This is an introduction essay to the IJAS special issue “Materialism and Materiality in Asia,” which is devoted to the intersections between Marxist historical materialism and the more recent new materialisms in different Asian contexts. The two materialisms correspond to two pressing social problems we are facing: the social inequality and alienations created by capitalism on the one hand and the environmental crises happening under the Anthropocene on the other. Bringing the two strains of thought together, we hope to explore ways to reconnect with the material world, and to develop theorizations that are more responsible to humans and non-humans.

This paper argues that the interwar Japanese Marxists Miki Kiyoshi and more contemporary Hiromatsu Wataru each moved towards developing this perspective beyond simple distinctions between idealism, which is confined to concepts, and materialism, conceived as presupposing that ideas are determined by matter. Japanese Marxism was in a unique place to affect such a synthesis because of the existence of Kyoto School philosophy, with whom both Miki and Hiromatsu were associated. The proponents of the Kyoto School combined Eastern and Western philosophical perspectives, which had the aim of criticizing modernity. Miki Kiyoshi and other members of the Kyoto School eventually supported Japan's wartime effort, which delegitimized their concerns about modernity during the postwar. However, in postwar Japan, Hiromatsu developed a creative reading of Marx's materialism and in the 1994 surprised everyone by advocating a pan-Asianist critique of modernity. Hiromatsu suggested that despite problems that Miki and the Kyoto School represented, one had to grasp the rational kernel, which could save Marxism from slipping into an equally dangerous modernization theory. This task remains for us today when the dystopia of globalized capitalism seems to have become a reality that threatens the survival of our planet.

The recent surge in materialist thought, namely New Materialism, has significant implications for political theory. They challenge the fundamental dichotomy upheld in the modern West between human agency and inert nature by revealing the affective quality of nature and granting it the status of the agency. However, does the non-West face risks if it attempts to overcome the modern Western notion of inert nature? If so, is there any way to avoid these risks? To pursue these questions, I take up the writings of political thinker Maruyama Masao (丸山眞男) and literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (小林秀雄) on the political implications of materiality. Maruyama ascribes Kobayashi's alleged collaboration with Japan's World War II policy to his passive acceptance of the felt reality. Regarding such passive acceptance as endemic to Japanese thought, Maruyama traces it back to the notion of an early-modern Kokugaku thinker Motoori Norinaga, “the way to things.” Against Maruyama's criticism, I argue (1) that Kobayashi's interpretation of Motoori's “way to things” resonates with the current New Materialism, and (2) that Kobayashi's materialism does not necessarily lead to passive acceptance of the external world, but rather can be pursued in a more productive way.

When the global material reality has already been reshaped and determined by western modernity, Gandhism and Maoism stand for attempts to discover a material world other than the existing one. I examine the ways in which the theory and practice of the body in Mao and Gandhi resonates with new materialisms' views of the body and matter as dynamic multitude and anti-dualistic open system. Gandhi and Mao share the concerns of new materialism in terms of seeing human bodies, environments, (in)organic matters and systems as configurations of multiple influences and dependencies. To put Maoism and Gandhism in the perspective of today's new materialism, the entanglement of human, nature and matter in their ideas also functions as a kind of agency in connection to other socio-political forces (instead of deploying ethics, as current new materialist ontologies have done) to enact changes. The ways in which the two formidable Asian thinkers grasp materials sound more like an abstraction, revealing that materialisms – either old or new – may be something other than what they define themselves as.

This article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.

In a single serving of boba tea, the non-human actors of the tall plastic cups, plastic dome lids, and the giant plastic straws dominate, but receive little attention. This article uses recent theories and discussions of new materialism to bring together cultural analysis of the boba tea consumption phenomenon that could be relevant for reflecting on a sustainable future. The article contributes to social research of waste by focusing on the mediating functions of plastic before it becomes waste. My central argument is that plastic is not merely a physical and impartial container in the contemporary food and beverage industry. It plays an indispensable role in the visualization, mass mediation, and consumption of the boba tea beverage. While current waste research often focuses on the “afterlife” of plastic waste as it relates to underclass waste workers, recycling economy and global waste trade, this article highlights the performative function of plastic as it changes the way we imagine time, gender, and waste. I show it is the plastic cup that enables boba tea to be so visually and gastronomically satisfying in an age when the photogenicity and “Instagrammability” of food and beverage have become more relevant to taste and distinctions.

