Education About Asia: Online Archives

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Our Story: A History of the World, An EAA Interview with coauthors Michio Yamasaki, Edward O’Mahony, and Angelica McDonough

by Lucien Ellington

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Editor’s Introduction: Erroneous predictions of the textbook’s demise have occurred for decades, but textbooks remain a major pedagogical tool, even though they are often ineffectual. This excerpt from a 2004 world history textbook study is still, for the most part, accurate today: World history textbooks have abandoned narrative for a broken format of competing instructio...

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: Rome and the Indian Subcontinent: A Forgotten Story of Impactful Economic Interactions?

by Lucien Ellington

Editor’s Note: Richard Davis’s AAS Key Issues in Asian Studies volume—Global India circa 100 CE: South Asia in Early World History—inspired me to incorporate part of his work and draw upon other sources as well in the following essay. Richard deserves the credit for stimulating my interest in this topic, but none of the blame for any errors I might have committed paraphrasing excerpts from Richard’s volume or working with additional sources. “The quest for India is a moving force of...

EAA Digest Exclusive, Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching Asian Geographies: Overcoming Pedagogical Barriers

by EAA Editorial Office

Understanding geography, especially physical geography, is not easy for me. A deceased relative once described this ineptness as “not having even a bump of locality.” This handicap notwithstanding, my advocacy for geographic literacy in general, and geographic understanding of Asia in particular, as essential foundations of liberal and international education becomes stronger each year. Despite enormous digital advances in pedagogy, the apparent persistence of widespread geographic illitera...

Feature Article

Making China And India Great Again? Why China’s and India’s Paths to Power May Hit a Wall, Part II: Foreign Policy Challenges

by Tommy Lamont

For the past decade, experts in international relations have suggested that the world’s center of power is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the main reason is the extraordinary rise of China. They add that the equally remarkable, though slightly slower, rise of India will move the center of global power even further from the West. A number of observers strongly believe the efforts of the United States under former President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy to ...

Feature Article

“Louder than Words”: A Profile of the Destruction of the Aral Sea and Its Consequences

by Reuel R. Hanks

The collapse of the Aral Sea is the greatest human-induced ecological catastrophe in history. Worse than Chernobyl, Bhopal, Minamata, London’s killer smog, and all the other disasters of the industrial age, the unprecedented decline of the Aral stands as a testament to the folly of myopic “economic planning” and the dangers of totalitarianism. Millions of people living in the vicinity of the sea have had their health and livelihood destroyed, and the damage to the region will continue for ...

Online Supplement

India’s Historical Impact on Southeast Asia

by Patit Paban Mishra

India’s historical impact on Southeast Asia forms an important component of world history. In this age of globalization, relations between two significant regions are important. The Look East and Act East policies have become the catch word of Indian foreign relations since the 1990s, where Indian policymakers desired close cooperation with Southeast Asian countries. This is nothing new from an Indian perspective, but an enactment of déjà vu. What we know of today as Indian and ...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

The Nomads of the Steppe: Resources for Teachers

by Gregory Aldous

The nomadic pastoralists of the inner Asian steppe had an impact on history out of all proportion to their small population. The cultures and politics of societies across Asia experienced profound change at their hands. China presents a good example of this phenomenon. The nomads on the steppe posed a perennial challenge to the Chinese political structure, making management of the nomads always one of the chief concerns of every Chinese dynasty. The Great Wall of China is the most famous demo...

Teaching Resources Essay

Population Trends and Issues: Bangladesh

by Byron Haast, Phillip O'Brien

In demographic studies, much discussion in academic circles centers around either the challenges faced by aging populations in places such as Japan, Germany, or Italy, or the impacts of pronatal and antinatal policies (policies meant to increase or decrease birthrate), such as China’s One-Child Policy or Australia’s Baby Bonus. With a population in excess of 165 million, Bangladesh is currently the world’s eighth-most populous nation, yet remains largely unknown and misunderstood outside o...

Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching East Asia with GIS

by Tanya L. Roth

Twenty years ago, taking a trip meant gathering the right maps or tracing the itinerary in an atlas. In the classroom, maps have long gone hand in hand with studying history: globes, wall-mounted maps, projected maps—these static images also help students in their journey to understand how events unfold across time and space. Maps are important visual reference points: with them, students can see where history happened and better understand why; for example, maps showing the earliest construct...

Feature Article

The People Who Left the People’s Republic: A History of the North Korean Diaspora

by Daniel J. Schwekendiek, Seung Ju Lee

Our primary questions are: Who are the people leaving the People’s Republic? When did they leave? Why did they leave? How many are there? The word “diaspora” is derived from the Greek word diaspeirein (to disperse) and relates to “the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland.”1 What makes the application of this term special is that it is very emotional, as people indirectly associate it with the plight of Jewish or African sl...

