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)!

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

Geological Wonder as a Sacred Landscape: The Case of Lonar Crater

by Pushkar Sohoni, Swapna Joshi

Many places around the world celebrate unique geological formations or natural phenomena by associating them with divinity. In India, Lonar, one of the world’s largest terrestrial impact craters, is considered a holy site and is the locus of several temples. It is one of the few hyper-velocity impact craters in basaltic rock. The natural history of the formation of the crater and the cultural history of how it has been perceived by humans can be seen at this site. [caption id="attachment_1...

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 Is Our Home” Hong Kongers Twenty-Five Years After the Handover [caption id="attachment_19701" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Flag of Hong Kong. Source: Wikimedia Commons at https://tinyurl.com/28a8kknu.[/caption] 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 Grea...

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...

Book Review Essay

Sijo: Korea’s Poetry Form

by Hannah Lim (Reviewer)

Sijo: Korea’s Poetry Form provides a comprehensive overview of sijo—a three-line Korean vernacular poetry form that was originally sung—and how to teach this style of poetry writing. Sijo poems follow a simple form of the first line introducing the theme, the second line developing that theme, and the third line opening with a “twist, a change in perspective, direction, or thought” that concludes the poem

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.

Teaching Resources Essay

Independent Cinema as a Lens on a Changing Cambodia: Using the Films of Anti-Archive in the Classroom

by Lauren Collins

Often teaching about Cambodia focuses on two key historical events: the Kingdom of Angkor of the ninth to fifteenth centuries and the Khmer Rouge Genocide of 1975–1979. For students in my undergraduate classrooms, when I ask what they know about Cambodia, if they have any baseline knowledge at all, discussion of the country is generally synonymous with Pol Pot and the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.

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.

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: Transparency International: Asia’s Most Populous Nations

by EAA Editorial Office

Transparency, or the lack thereof, is a critical factor in evaluating any nation. The column that follows focuses upon Asia’s six most-populous countries. In order to enhance teacher and student critical thinking about transparency, the column also includes content on two of the most-populous Western nations, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.

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

Teaching Japanese Popular Culture Online

by Yasue Kuwahara

I started teaching Japanese popular culture in the 1990s when there was an increased interest in Japan due to the country’s economic expansion in the US and the world. I taught it in person first and then shifted to online, using different textbooks, other learning materials and activities. In the essay that follows, I focus on the online format and explain what I teach and how I do it in detail to help others develop their courses. The same format can be used to teach the popular cultures of ...

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.