Contemporary cinema and media studies are marked by a materialist turn that highlights material elements, such as objects, non-human agencies, the environment and places on and off screen, as well as the materiality of media productions and consumption. This article expands on the important scholarship of “materialist” media studies as well as existing ecocinema scholarship by stressing the materiality of digital landscapes in contemporary Chinese fantasy (or qihuan and xuanhuan) film and television works that have gained significant popularity in China and Hong Kong. Specifically, this article examines the animist landscape in film and television adaptions of Eternal Love, a fantasy romance television serial that loosely draws on Daoist mythology. Focusing on the material aspects of digital landscapes of Chinese fantasy cinema, the article develops the notion of the “cinema–ecology complex” to address the materiality of digital landscapes, the cinematic footprint of digitally enhanced landscapes through location shooting and the consumption of landscapes as scenic spots, including daka practices, in film studio cities and related film-induced tourism. Ultimately, this article calls for a textual–infrastructural approach in cinema and media studies, which tends to reorient to the infrastructural aspects of media production, distribution and consumption.

This paper aims to provide a new constitutional perspective on the Egyptian political process from the end of World War I to its independence in 1922. Egyptian historical research on the same period has been conducted mainly from a nationalist perspective. However, as Egypt had a long history of constitutionalism that had developed in unison with nationalism since the 1870s, Egyptian nationalists simultaneously desired to establish a constitutional system after achieving independence. Eventually, Britain unilaterally declared the independence of Egypt in 1922, which, despite its concern, included the introduction of a constitutional system into the country. The declaration was the product of secret negotiations between the British Special High Commissioner Allenby and Tharwat, an Egyptian nationalist politician. However, the idea of introducing the constitutional system was first publicly proposed in the preceding negotiations between Colonial Minister Milner and Zaghlūl, which facilitated Tharwat's negotiations with Allenby on this subject. While Zaghlūl, the leader of the Wafd, and the group including ‘Adlī and Tharwat were increasingly antagonistic, the establishment of a constitutional system had long been a common desire of all Egyptian nationalists who transcended their differences.

This article is a case study on the Yunnanese scholar Li Yuanyang under the background of the Ming's incorporating and sinicizing Yunnan, exploring how he views the Ming's actions and writes Yunnan's becoming a part of China. First, it retells Li's life experiences and examines the Yunnan native things and Chinese traditions in his writings. Then, after noting his emphasis of Yunnan's belonging to China, it concentrates on his comments on the Ming's military campaigns. As it analyzes, on the one hand, he justifies these campaigns against indigenous rebellions, on the other hand, he also criticizes unnecessary wars and some imperial officials' selfish deeds. Besides, he considers the constructing and reconstructing projects as a symbol of the central state's righteous governance, which should also bring benefit and benevolence to the indigenes. In a word, Li's case reflects the deep impact of the Ming's invasion on the local elites, as well as how they react to this.

As the Chinese minister to the United States between 1889 and 1893, Cui Guoyin faced unprecedented pressures from the Qing government to achieve an alleviation of Chinese exclusion. However, American discrimination against Chinese escalated despite his tireless effort to stem it. The failure made him frustrated and especially sensitive to the issue of face. While finding it a useful tool to exonerate himself, Cui believed that face could also be helpful to Chinese bargaining with the United States over immigration. He incorporated this belief into his exchanges with the U.S. Department of State. At Cui's suggestion or at least agreeing with him, the Zongli Yamen referred to America's reputation as a pressure for concessions in its communications with the U.S. legation in Beijing as well. Such “weaponization” of face represents both an often ignored backward turn in late Qing's diplomatic mentality and the limit of its diplomatic leverage with the United States.

