Education About Asia: Online Archives

Browse and download over 1,900 articles — feature articles, lesson plans, interviews, classroom resources, and book and film reviews — from Education About Asia (EAA)!

Sign up for the EAA Digest E-Newsletter and receive monthly updates and announcements from the EAA editor. Subscribe

Help us do more

by supporting EAA through print subscriptions and donations.

How to use the EAA Online Search Engine

PLEASE NOTE: All article and essay illustrations, including many images and graphics necessary for understanding the content, may be viewed in the PDF.

  1. 1

    Use the dropdown menus

    to search by author, geographic location, article type, and academic field

  2. 2

    Enter keywords

    to search the full text of articles (where search terms may not appear in the article title, eg.)

  3. 3

    View an article

    by clicking on its title. To view the original print version of the article, select “PDF”

Search for Articles

(culture, history, art, marriage, etc...)

NOTE: Archive articles may be downloaded and reproduced for personal or classroom use only.

Feature Article

The People’s Republic of China and Christianity: A Brief Introduction

by Elena Vishnevskaya

The spellbinding surge of Christianity in China has baffled the Western scholarly community for several decades as Christianity has been growing by leaps and bounds despite the restrictive religious policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): as of this article’s publication, Christian believers in China tally between 70 and 100 million.1 To appreciate the runaway expansion of Christianity in China is to recognize the contextual factors which have shaped this unique phenomenon—spiritual, ...

Feature Article

“Hong Kong is Our Home”: Hong Kongers Twenty-Five Years After the Handover

by Christopher K. Tong

Hong Kong has always existed in between empires, on the margins of historical time. The fishing hamlet on the edge of the Chinese empire became a political entity of importance only in the nineteenth century, when the Qing court ceded the island to Great Britain at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. Hong Kong’s liminal status made it a cosmopolitan space for transcultural exchanges between Chinese and Western worlds throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Western notions of de...

Feature Article

Trial at the Red Fort 1945-1946: The Indian National Army and the End of the British Raj in India

by Chandar Sundaram

World War II was many things to many people. For a group of Indians in Southeast Asia, it was the chance to try to free India militarily from British imperial subjugation. To do this, they formed the Indian National Army (INA) and secured imperial Japan’s sponsorship. Taking the INA court-martial of 1945–1946 as an entry point, this article will briefly assess: the INA’s history and combat performance; the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose; the political use and misuse of the INA; and Brit...

Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching the Silk Road(s): The Past, the Present, and the Future?

by Andrew M. McGreevy

The concept Silk Road(s) is prominent in Asian studies for a variety of reasons. It first became influential in the second century BCE, has served multiple functions throughout world history, and remains important in the present and, most probably, well into the future. The essay that follows is intended for middle, high school, and undergraduate instructors, and includes a brief EAA article from over twenty years ago, a college teaching guide, and three different books. Instructors, and possibl...

Teaching Resources Essay

Empathy, Memory, and Teaching East Asia’s World War II

by Emily Matson

Historical memory is a socially based reconstruction of the past that prioritizes the needs of the present over the veracity of the past.4 Originating in the 1920s, the field of memory studies grew increasingly prominent in the 1980s and became closely linked with memories of the Holocaust. Since then, it has spanned “any imaginable historical topic, from the tragic to the mundane, from genocide and war to Mickey Mouse and landscape.”5 In the case of studying historical memory of World War I...

Teaching Resources Essay

Graphic Novels about Japanese Imperialism in East Asia: Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa (vols. 1-4) and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass

by Peter Braden

Shigeru Mizuki’s sweeping manga history and personal memoir of the reign of the Shōwa Emperor (1926–1989) could be a valuable addition to high school and college classroom discussions of Japanese imperialism before and during the Pacific War, and of the country’s turbulent postwar economic and cultural transformation.

Editor's Message

Editor’s Message

by Lucien Ellington

I hope readers prosper and are at peace during all of 2023. The winter issue is a landmark of sorts; the first non-thematic issue since 2004. A series of nonthematic issues should offer an interesting variety of articles and essays while supplementing and updating our substantial existing collections of special sections.

EAA Interview

An EAA Interview with the 2022 Franklin R. Buchanan Prizewinners: Anne Prescott, Yurika Kurakata, and John Frank for Walking the Tokaido: A Multi-Disciplinary Experience in History and Culture

by Lucien Ellington

This is our twenty-sixth consecutive interview with the winners of the Franklin R. Buchanan Prize, awarded annually to recognize an outstanding pedagogical, instructional, or curriculum publication on Asia designed for K–12 and college undergraduate instructors and students. This year’s winners are Anne Prescott, Yurika Kurakata, John Frank, and Arlene Kowal for Walking the Tōkaidō: A Multi-Disciplinary Experience in History and Culture (https://tinyurl.com/y3cc5nr3).

Resources

Walking the Tokaido Road with my Students

by Andrew Glasier

In the summer of 2021 I was lucky enough to join a unique professional development opportunity through Five College Center for East Asia Studies. The opportunity was to virtually walk the Tōkaidō Road of pre-modern Japan, while also reading, researching, watching videos, and discussing with other participants along the way at several “stops” that the center had created.

