Education About Asia: Online Archives

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EAA Interview, Feature Article

Vocational Students and International Education: An EAA Interview with United States–Japan Foundation Elgin Heinz Prizewinner, Robert Clavelle

by Lucien Ellington

Robert (Bob) Clavelle is the Instructor of the Building Trades Program at the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center in White River Junction, Vermont. He has a strong passion for Japan, its people, and culture. In the summer of 2000, he was provided an opportunity to be a participant in the University of Vermont’s Asian Studies Outreach Program Institute in Japan, a three-week study program funded by the United States–Japan Foundation (USJF) with a focus on learning Japanese culture and ...

Book Review, Resources

Common Core: Korea Lessons and Resources for K–12 Classrooms

by Charles Newell

Reviewed by Charles Newell Do not let the words “Common Core” in the title of this curriculum guide cause you to dismiss it too quickly. It has certainly become an educational fad to use the phrase “Common Core” on about every classroom resource. Ironically, it has also become clear that not all states will adopt the Common Core standards, and thus far, some (and perhaps eventually many) states are changing the way they are implementing Common Core standards with their own set of state ...

Book Review, Resources

North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters, and Defectors

by Peter K. Frost

by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2015 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0804844581, Hardcover Reviewed by Peter K. Frost As its title suggests, North Korea Confidential is written by two highly knowledgeable British journalists whose main aim is to counter the usual view that all North Koreans are either “brainwashed worshipers” of North Korea’s founding father, Kim Ilsung, or “helpless victims” of his grandson, Kim Jong-un, the third leader of t...

Book Review, Resources

Chinese Religious Art

by Benita Stambler

By Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Lanham: Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), 2013 394 Pages, ISBN: 978-0739180594, Paperback Reviewed by Benita Stambler It seems hard to believe that there has not been a volume prior to this one devoted to Chinese religious art, but this work by Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky is the first comprehensive volume on the subject. It thus fills an important gap in literature on Asian art by providing a less- familiar lens for examining dynastic art. In this b...

Book Review, Resources

Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, Volume 4

by David L. Kenley

Reviewed by David L. Kenley With the publication of volume 4, Berkshire is nearing completion of the Dictionary of Chinese Biography.  While the editors and writers will continue to add to and amend the online supplement, this is the final volume of the dictionary’s printed version. Volume 4 includes figures who have influenced Chinese history since 1979. As with the previous three volumes, this one exemplifies high standards of research, writing, and editing. It is a welcome addition to an...

Book Review, Resources

A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks

by James R. Holmes

By Stewart Gordon Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge (University Press of New England), 2015 290 pages, ISBN: 978-1611685404, Hardcover  Reviewed by James R. Holmes Learning about history isn’t always fun. But it should be. And it can be. Think about Wayne Curtis’s And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails (Broadway Books, 2007), which tells the history of the New World amusingly and fascinatingly. Paul Revere paused for a snootful in Medford, Massachusetts, where I attended...

Columns, Resources, Web Gleanings

Web Gleanings: Sports, Culture, and Asia

by Judith S. Ames

GENERAL Sports Across Asia: Politics, Cultures, and Identities URL: http://tinyurl.com/z5yf6d3 This entry in Routledge’s Research in Sport, Culture, and Society series, edited by Katrin Bromber, Birgit Krawietz, and Joseph Maguire, was published in 2013. As is the case with all books featured by Google Books, only portions of this book are provided. The Introduction and the first article are presented with only a few pages omitted. The first article looks at the globalization of sports wi...

Online Supplement

What Soccer Means To Me: National Integration through the Prism of Soccer in Singapore

by Leonard C. Sebastian

For Singaporeans of my generation born in the 1960s, soccer dominates our lives. It’s hard now to imagine an era where children did not have fancy gadgets with bells, lights, and sound effects—let alone television. But that was the reality of growing up in post-Independence Singapore, where poverty was endemic and forms of recreation for children were limited. Yet for me, like so many Singaporean children growing up in the 1970s, our lives revolved around soccer. I started playing soccer ...