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a commercial network of Chinese Hui Muslims emerged in China's mid and lower Yangzi River region. Through this commercial network, Muslim merchants achieved economic success and positioned themselves as Muslim community leaders and leading reformers of Chinese society. Past scholarship on Chinese Hui Muslims has focused on intellectuals or warlords and missed this important group of Muslim leaders – a group that, with the rising prominence and influence of entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century, had growing political clout. Chen Jingyu, a Muslim merchant from Nanjing, symbolized the culmination of the Muslim commercial network. Indeed, Chen's economic achievements were the direct result of the coordinated effort of Muslim merchants. With sufficient financial backing, Chen then invested in charitable activities and gained unprecedented influence in Muslim communities and Chinese society at large.

To date, the research on Chinese figures residing or settling abroad and their residential settlements has mainly focused on trade merchants. Merchants frequently traveled abroad due to the characteristics of their occupation and were therefore more likely to reside in foreign countries for varying periods of time in the process. Song-era records that document figures staying overseas, however, largely center around intellectuals and bureaucrats who were trained in the Chinese systems of knowledge or administration, as opposed to merchants. Examining the records concerned, it is difficult to conclude that merchants accounted for the majority of overseas Chinese citizens at that time. This paper strived to focus on the emergence of people who looked for opportunities overseas as the background for the formation of Chinese communities in the Song period, as opposed to trade voyages by merchants. This situation is clearly revealed through the Song's ban on overseas travel for those with different traits from merchants. This indicates that the emergence of people who sought to journey abroad for new opportunities had begun even before 1078. As Chinese citizens sailed abroad to look for new opportunities, Chinese communities began to form in foreign countries around the twelfth century.

This study analyzes the little known Manchukuo Young Girl Envoys – Manchukuo's first government-appointed diplomats – and their official visit to Japan between June 22 and July 12, 1932. Existing studies on the Envoys tend to interpret them from an angle of contemporary Japanese people's national sentiment and deem their visit to Japan a show that the Japanese authorities in Manchukuo and Japan orchestrated together, to render Japan a strong world power. This study problematizes that view and considers the Envoys more of a product of intense power struggles inside Manchukuo's highest Japanese ruling strata, suggesting that Manchukuo's decision-making circle in 1932 was far from being a unified entity. Examining the Envoys' interactions in Japan and comparing relevant Japanese- and Chinese-language news coverage on them, this study argues for the possibility of tracing the intertwined national ideals of Manchukuo's Chinese and Japanese government leaders based on the inspiring example of the Envoys.

This article examines the incident of a “revolt” in the Ockenden Tibetan refugee school in the early 1960s. By analyzing this previously unknown incident of “revolt” in the Tibetan refugee school within the broader historical context of early years in exile, this article aims to underline the contested and contingent process of nation-building in exile. I argue that the Ockenden incident, as forgotten fragments of the Tibetan past, provides us a rare glimpse into the early history of contestation over the production of national history and discourse on Tibet, where exiled Bonpos, a non-Buddhist minority, attempted to renegotiate their marginality by producing alternative history and discourse on Tibet. By focusing on the history of the Ockenden incident as a forgotten fragment from the exile Tibetan past, this article aims to decenter the teleology of Tibetan nationalism by bringing to light one of the unrealized alternative future agendas different groups of exiled Tibetans had in those early moments of discursive formation.

War and peace are the two incompatible notions. War and compassion are not: war often calls for human compassion to save not only friends but also enemies. As the technology of war has advanced since the nineteenth century, the targets of compassion in the form of philanthropy, social work, and humanitarianism have also expanded to include soldiers, civilians, and children. In this article, I explore the link between war and compassion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by focusing on the plight of Japanese war orphans in Japan and Chinese war orphans in China. These sixty-seven Chinese war orphans were brought to Japan in 1939 by a member of the Japanese Imperial army stationed in occupied China. The founders of orphanages in Japan argued that war incited their compassion to save the young victims of war. Yet they were also forced to work under the watchful eyes of the State. How did Japan's power structures, which created misery in both Japan and China, change over time? How did the Japanese social structures, which tried to help alleviate misery among children, change? My goal is to relate these questions to each other for further understanding the link between war and compassion between 1867 and 1945 and in the early postwar era.

