Education About Asia: Online Archives

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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=Ds3adcHVxn...

Teaching Resources Essay

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

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 youth and allow student...

Essay, Resources

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

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 over the past decade, lib...

Feature Article

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

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.”

Feature Article

Ethnicity in the Lives of Modern Malaysian Youth

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

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 Southeast Asian country. It consists of eleven states on a long, narrow peninsula and...

Book Review Essay, Curriculum Materials Review, Resources

When Asia Was the World

by Gwen R. Johnson, Stewart Gordon

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 which to view the “riches of the East,” the interconnection of peoples and cultures, and the spread of ideas and knowledge acr...

EAA Interview

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

by Lucien Ellington

Coonoor Kripalani is Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre of Asian Studies (CAS), the University of Hong Kong. She wrote her thesis on a comparison of Gandhi and Mao and maintains a keen interest in current developments in India, China, and Southeast Asia. Currently based in Singapore, she conducts research and writes on popular Hindi film, as well as radio broadcasting in India. Her articles on films include topics such as terrorism, in-film advertising, and marriage and family. In addition t...

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

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. 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 of most young Chinese at the time, Ki...

Film Review, Resources

The Forbidden Kingdom

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 locations—a bamboo forest, a Buddhist cave temple, the Gobi desert, a teahouse, and the well-know myth of the Monkey King—The Forbidden Ki...

Film Review Essay, Resources

On Another Playground: Japanese Popular Culture in America

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 is clear that Kanji-tattooed folks sporting Kanji-drawn T-shirts often ponder Asia. So if I were to seek classroom material that I could use in order to slake this thirst, I might tend toward topics discussed in this new DVD, where anthropologists present case studies on Hello Kitty, sushi, and baseball. These three may s...

Feature Article

Film and China’s Youth Culture

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 considered unwarranted ...

Feature Article

Nerd Nation Otaku and Youth Subcultures in Contemporary Japan

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” or “geeks,” otaku ar...

Curriculum Materials Review, Resources

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

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). Anyone with exposure to the curriculum products previously offered by SPICE will find themselves on familiar ground with this unit.

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.