Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement (September–December 2014) represented a watershed in Hong Kong's political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1,000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement, this study provides an overview of claims, which are oriented towards an assertion of agency, articulated at different levels: in a universalistic mode (“democracy”), in relation with a political community (Hong Kong autonomy and decolonization), and through concrete policy aims. At the same time, slogans mobilize diverse cultural and historical repertoires that attest the hybrid quality of Hong Kong identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally, it will be argued that by establishing a system of contending discourses within the occupied public spaces, the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy. Despite the challenges that this discursive space encountered in interacting with the authorities and the public at large, it represented an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kong's younger generation.

Representations of dancing minorities have often been viewed in contemporary Chinese studies as examples of a broader discursive practice of “internal Orientalism,” a concept developed by anthropologists in the mid-1990s, based on fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s. A historical examination of state-sponsored minority dance in the early PRC (1949–54) suggests that internal Orientalism may not be a generalizable explanatory framework for minority dance and its relationship to PRC nationality discourse. During a time when external military threats to the nascent PRC loomed large, long-standing ethnic stereotypes were perceived as a vulnerability to national security and targeted for reform through new policies of state multiculturalism. Thus, rather than portraying minorities as exotic, erotic, and primitive, early PRC dance constructed minorities as models of cultural sophistication, civility, and respectability. Likewise, rather than envisioning a developmental hierarchy between Han and minority dance, national performing arts institutions established during this period constructed Han and minority dance as parallel modes of ethnic performance categorized together as a new genre, “Chinese folk dance.”

This article examines the cultural logic of mobilization in postcolonial South Korea, promoted through American cinematic representations. In early 1946, the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea started importing and distributing American propaganda films. These audiovisual textbooks for “free people” praised private car ownership and self-determined mobility, attracting audiences with scenes of automobiles and expressways. This might have encouraged audiences to imagine a self-regulating and untrammeled unit where they could choose their own destination, speed, and companions, symbolized in the ideal type of car-owning nuclear family. Such representational expressions of “maik'a” (my car) were closely linked with the global transition after World War II, such as the nuclearization of the family, the rise of the automobile industry, and the emergence of small screens at home. This shows how South Koreans were exposed to a new, liberal technology of government under U.S. hegemony, after the cessation of Japanese railway imperialism.

After four years of rising tensions over China's construction of military bases in the South China Sea, in July 2016 the Permanent Court of Arbitration issued a landmark decision layered with meaning, academic as well as diplomatic. “China's claims to historic rights, or other sovereign rights or jurisdiction,” wrote the panel of five judges, “with respect to the maritime areas … encompassed by the relevant part of the ‘nine-dash line’ are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect.” Writing with unambiguous clarity, the court ruled that China's dredging of these artificial islands for military bases gave it no right whatsoever to the surrounding seas and rebuked Beijing for infringing on waters that the Philippines should rightly control. China's claims to most of the South China Sea within that nine-dash line, which Beijing first published on maps at the height of the Cold War in 1953 and has pursued ever since, “were extinguished,” the court said, by the UN Convention (Gao and Jia 2013, 103–4; New York Times 2016; Permanent Court of Arbitration 2016, 68–77, 116–17).

American military bases and the protests they have elicited have had a major impact on Japanese political culture. But after the end of the formal Occupation, and outside the territory immediately affected, the cultural consequences of the U.S. military presence are much less clear. This article offers a synthetic analysis that integrates diplomatic and social history and relates the strategies of U.S. policymakers to those of anti-base activists. It shows how much the base system has changed over time and how protests have long focused on the same issues, especially sex work and sexual violence, territorial disputes, and nuclear weapons. In each case, Washington and Tokyo worked together to insulate Japanese society, which made it easier for Japanese men and women to tolerate the bases and easier for U.S. servicemen to live within them.

This article uses Beijing police case records between 1913 and 1948 to uncover a new view of male-male sexual relationships and their legal regulation in fin-de-siècle China. It moves beyond previous studies' focus on sexological discourse and the world of Peking opera, revealing that sex between men was neither rare nor secret to most denizens of the city. Much older practices and vocabularies surrounding male-male sex endured, even flourished, for far longer than the media or elite discourse might lead one to expect. Testimonies in these archives also make clear how difficult it can be to separate sexual abuse from the need for survival and for erotic fulfillment. Studying how the former imperial capital's many disenfranchised men and the law enforcement prosecuting them defined these boundaries, as well as those of erotic legitimacy more broadly, offers insights for understanding sexual politics in today's China.

Since 2000, a number of performing troupes have been established in South Korea, made up largely of musicians and dancers who were professionally trained in North Korea prior to their migration and presenting a range of music and dances related to both the North and South. Combining ethnographic data with performance analysis of one such troupe, the Pyŏngyang Minsok Yesultan, I show how the nation and the state intersect in the space of performing arts as the troupe's creative culture reflects the settlement experiences of North Koreans in the South. While the troupe's organization, membership, and performance culture delineate migrant adaptation and understanding of their new citizenship, the performance of these Koreans is a complex terrain in which the two Koreas converge and are contested as the performers enact a constant negotiation between “being” and “negating” North Korean-ness, expressing their cultural hybridity as emergent citizens of the South.

This essay attempts an exploration of the historical and historiographical implications of the interplay of individual, local, “national,” and global forms of memory in the music of Rabindranath Tagore. Produced at a time of crises in the Indian postcolonial subjectivity, this music offers a critique of the Eurocentric discourses of “World-history” and nationalism, by invoking alternative Indian discourses of “Itihāsa” and “samāj”. At the same time, Tagore departs from the contemporary Hindu cultural nationalist revivalist approach of the tradition of North Indian (Hindustani) classical music and subjects it to a creative regenerative endeavor by reconnecting the tradition with its original subaltern roots. Skeptical of several kinds of homogeneous impulses, this music offers an alternative idea of universalism that is as much human as a specific civilizational concept. Tagore's musical program thus offers an aesthetic blueprint of a more inclusive indigenous modernity in the subcontinent.

