Education About Asia: Online Archives

NEW FOR 2023: Beginning with Spring 2023, subscribers to the print edition of Education About Asia (EAA) will receive additional exclusive digital access to the current year’s three issues (spring, fall, and winter) as an online flipbook for the duration of their active subscription. Articles from the three print issues for 2023 will be uploaded to the EAA Digital archives in 2024. View the TOC and Editor’s Message for the Spring 2023 issue. Subscribe today to stay up to date with EAA!

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, Teaching Resources Essay

Exploring the Vietnam War: A Teacher’s Resource Essay

by Raymond A. Marcus

The purpose of this essay is to provide classroom instructors and other interested parties with a review of a range of readings, films, and documentaries about the Vietnam War. The eight areas presented explore the conflict in its complexity, from background to culture to the legacy for US foreign policy. The areas can be shaped into instructional units, with readings and films chosen with a secondary school or college audience in mind.

Resources, Web Gleanings

Web Gleanings: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and World War II in the Pacific

by Judith S. Ames

Although this site is fairly crude from a technical standpoint, several areas are useful. There is information about today’s Hiroshima Peace Park in the form of a series of photographs as well as photos taken inside the Peace Memorial Museum. In addition, there are interviews from survivors, the second generation, and children of today.

Online Supplement

The Harper’s Magazine article from 1947, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” by Henry Stimson, to accompany Peter Frost’s article, “Teaching Mr. Stimson.”

by Henry L. Stimson, To Accompany an Article by Peter Frost

In recent months there has been much comment about the decision to use atomic bombs in attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This decision was one of the gravest made by our government in recent years, and it is entirely proper that it should be widely discussed. I have therefore decided to record for all who may be interested my understanding of the events which led up to the attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, on Nagasaki on August 9, and the Japanese decision to surrend...

Essay, Resources

Nagasaki Survivors: Stories of Endurance and Courage

by Lynne Shivers

Between 1966 and 1995, as I interviewed atomic survivors, I frequently traveled from Hiroshima to Nagasaki by train. As I took the train south to Nagasaki, I had to change from the fast express train to the slower, regional train in northern Kyushu. The train wound slowly past small fishing villages, sometimes right next to the beaches. Fishing nets were piled on the sea walls. Narrow streams coming out of the mountains emptied into the ocean. Blue and brown fishing boats on mud flats leaned to ...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Approaching Hiroshima: Three Ways to Engage with History

by Lynn R. Dole

Classroom instruction has generally reflected trends in popular understanding of the US decision to use atomic bombs. Mark Selden recently published an analysis of nineteen contemporary high school and college textbooks in Japan Focus (2005). His examination revealed that American texts offer a range of treatments of the atomic bombings. Even the way the topic is situated in historical surveys reveals contested interpretations: is this event framed as one of the last actions of World War II or a...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Feilong (Flying Dragon): The China Game

by Patricia Burleson

The board game Feilong: The China Game, a unique tool for learning and/or reinforcing learning about China, requires only a beginning knowledge of Chinese history and culture, but extends to challenge even the well informed. Players roll dice, answer questions from game cards, and move along the game board competing to be the first to land on a predetermined set of spaces. Eight playing pieces are included, but more players could easily play at the same time, or work in teams. There are 600 t...

Resources

Eat Drink Your Homework

by Elizabeth Graf

Eat Drink Man Woman is a delightful and thoughtful comedy by Ang Lee, who directed the box office hits Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Brokeback Mountain (2006). The title is a quote from the Li Ji, a Confucian classic, but the action is in contemporary Taiwan. The story concerns Mr. Chu, a widower, who is a master Chinese chef, and his three daughters, each of whom challenges any rigid definition of traditional Chinese culture: one is an airlines executive, one is a Christian, and on...

Feature Article

The Day Man Lost: Hiroshima: A Matter of Perspectives

by Ileana B. Leavens

August 6, 1945, has been called “the day man lost,” for regardless of race, nationality, beliefs, economic and or military strengths and weaknesses, and political ideologies, we all lost. Considering the character and consequences of that day in which man’s history was completely changed, it is imperative that the issues that led to August 6 be known as broadly as possible, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki be studied from different but interconnected points of view. In this article I discus...

Feature Article

Teaching Mr. Stimson

by Peter K. Frost

For some time now, I have taught a mixed lecture and discussion class on the atom bomb, primarily by using Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s February 1947 Harper’s Magazine article “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” As many EAA readers no doubt know, Secretary Stimson wrote this article in response to a request by Harvard University President James Conant, a distinguished scientist who had himself worked on the bomb and hence was worried about a number of Americans who criticized the ...

Feature Article

Learning from Truman’s Decision: The Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Surrender

by George P. Brown

August 6 through 9 of 2005 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings stand as a watershed event in modern history because they brought to a decisive conclusion the greatest and most devastating conflict in human history, and because they ushered in a new age, the era of nuclear weapons and the policies of “massive retaliation” and “mutual assured destruction”—which at the height of the cold war brought with them the very real poten...

