Education About Asia: Online Archives

Browse and download over 1,500 articles — feature articles, lesson plans, interviews, classroom resources, and book and film reviews — from Education About Asia (EAA)!

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

    Enter keywords

    in search bar below

  2. 2

    Filter your search

    by selecting your search criteria in the dropdown boxes. Search filters range from geographic location to article topic

  3. 3

    View an article

    by clicking on its title. To view the entire 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.

Resources, Web Gleanings

Web Gleanings: Teaching about Asia through Youth Culture

by Judith S. Ames

JAPAN Anime The Ghibli Studio and Hayo Miyazaki rank foremost in Japanese anime. The following sites contain interviews, movie clips, and discussions about Ghibli and Miyazaki: Title: Ghibli—The Miyazaki Temple URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoXRf0h-3Lo A review in six parts, most of them around eight to nine minutes long. This link is to the first section with links to the others on the sidebar. Title: The Birth of Studio Ghibli URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds3adcHVxnQ ...

Teaching Resources Essay

Charting Their Own Course: Resources for Teaching about China’s Youth

by Mary Cingcade

By Mary Cingcade I begin this review of resources for secondary teaching about youth culture in China with a bit of encouragement. To those for whom the mere mention of “youth culture” evokes an unknowable world inhabited by unforgiving digital natives, fear not. Early in my survey of resources, I realized that to do this topic justice, you must cede certain ground to your high school students—doing so will pay dividends in your classroom. If you provide the perspective on China’s you...

Essay, Resources

Analyzing the Appeal of Manga: Teaching Information Literacy Skills through Japanese Popular Culture

by Maureen Donovan

By Maureen Donovan Manga’s rapid rise in popularity around the world in the twenty-first century is an example of the diffusion of information and culture across borders in today’s “global information society.” Manga (Japanese comics) are appealing and accessible to high school and college students who sometimes pursue an avid interest and go on to become independent learners in the world of Japanese popular culture. With thousands of manga volumes published in English translation ove...

Feature Article

Top Ten Things to Know About Japan in the Early Twenty-First Century

by Carol Gluck

By Carol Gluck 10 JAPAN IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY. Although Japan is sometimes compared in size to the state of California, it is probably better to think of such things in national terms. In that case, Japan is two-thirds the size of France, one-quarter bigger than Italy or Great Britain, and three-quarters larger than the Korean peninsula. Geographically, the United States, Russia, and China are very big countries, while Japan is something more like “normal size.”1 But geographic size do...

Feature Article

Ethnicity in the Lives of Modern Malaysian Youth

by Courtney Graham, Jonathan Bonner, Melissa Christie, Nancy Janus, Zoe Friedman

By Nancy Janus, Courtney Graham, Melissa Christie, Zoe Friedman, Jonathan Bonner During the summer of 2007, I traveled to Malaysia with four undergraduate students to study the lives of Malaysian youth. The youth-on-youth approach gave us an intimate look into the religion, social lives, and values of young Malaysians. We were interested in examining the ways in which ethnicity shaped the lives of young people in this multi-ethnic society. Malaysia is a geographically and ethnically diverse S...

Book Review Essay, Resources

When Asia Was the World

by Gwen R. Johnson

BY STEWART GORDON CAMBRIDGE, MA: DA CAPO PRESS, 2007 240 PAGES, ISBN: 978-0306815560, HARDCOVER Reviewed by Gwen R. Johnson Stewart Gordon’s, When Asia Was the World, promises to be an important source for both high school teachers and undergraduate instructors in World History and Asian Studies. Having meticulously researched original historic texts and memoirs of the explorers and travelers who traversed Asia from 500 to 1500 CE, Gordon provides a unique multiple perspective lens from wh...

EAA Interview

Indian Youth Culture Reflections on Film: An EAA Interview with Coonoor Kripalani

by Lucien Ellington

Lucien: Thank you for this interview, Coonoor. Readers have enjoyed your articles on Indian films in past issues of EAA. Would you please briefly tell us a little about your background and how you became interested in cinema? Coonoor Kripalani: I worked at the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong for a number of years. My field is history, and while in Hong Kong, I wrote my Master’s of Philosophy thesis on a comparison of Gandhi and Mao....

