Asia Pacific Perspectives

Article by Cory Willmott

From 1905 to 1928, social gospel missionaries in Sichuan had been the most ardent supporters of new Chinese government physical education curricula. After 1928, however, local politics dominated by warlords and secret society members provided a unique environment for these policies to play out.

Article by Thibaut Diverchy

The cultural phenomenon known as “youth culture” (ch’ŏngnyŏn munhwa) emerged in South Korean society at the turn of the 1970s. It encompasses Western fashion trends, music genres, leisure and nightlife. Labeled as a foreign and decadent trend by the authorities, this so-called counterculture was the target of repeated crackdowns.

Article by Elizabeth Littell-Lamb

During the Republican era (1911-1949), Christian missionaries and Chinese reformers engaged in rural reform and reconstruction. The YWCA joined in that effort, but unlike other reform programs, they were singularly focused on rural women. They used a grassroots approach, depended on the initiative of rural YWCA secretaries, and insisted their rural programs become locally led and locally funded.

Source: Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.

Photo Essay by Marion Breteau

This photo essay explores the affective infrastructures that sustain and shape return migration between the Philippines and the Arab Gulf states. Rather than addressing migration as a linear trajectory, the essay presents it as processual, and encrypted in houses, debts, bodies, aspirations, and memories.

Book Review by Jieon Yoo

Spirit Power’s central question, how General Douglas MacArthur, the iconic commander of the Korean War, came to be worshipped as a deity in Korean shamanism, might initially appear as a curiosity. Kwon and Park show instead that this question opens onto a triangular history linking American-led Protestant evangelicalism, Korean shamanism, and the political orders of Japanese colonialism and the Cold War.

Book Review by Jiyoon Auo

What if we approached nineteenth-century American history from a different vantage point — one that places Chinese migrants not at the margins, but at the center of cultural and urban transformation? Nancy Yunhwa Rao answers this question by showing how infrastructure — specifically, the cultural institutions through which Chinese migrants organized sound, space, and public life — moved through and actively shaped American urban, sensory, and musical life.

Book Review by Ray Matsumoto

Minority populations in Japan are often described as “invisible,” a perception rooted in the myth of Japan’s ethno-racial homogeneity. In Being Korean, Becoming Japanese?: Nationhood, Citizenship, and Resistance in Japan, Hwaji Shin challenges this narrative by foregrounding the experiences of Koreans in Japan, so-called “Zainichi Koreans.”