EAA Interview, Feature Article

EAA Interview with John Dower

by Lynn Parisi

Most EAA readers are familiar with MIT Professor John Dower, who works in modern Japanese history and US-Japan relations. He is the author of numerous publications including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999). Dower is both an internationally-prominent scholar and a master teacher. One of his most recent pedagogical projects, with colleague Shigeru Miyagawa, is Visualizing Cultures (VC) a Web-based, multimedia, interactive, curricula project on ...

Feature Article

A Tribute to John Hersey’s Hiroshima

by Fay Beauchamp

This will be the sixtieth-year anniversary of one of the most remarkable books of American history, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first published on August 31, 1946, in The New Yorker. In March 1946, William Shawn, managing editor of The New Yorker, called for an article focused on the immediate devastation in Hiroshima rather than on statistics or politics. John Hersey interviewed survivors for three weeks in May and decided to focus on suffering human beings rather than on destroyed buildings. He...

Feature Article

Thank God for the Atom Bomb?

by Richard Rice

I once received a call from the concerned editor of an education journal: “Could you find a source other than Thank God for the Atom Bomb? We feel it inappropriate for teachers to see it in a journal dedicated to international understanding.” Since the essay on travel versus tourism that I wanted to cite appeared only in this provocatively titled collection of Paul Fussell essays, they finally did allow it to appear in a footnote. The phrase—without the question mark I add above to my own ...

Feature Article

What We Forget When We Remember the Pacific War

by Owen Griffiths

Whatever else history is or does, it is an indispensable component of our sense of self, both as individuals and as members of various communities. History in all its forms––memory, experience, and formal study––grounds us in a particular time and place and provides us with an understanding of how we are connected to those who came before us. History is also fundamental to our daily lives because it permeates our every decision and action in the present. From the “everyman” and woman...

Film Review Essay

Of Cold War and Political Orthodoxy: From the Masses to the Masses

by Gregory Lewis

Political scientist Eric Hyer first captured the dramatic appeal of China’s revolutionary history in his incisive documentary on Helen Foster Snow (2001). With From the Masses to the Masses, he delves substantially deeper into the cultural and political milieu of Mao’s China both before and after 1949. Hyer takes as his subject Jin Zhilin, an artist born in 1928 in Hebei province who began his formal training during the Anti-Japanese war. Jin’s discovery in Yan’an of what was to become h...

Book Review, Resources

Daoism and Chinese Culture

by Gil Raz

Livia Kohn presents us with a textbook meant for classroom use. In colloquial and non-technical language, clearly based on lecture notes, Livia Kohn’s classroom text, Daoism and Chinese Culture, attempts to synthesize in simple terms the very complex social reality of Daoism. Finding coherence in the almost innumerable practices, ritual techniques, and lineages, Kohn defines the unifying principle of Daoism as “aligning oneself with Dao, creating harmony and a sense of participation in it . ...

Book Review, Resources

Po Chu-i: Selected Poems

by Susanne Klein

This anthology of 128 poems and a short prose piece by Po Chü-i offers valuable insight into the work and ideas of the T’ang bard. To date, more than 2,800 poems have been attributed to Po, leaving translators with a substantial selection from which to present a choice personal image of the man. Watson selected a range of themes, from religious issues such as Buddhism and Taoism to less devout depictions of drinking and joviality alongside verse on melancholy. In his early years of literary a...

Book Review, Resources

Central Asia: A Global Studies Handbook

by Hazel Sara Greenberg

Most Americans know little about the vast area called Central Asia. Today it has been arbitrarily redefined as five countries: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Yet, historically, culturally, geographically, and politically, much links this region that further confounds those who want to study about these five countries.

Film Review Essay

An Unusual Journey: Afghanistan Unveiled

by S. Louisa Wei

Many innocent civilians were killed in the war against the Taliban in early 2001. The world soon forgot about these victims as more wars broke out elsewhere. Afghanistan Unveiled is a documentary in the form of a road movie. It visits, in turn, the cave-dwellers of Bamyan—mostly women and children left behind after the men were slaughtered—who have only enough food to keep alive, the Kuchi nomads, also in poverty and feeling devastated, the warm and hospitable Badakshan mountain people, and ...

Film Review Essay

Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

by Reuel R. Hanks

Kyrgyz society, like societies in all the emerging states in former Soviet Central Asia, is struggling with the clash of “traditional” values and modernization. The tradition of ala kachuu, or bride kidnapping, has received a considerable amount of attention by both Western and Kyrgyz scholars in recent years. Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan opens this controversial practice to direct scrutiny, revealing how young women in rural areas are frequently pressured into marriages they have not chos...

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.