This article takes a life course perspective to examine the immigration and settlement processes experienced by children of Japanese war orphans left behind in China. Due to legal, social and biological factors, the lifecourses of immigrants are analysed in four groups, determined their age and, concomitantly their year of immigration. “Child immigrants” immigrated by the mid-1980s at school age and steadily built working careers. Due to multiple factors, “adolescent immigrants” made a hasty decision to immigrate to Japan before reaching twenty in the late 1980s. As they did not have special skills, they remained unable to achieve upward mobility. “Young adult immigrants,” falling outside the age-limit eligible for government support, immigrated in 1990s at their own expense while in their 20s. It took a long time before attaining stability in life. “Elder adult immigrants” immigrated in the late 1990s and later while in their 30s. They continue to live at the bottom of the social ladder in Japan.

This study applies a genealogical mode of enquiry to the history of tigers as a symbol of Korea and the Korean people. The zoomorphic idea of Korea as a tiger is conventionally traced to the writings of the intellectual, Ch'oe Namsŏn (1890–1957). However, we argue that while Ch'oe was the first to link tigers with modern Korean nationalism, low levels of literacy and Ch'oe's later ambiguous status as a Japanese “collaborator” meant his promotion of the tiger symbol failed to gain traction. Instead, we locate the making of the modern Korean tiger metaphor in multiple post-colonial sites of cultural inscription, including national newspapers, zoos and museums, which generate and diffuse narratives about the ancient and continuous origins of the Korean people. In particular, it was during the 1980s that the successful Seoul Olympic bid and the Chŏn dictatorship's cultural policy converged to facilitate the “rediscovery” of the tiger as a national symbol with a supposedly ancient heritage, and with Ch'oe and his problematic legacy effaced. We also observe a continuing resistance to Japanese hegemony and a post-colonial construction of Korean identity through the recasting of the tiger – originally a Japanese symbol of Korea – in a new light.

Noting the growing importance of online platforms, this paper discusses the rise and development of the platform economy in Korea, defining platforms as a business model and arguing that the platform economy requires financing, an environment for Internet use and users, services, and content. Many believe that the platform economy's development is a natural outcome of technical innovation. However, the platform economy was created by the interplay of government and corporate strategies under certain historical conditions. In Korea, the platform economy developed after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Presenting the IT industry and venture businesses as a solution to the crisis, the government helped finance venture companies through intensive investment and enhanced the strategy of building information and communication infrastructure. Platform companies suffered from the lack of content and services to provide; however, they quickly built web portal platforms with Korean specificities by copying and benchmarking personal computer communication services.

Moving away from the text-centered paradigm in film studies, the present research explores the relationship between the growing popularity of the film in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century and city governance in the International Settlement. It argues that the rise of movie halls contributed to creating a new kind of crowd that blended Chinese moviegoers with non-Chinese viewers. The emergence of the cinema as a space where people of different racial and ethnic origins encountered impelled the Shanghai Municipal Council – the governing body of the International Settlement in Shanghai – to respond by implementing new measures of public safety and altering its decades-long unspoken rules of segregation in the realm of everyday life. For Chinese enlightenment intellectuals and government officials, meanwhile, anxiety over their fellow Chinese's lack of basic decorum in public spaces arose with the intense intermingling of Chinese and non-Chinese filmgoers under the same roof. Thus, the cinema became a “contact zone” – a space of asymmetrical relations resulting not necessarily from colonists' exercise of colonial power but from the Chinese elite's wrapping of the discussion of movie theater etiquette reform within a political and ideological framework of modernization, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.

Natsume Sōseki and Masaoka Shiki, two of the towering figures in modern Japanese literature, exchanged kanshi poems for eleven years starting in 1889 when they were students. What Sōseki and Shiki enacted in their kanshi exchanges was not simply an admiration for Chinese culture, but rather a performance of literati cultural exchange. In the personae that these two writers adopted in these exchanges, and in the poetic voices that each writer meticulously honed, they were achieving a return to a cultural homeland and to an “imagined community” in the Sinosphere. Further, the exchange of poetry in a language that was simultaneously both foreign and hauntingly familiar demonstrated a performative quality that reflected their appreciation of the dynamics of poetic exchange in China but also of the yose theater and of the rakugo performances that they frequented as students in Tokyo. In fact, for Sōseki and Shiki, kanshi composition and exchange served two paradoxical purposes: it offered both the challenge of poetic expression in a foreign language and a return to an imagined community and to the familiar rhythms and conventions of a sacred language.