Feature Article

Labor Migration in Central Asia: Will Kazakhstan Be the Anchor for Stability

by Bolat L. Tatibekov, Reuel R. Hanks

Labor Migration in Post-Soviet Central Asia The five former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajik­istan, and Turkmenistan may collectively be referred to as Central Asia. In the quarter-century since these countries gained independence, their geo­political importance has become obvious. Not only does this region serve as a classic buffer zone between Russia and the turmoil in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they also hold large reserves of hydrocarbon and hydroelec­tric ...

Feature Article

Nation, Immigration, and the Future of Japanese Society

by Thomas Feldhoff

Today’s classroom maps, globes, and atlases show the boundaries of all sovereign states across the world. These boundaries establish the territories of states and define the homelands of nations. However, combining the political institution of the state with the cultural attributes of a nation is a nineteenth-century European political invention that came to dominate world politics in the twentieth century.1 British historian Eric Hobsbawm pointed to the fact that “history” has always been...

Feature Article

Same Land, Different Life? Questioning Narratives Surrounding China’s State-Led Rural Urbanization

by Isabel Heger

“Same land, different life”: Under this slogan, Huaming, a model town in the suburban Dongli District of the municipality of Tianjin, China’s fifth-largest city, was presented at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai as a successful example of China’s rural urbanization. The slogan was meant to express that the peasants who had to give up their land in the process of urbanization and relocate to Huaming were leading better lives than before. This is in line with the official portrayal of gover...

Feature Article

Some Demographic Trends in the World’s Most Populous Country-to-Be

by Nimish Adhia

Sometime around the year 2023, India will surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, with a population approaching 1.4 billion (see Figure 1).1 Such change at the top of demographic rankings is rare, and so it is likely to generate some attention, reflection, and commentary. People are likely to be curious about India’s population growth—does it show signs of slowing? In the Western imagination, India, perhaps more than any other country, has been associated with overpopulation. St...

Feature Article

Japan’s Changing Demographics and the Impact on Its Military

by Robert D. Eldridge

[caption id="attachment_6996" align="aligncenter" width="469"] Japanese troops in South Sudan. Japanese forces left South Sudan in the spring of 2017. Source: Screen capture from the documentary Japan—60 Years of Contribution in Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Mine Action Activities by UNMAS United Nations on YouTube at https://tinyurl.com/y8lmfn9d.[/caption] Modern Japan has long been a prosperous country with a growing population, but over the past couple of decades, its economy has struggl...

Feature Article

Singapore Immigration and Changing Public Policies

by Chris Hudson

The demographic composition of the contemporary population of Singapore reflects a complex and vibrant history of a melting pot nation that has grown out of successive waves of immigration stretching back nearly 200 years. As an immigrant society, Singapore is a product of the forces of globalization that have been a constitutive feature of the historical development of many nations. When Britain’s Sir Stamford Raffles signed a treaty in 1819 with local rulers, a swampy little island was trans...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Japan’s Declining Population: Beyond the Textbook

by Byron Haast, Phillip O'Brien

Geography, as a discipline, allows students to explore, analyze, and understand the places that comprise our world. Most geography curricula focus on both physical and human geography, often in the context of "issues"-based learning; this serves to demonstrate the dynamic and applicable nature of the subject to learners. Within the context of human geography, population is an area of study that enables geographers to plan the use of Earth’s resources, make sense of the underlying factors influ...

Online Supplement

Digital Pedagogical Resources from “Japan’s Declining Population: Beyond the Textbook”

by Byron Haast, Phillip O'Brien

Population Data UN population division: http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/ Japanese Ministry of Health: http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/ Topic Introduction Jonathan Soble, “Japan, Short on Babies, Reaches a Worrisome Milestone,” The New York Times, June 2, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y8hny6ua Impacts Shrinking workforce: https://tinyurl.com/y8tzfu4v Potential abortion restrictions: https://tinyurl.com/yb2q88rl Budgetary impact: https://tinyurl.com/y8acdb98 ...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Aging Populations: A Comparison between Japan and Germany

by Jayson Evaniuck

When comparing population trends of Japan and Germany, numerous similarities stand out. Both countries have an identical total fertility rate (TFR) per woman of 1.4 with a population growth rate of -0.2 percent (Table 1). While both countries have high life expectancies, Japan’s eighty-five-year life expectancy is among the world’s longest, leading to a higher elderly dependency ratio in 2017 (Table 1). Similarities between the countries related to below-replacement-rate population growth, a...

Feature Article

Child Poverty in a Rich Country: Measuring and Influencing Policies in Contemporary Japan

by Thomas Feldhoff

Japan is a wealthy developed country. It has the third-largest economy in the world after the United States and China in terms of gross domestic product, it is a top-performing country among member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of the quality of its educational system, and Japanese men and women enjoy ever-longer and healthier life spans. But stereotypes of Japan as a middle-class society with exceptional equality in income and wealth have c...

New to EAA?

Before viewing the full archives, view Editor’s Choice Articles, handpicked by EAA Editor, Lucien Ellington, which provide a good overview of EAA and introduction for new readers.