EAA Interview

An Interview with 2008 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize Winners Selena Lai and Waka Takahashi Brown

by Lucien Ellington

This is our twelfth consecutive interview with winners of the Franklin R. Buchanan Prize. The Association for Asian Studies awards the prize annually for development of outstanding curriculum materials on Asia. The 2008 prize was awarded to the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) curriculum units, Chinese Dynasties, Parts One and Two, co-written by Waka Takahashi Brown and Selena Lai. A review of Part Two of the series appears on page 61 of this issue. Readers ...

Feature Article

Confucian and Cool: China’s Youth in Transition

by James Rizor, Robert Moore

By Robert Moore and James Rizor Kicking Bird could be considered Qingdao University’s first hippie, at least if one were to judge him by his appearance. He had shoulder-length hair and made a point of publicly protesting the university’s rules on grooming.1 That was 1994, and even though young Chinese who looked like Kicking Bird could be found in Beijing and Shanghai at that time, they were all but non-existent in provincial cities like Qingdao. In fact, given the conservative grooming o...

Film Review, Resources

The Forbidden Kingdom

by Elizabeth Parke

DIRECTOR, ROBMINKOFF LIONS GATE FILMS, INC. DVD, 113 MINUTES., COLOR, 2008 ENGLISH/MANDARIN SUBTITLES Reviewed by Elizabeth Parke Promotional movie posters for The Forbidden Kingdom visually link two of the most recognized kung fu actors, Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Joined at the J, Jackie Chan’s name runs horizontally while Jet Li’s name drops vertically. The use of composite imagery in the film’s marketing strategy is mirrored throughout the film. Using carefully chosen shooting locatio...

Film Review Essay, Resources

On Another Playground: Japanese Popular Culture in America

by Carl Rachelson

WRITTEN BY CHRISTINE YANO, KEIKO IKE, AND WILLIAM KELLY PRODUCED BY KEIKO IKEDA ASSOCIATE PRODUCER, DAVID PLATH PRODUCTION OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF AMERICAN STUDIES AND CENTER FOR AMERICAN STUDIES, DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY DISTRIBUTED BY MEDIA PRODUCTION GROUP DVD, 152 MINUTES., COLOR, 2008 Reviewed by Carl Rachelson However we cast it, there has been an Eastern awakening among Westerners in recent years. Whether manga, Ichiro, or an inhalation of spider rolls has prompted this stirring, it i...

Feature Article

Film and China’s Youth Culture

by Stanley Rosen

By Stanley Rosen China’s youth have been featured extensively in Western media reports in 2008, with the coverage reaching a crescendo as China prepared to host the Olympics in August. Whether in defense of the Olympic torch relays or in criticism of Western reporting about events in China—highlighted by the response to the rioting in Tibet in March—youth within China, as well as those studying abroad, have demonstrated their patriotism by defending the country against what has been con...

Feature Article

Nerd Nation Otaku and Youth Subcultures in Contemporary Japan

by William M. Tsutsui

By William M. Tsutsui A wide variety of youth subcultures have appeared in Japan since World War II, many of them shocking polite sensibilities and subverting mainstream society with behaviors considered hedonistic, self-centered, and deviant. Among the subcultures that attract the most attention, both among the public and in academic circles, is the otaku, the notoriously obsessive fans of manga, anime, video games, and other forms of Japanese popular culture. Generally styled as “nerds”...

Curriculum Materials Review, Resources

Chinese Dynasties, Part Two: The Song Dynasty Through the Qing Dynasty, 960 to 1911 CE

by Alan Whitehead

PRODUCED BY SELENA LAI ANDWAKA TAKAHASHI BROWN STANFORD PROGRAM ON INTERNATIONAL AND CROSS-CULTURAL EDUCATION (SPICE), FREEMAN SPOGLI INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, 2007 HARDCOVER BINDER WITH CD-ROM Reviewed by Alan Whitehead Chinese Dynasties Part Two: The Song Dynasty through the Qing Dynasty is the second of a two-volume curriculum unit from Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE).1 Anyone with exposure to the curriculum products previously offered by ...

Feature Article

Mobile Phones, Young People, and South Korean Culture

by Kyongwon Yoon

Today, almost everyone in the streets of Seoul carries a mobile phone, and many people in the subway or on the bus are speaking on it or texting. The rapid proliferation of mobile phones offers a fascinating case for understanding the contemporary culture of South Korean young people (Korea hereafter). As of 2005, ninety percent of young Koreans between the ages of fourteen and nineteen had a mobile phone and 38.2 percent of young users sent more than one thousand text messages per month.1 For y...

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.