Results for tag: Northeast Asia

David W. Plath accepting the Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies award at the AAS 2013 Annual Conference

David William Plath (1930-2022)

By William W. Kelly, Yale University David Plath, one of our preeminent anthropologists of Japan, passed away peacefully from illness on November 4, 2022, at age 91. In a long engagement with Japan that stretched over seven decades, he was an ethnographer of deeply humanist intentions, a craftsman of precise and stylish writing, an innovative […]

Sumie Jones Prize for Project Leadership in Japan-centered Humanities

The Association for Asian Studies and the Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) are grateful to Sumie Jones, Professor Emerita at Indiana University and an AAS member for more than 45 years, for providing the resources, leadership, and inspiration for the establishment of the Sumie Jones Prize for Project Leadership in Japan-centered Humanities. The mission of the […]

Adriana Boscaro (1935-2022)

Adriana Boscaro, Professor Emerita of Japanese and longtime director of the Department of Oriental Studies at the University Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, died August 21, 2022 at her home in Venice. She was 87 years old. Professor Boscaro was a major figure in the field of Japanese studies in Italy and a scholar known internationally […]

Dream Super-Express: A Q&A with Jessamyn R. Abel

Interviewed for #AsiaNow by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham When two blue-and-ivory “dumpling-nose” engines departed from Tokyo and Osaka train stations and started racing toward each other at 6:00am on October 1, 1964, the world’s fastest train officially became a reality. Japan’s bullet trains took the old-fashioned railroad industry and updated it with new technology and a […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Heonik Kwon

Heonik Kwon is Professor, Senior Research Fellow of Social Anthropology, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK, and a member of the Mega-Asia research group at Seoul National University Asia Center. Kwon is author of After the Korean War: An Intimate History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 and winner of the 2022 James B. […]

Promotional poster for Minamata (2022)

Sacrificed for the Prosperity of the Nation: Telling the Story of Minamata through Film

Minamata (Andrew Levitas, director, 2020; Sakamoto Ryūichi, music; Benoît Delhomme, cinematography) Inspired by true events in Minamata, Japan, where the Chisso chemical factory poisoned residents by dumping mercury into the sea from 1932 to 1968, Andrew Levitas’ film shows Minamata through the eyes of the great photojournalist W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Smith, who move […]

Mediums and Magical Things: An Interview with Laurel Kendall

Laurel Kendall served as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2016-17 and is Curator of Asian Ethnology and Acting Curator of African and Pacific Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. Kendall also chairs the AMNH’s Division of Anthropology and is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Weatherhead […]

Fieldwork in the Outfield: William W. Kelly on The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers

Baseball tickets as a research expense? Nice try. It’s no surprise that a funding agency expressed skepticism when anthropologist William W. Kelly included a $900 “purchase of baseball game tickets” line item on his proposed grant budget. Kelly, however, had a legitimate reason for requesting the support: he was conducting an ethnographic study of Osaka’s […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Jaeeun Kim

Jaeeun Kim is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. She is author of Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea, published by Stanford University Press and recipient of the 2018 AAS James B. Palais Book Prize Honorable Mention. To begin with, please tell […]

Drinking Bomb & Shooting Meth: An Interview with “Asia Shorts” Author Jeffrey W. Alexander

Last July, Hendrix College President and AAS Editorial Board Chair Bill Tsutsui introduced #AsiaNow readers to a new AAS book series, Asia Shorts. In these “small volumes with a big message,” Tsutsui explained, readers would find “rigorous, timely, and accessible work in our field,” written in concise, readable prose. We are happy to announce that […]

Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea

By Dafna Zur Dafna Zur is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Stanford University and author of Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea, just published by Stanford University Press. In the fall of 2011 I was a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia and had taken a position […]

A Brief History of the North Korean-Myanmar Friendship

By Maria Rosaria Coduti “Dangerous bedfellows,” “rogue brothers in arms,” and “friends in need” are some of the expressions experts and journalists have used to describe North Korea-Myanmar [Burma] relations in the past. In 2005, then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice labeled Myanmar an “outpost of tyranny,” a feature that saw the country enter […]

#AsiaNow Speaks with Hyun Ok Park

Hyun Ok Park is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University and author of The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea, published by Columbia University Press and recipient of the 2017 AAS James Palais Award Honorable Mention. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. This book […]