterals” have proliferated, with Japan keen to join. Although current regional minilaterals are critiqued as creating as many problems as they resolve, restricting the agenda-setting of second-tier powers like Japan, a geopolynomic perspective illustrates how alternative policy prescriptions for leadership include non-traditional security minilaterals and regional international commissions.

It was recently revealed that Japan's Self-Defense Forces now designate China as a “hypothetical enemy”. This phrase has a controversial history that stretches back to the era of prewar militarism. In the 1930s, the Japanese military designated the US as a hypothetical enemy. After World War 2, this designation was identified as a reason for the militarists' view of war as inevitable. A strong taboo against labeling other countries as hypothetical enemies therefore emerged. But as the collective memory of war has waned, so has the hypothetical enemy taboo. The fact that the label is now attached to China by Japan's defense establishment does not bode well for Sino-Japanese relations.

This article describes the arrest and prosecution of three peace protesters during the Iraq War era. It places these events within the broader context of the campaign to revise Japan's Constitution, especially Article 9, to allow for the deployment of Self-Defense Force units abroad. It also introduces the great hesitancy of the Supreme Court to enforce Article 9.

Although there is a clear rise in academic interest in region formation, theoretical approaches to the topic vary greatly, stemming from geopolitical identifications of objective regional boundaries, through functionalist ideas of regional linkages, to post-structuralist ideas about fluid regional belonging. This article provides a typology of region formation approaches, based on the ontological assumptions of its authors. The typology is based on two main debates within contemporary international relations ontology: regarding the basic components of reality (material vs. ideational) and regarding the status of theories (transfactual vs. phenomenalist). The presented matrix provides an ideal-typical position for each of these four iterations and illustrates its viability in the case of region formation literature on the Asia-Pacific. Doing so, the text contributes to (meta) theoretical discussions of how regions are formed while at the same time illustrating the often-overlooked stories of region formation.

There are two main ways Russian propaganda reaches Japan: (a) the social media accounts of official institutions, such as the Russian Embassy, or Russian state-linked media outlets, such as Sputnik, and (b) pro-Russian Japanese political actors who willingly (or unwillingly) spread disinformation and display a clear pro-Kremlin bias. These actors justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine and repeat the Russian view of the war with various objectives in mind, primarily serving their own interests. By utilizing corpus analysis and qualitative examination of social media data, this article explores how Russian propaganda and a pro-Russian stance are effectively connected with and incorporated into the discursive strategies of political actors of the Japanese Far-Right.

This article draws on fieldwork among patients pursuing healing using macrobiotic diets at a Buddhist temple clinic not far from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It examines the (re-)emergence of macrobiotic diets as a movement for “nurturing life” (duõng sinh) in modeern Vietnam. By examining the use of macrobiotic diets among this temple's patients and followers, the article unravels popular discourses of food and health, and their intertwining relationships with conceptions of chronic diseases in contemporary Vietnamese society. The popularity of this temple as an alternative therapeutic centre for people with chronic conditions also sheds light on notions of illness, healing processes, and religious beliefs. The rise of macrobiotics as an alternative diet and lifestyle reveals people's uncertainties and mistrust amid many prevalent problems in contemporary Vietnam, such as food safety concerns. Altogether, “nurturing life” activities offer strategies for individuals to adapt to a rapidly changing social context.

In this article, I use Emile Durkheim ’s theory of “social facts” to examine Buddhist charity movements in Vietnam. Durkheim defines social facts as the beliefs and customs required to belong in a community. I use Durkheim's theory to analyze how volunteer groups develop Buddhist cosmologies with distinct social facts about human subjectivity, ethics, and karma. My study traces how social facts cause different programming outcomes like decisions to serve meat-based or vegetarian meals among food charities. My findings are significant among studies of religious humanitarianism for suggesting that grassroots movements spread through heterogeneous values and cosmologies, even within a shared tradition.

The papers in this special issue have highlighted new perspectives on food charity activities, as well as notions of food and ethics in contemporary Vietnam. As Vietnam is rapidly changing, food-related activities are dynamic phenomena that reflect the social, moral, and economic changes unfolding in society. However, ethnographic research on food culture in Vietnam published in English has been scarce. This epilogue provides a few exploratory insights into interesting social phenomena in recent years that exemplify the shifting landscape of cuisine and food ethics in modern Vietnam.