Feature Article

Debating the Allied Occupation of Japan (Part One)

by Peter K. Frost

The Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952) was an extraordinary time in world history. Working through SCAP, a term that stands for both the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (General Douglas MacArthur until 1951) and the largely American bureaucracy, the United States and its allies insisted that Japan must enact major reforms before regaining independence. Conservative Japanese naturally resisted, but massive casualties, two atomic bombs, anger at the militarists, and fears that the Sov...

Feature Article

Physical Education in Chinese Schools: Role Models, Repetition, and Winning

by Anni Kajanus

I stood in front of thirty-six children, neatly lined up outside their classroom, standing at attention with their arms pressed against their bodies and expectant eyes on me. My eyes gazed longingly after their teacher, who was about to disappear to the teachers’ office at the end of the corridor. I had arrived in Nanjing a few days before to carry out research in two primary schools on the development of children’s cooperative behaviors and motivations. While negotiating access for particip...

Feature Article

The Changing National and Political Role of Chinese Sports 1949–2016

by Matthew Bryan Haugen

The purpose of this essay is to assist readers in understanding the government-sponsored Chinese sports system, which for over sixty years has altered its use of sport based upon ideological and/or policy objectives. Since the Communist 1949 takeover, the government has in subsequent decades utilized sports to further socialist goals, train elite athletes for Olympic glory, and as an international projection of soft power. China might be about to experience an ideological paradigm shift regardin...

Feature Article

Baseball in Japan and the US: History, Culture, and Future Prospects

by Daniel A. Métraux

The essay that follows, with a primary focus on professional baseball, is intended as an introductory comparative overview of a game long played in the US and Japan. I hope it will provide readers with some context to learn more about a complex, evolving, and, most of all, fascinating topic, especially for lovers of baseball on both sides of the Pacific. Baseball, although seriously challenged by the popularity of other sports, has traditionally been considered America’s pastime and was for...

Feature Article

Japan in the Olympics, the Olympics in Japan

by Robin Kietlinski

The Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, though still a few years away, has a website providing up-to-date news on every imaginable aspect of the forthcoming event—from the infrastructural changes that Tokyo is currently undergoing to the latest corporate sponsors. The site also outlines the 2020 Games’ “vision,” which includes “passing on legacy for the future.” The organizers state that “the Tokyo 1964 Games completely transformed Japan, enhanced Japanese people’s awareness of the outsi...

Feature Article

Guru Dutt Sondhi: Indian IOC Member and Visionary of Asian Integration through Sport

by Stefan Huebner

To this day, the Olympic Games have never taken place in South Asia. One of the reasons, in addition to exploding costs, is the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC’s) lack of trust in Indian organizing capabilities. For example, the chairman of the organizing committee of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi was arrested for corruption.1 Doubts concerning Indian reliability have quite a long tradition, going back to the first regional events hosted there: the Western Asiatic Games (Ne...

Crafting Stars: South Korean E-sports and the Emergence of a Digital Gaming Culture

by Stephen C. Rea

For nearly two decades now, South Korea has been at the forefront of a global sports culture that is rapidly growing in popularity. But unlike other sports, athletes don’t physically overpower or outlast one another. Rather, they engage their opponents through strategic thinking and the expert manipulation of a mouse and keyboard in contests mediated by digital game environments. Known as “e-sports”—an abbreviation of “electronic sports”—these competitions attract crowds of enthusi...

Feature Article

Sports and Indian Culture in Popular Film

by Coonoor Kripalani

India is more likely to be associated with Bollywood film culture than sports. So what does the largest film industry in the world, in terms of output, tell us about sports? And what is the place of sports in the national culture? Of the six films selected here (available through online retail stores such as Amazon) to answer these questions, two deal with cricket, two are biopics about Olympian athletes in track and field and boxing, and the other two deal with hockey and soccer. Half these fil...

EAA Interview, Feature Article

Professional Basketball in Taiwan: An EAA Interview with Ben Metcalf

by Lucien Ellington

Ben Metcalf is currently the Head Coach of the professional Pure Youth basketball team in Taipei, Taiwan. A lifelong basketball fan, he spent his formative years living overseas in Japan, England, and Turkey before moving back to the US. After graduating from George Washington University in 2003, he worked for the Orlando Magic before ultimately moving to Taiwan to learn Mandarin. In the following eight years, he was a part of four Taiwanese professional basketball championship teams and helped ...

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.