Teaching Resources Essay

Lessons From Teaching East Asia: Korea and Korean American History

by Mary Connor

Teaching East Asia: Korea and Korean American History is a welcome resource for teachers wishing to include more breadth to their curriculum on East Asia by including Korea. Offering lessons and background material for all subjects, the resource is available not only in print, but also as a downloadable e-book at no charge by accessing the National Korean Studies Seminar website: www.koreanseminar.org. The following lessons on “Korea and Confucianism” and the “Four Famous Koreans” fro...

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...

Resources

Teaching the Tōkaidō Road: The Visual Arts, Geography, and History

by Angie Stokes

Journey Along the Tōkaidō: Exploring Japan’s National Road1 is an online curriculum developed by the Ohio State University’s East Asian Studies Center with support from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. This comprehensive collection of resources includes a series of sixteen lesson plans designed by K-12 teachers providing a wide range of opportunities for educators to bring the adventures of the Tōkaidō to life in their classrooms using primary source materials. This cu...

Feature Article

Kimono: The Global Adventures of a Fashion Icon

by Gavin James Campbell

Clothing is a fun and accessible way to show students global connections. Tracing the odyssey by which a “simple” t-shirt was conceived, resourced, designed, woven, sewn, marketed and delivered reveals the far-reaching networks that keep us clothed. Fast fashion and modern technology has considerably sped up this process, but the global fashion industry is ancient. Most of humanity’s earliest overland and maritime trade routes were an attempt to get beautiful cloth and dyestuffs from one r...

Book Review

China and the Founding of the United States: The Influence of Traditional Chinese Civilization

by Peter K. Frost

China and the Founding of the United States The Influence of Traditional Chinese Civilization By Dave Xueliang Wang Lanham, Lexington Books, 2021 365 Pages, ISBN 978: 1793644350, Hardcover Reviewed by Peter K. Frost “The mere thought of Chinese cultural influence on the founding of the United States,” Dave Wang’s states in his very first sentence in this quite extraordinary book, “is unimaginable to some.” The rest of the book is dedicated to combat what he considers “misconcep...

Essay

Japan’s Impact on World History

by Peter K. Frost

Many of us might find it hard to imagine Japan having a big impact on twentieth century world history. How could a nation smaller than the state of California, and dwarfed by its much larger neighbor China, possibly be a big player? Hopefully, the fact that Japan has the world’s eleventh-largest population and is now the world’s third-biggest economy may explain why Japan has had at least two different kinds of impacts on world history, each of which was a major influence in its own par...

Essay

Sisters and Enemies: A True Story of Two Sisters

by Zhuqing Li

They are two sisters born and raised in China’s southeastern coastal city of Fuzhou in Fujian Province. In a family that claims the last emperor’s tutor, Chen Baochen, as one of its ancestors, the girls had the privilege of traditional tutoring at home, in addition to their missionary school education—modern and bilingual—and had dreams as big as the world. The older sister, Jun, wanted to be a teacher, and the younger one, Hong, wanted to be a “big doctor”—in her own words—to ge...

Feature Article

Opposition to Chinese Exclusion (1850-1902)

by Edward O'Mahony

In 1849, thousands of Chinese migrants arrived in California to take part in the Gold Rush. In December 1849, a huiguan, or Chinese mutual-aid society, was established in San Francisco to help the new immigrants adjust to life in America. The huiguan, which were organized and led by the local Chinese merchant community, helped recent Chinese immigrants find jobs and acquire accommodation. They also acted as post offices, enabling immigrants to send and receive letters, and they provided a place ...

Feature Article

Japan Meets Russia

by Viktor Shmagin

Japanese, Ainu and Russians, 1702–1792 Most people today think of the Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905) as the first time Russians and Japanese came into conflict in Asia. Yet in fact, by 1904 they had been viewing each other as imperial rivals for over a century. Edo Period (1600–1868) Japan was keenly interested in the world beyond its borders. Indeed, despite the persistence of the sakoku (closed country) narrative in the popular imagination, Japan was anything but secluded during this ...

Feature Article

Variolation to Vaccine: Smallpox Inoculation Travels East to West and Back Again

by Susan Spencer

The history of the inoculation process itself might help shed light on the roots of controversies we are facing today. In the spring of 1721, England struggled in the grip of a deadly smallpox epidemic. Mandated shutdowns affected businesses, schools, and social venues, health care services were overwhelmed, and the newspapers reported alarming death tolls. Doctors in London seized the opportunity to introduce the public to the concept of inoculation, which had long been practiced in Asia and th...

Feature Article

The “First Daughter” in Asia: Alice Roosevelt’s 1905 Trip

by Benita Stambler

Adventure, romance and royalty, political intrigue. The 1905 diplomatic mission undertaken by Alice Roosevelt and others through Asia had it all, the uniquely personal combined with significant events on the world stage. Alice and her travel companions were witnesses to, and occasionally even participants in, incidents and decisions that affected the complicated diplomacy of that pivotal year. Fortunately for us today, the Smithsonian Institution has produced a website that includes two chapters...

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.