Alfred McCoy's paper offers a masterful analysis of the way in which the Philippines, and more generally Southeast Asia, were used as base and laboratory for extending US dominance—its hegemony—in the twentieth century, and in particular the Cold War era and its aftermath. He offers a succinct summary of the way in which US organs of global domination—the National Security Council, the CIA, the Defense Department—worked throughout the developing world and in Europe to ensure compliant, anti-communist regimes during the Cold War period, which also meant that more than once the United States was thwarting democracy in a number of locales and thus casting its own ideology of democratic progress and prosperity into doubt.

During the seventeenth century, an alliance took shape between Japan's Tokugawa bakufu and the Zheng organization of southeastern China and Taiwan. The Zheng, especially under the half-Japanese Koxinga in the 1650s, were ideal partners because of their domination of maritime East Asian trade, privileged access to much-coveted Chinese goods, and commitment to Ming restoration against the Manchu Qing, a popular stance in Japan. The organization jointly administered the Chinese community at Nagasaki with the bakufu, and received aid in Japanese armaments and probably mercenaries. Starting in the 1660s, the alliance unraveled amid the depletion of silver to purchase Chinese goods, the rise of a robust domestic market in Japan, and the destruction of the Zheng by the Qing. This article portrays Japan's “isolation policy” (sakoku) as a dynamic process, from active involvement overseas to withdrawal, based upon rational assessments of the international climate and subject to contestation from local and foreign players.

Japan has been home to two distinct approaches to typewriting, the first oriented exclusively towards the typing of kana and the second oriented towards kanji. In look and feel, this first family of machines was indistinguishable from those built by Remington, Underwood, or Olivetti. The second, however, was indistinguishable from typewriters already being produced in China: tray bed machines featuring approximately 2,500 of the most commonly used characters. In part because of this Janus-faced approach to the typewriter, Japanese companies succeeded in penetrating the Chinese information technology market where Western manufacturers had failed, making inroads as early as the 1920s. With the expansion of empire-building in 1931, and the outbreak of war in 1937, Japan came to dominate the entire Chinese typewriter market. In giving rise to the Japanese-built Chinese typewriter, this historic period also gave shape to what is now understood within information technology circles as CJK: the distinct Chinese-Japanese-Korean technolinguistic zone.

After Vietnam's August Revolution in 1945, Hồ Chí Minh was venerated as the center of a newly created political religion that eventually became part of the Vietnamese religious landscape. This article traces the origins of Hồ Chí Minh's veneration and his own role in cementing his image not only as the leader of the nation but as the Uncle, the head of the Vietnamese national family. Through an examination of Hồ Chí Minh's first (auto)biography, it explores some of the means employed to achieve these results. Hồ Chí Minh's cult transformed the nation and altered Vietnamese cultural traditions. It served to acquaint people with the new order and to create and perpetuate people's loyalty to the newly formed state entities. This article looks at how Hồ Chí Minh went from being the master of his own cult to losing control over it and becoming its employee.

This article uses an important Sri Lankan Supreme Court case concerning religious sound as a starting point for thinking about the intersections of Islam, law, politics, and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. It argues that Sri Lankan Muslims find themselves in three interlacing legal “environments” at the present moment: in an environment of general laws governing religion, in an environment of special laws and administrative bodies for Muslims, and in a broader constitutional environment that grants special recognition to Buddhism. These environments offer differing opportunities and imperatives for expressing Muslim identity, religious equality, diversity, rights, and freedoms in contemporary Sri Lanka. Through a consideration of these legal environments and the way they affected the case, this article illuminates ongoing questions about the legal and political status of Muslims on the island and provides a snapshot of the legal debates and discourses that have flowed into and fortified recent anti-Muslim sentiments on the island.

With Asia as its backdrop, Alfred McCoy's paper gives us a story of the rise of US hegemony after World War II. Using “military bases” rather than wars as a metric of imperial power, the paper traces the geopolitics of imperial expansion (and sometimes retraction) through a close and rich study of the many contestations around US military presence in the Philippines—contestations that occurred in both the United States and the Philippines. In doing so, one of the paper's most profound insights, made with considerable archival documentation, is that colonization and decolonization do not follow a linear trajectory and that its politics, rather than a simple imposition from the colonizer onto the colonized, are instead quite messy, complicated, and perhaps mostly importantly, in a constant state of negotiation. Thus, for instance, the paper shows us that political independence is not a clear rupture from colonization to decolonization, that arguments for the continuation or discontinuation of imperial relations post-independence are complex on both sides of the imperial divide and shift in different directions over time, and that who appears as a “threat” or an “enemy” that mobilizes a national community and nationalist resistance is also complex and inconstant. In other words, McCoy provides us with a historically detailed story of the rise of US hegemony in the latter half of the twentieth century through an account of the complex expansion of the US presence in Asia.

With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: what could feasibly have been published under the title “Making Machinists” was instead marketed as “Fabricating Consumers.” What does it mean to talk about consumers in 1950s Japan, a time and place of hard work, thrift, and restraint? For Gordon an important premise was the role of women in the postwar economy. This provides a point of departure from which to explore the ideologies and practices of production and consumption across the Cold War dividing line between “consumerist” and “productionist” regimes in East Asia. The Cold War was a time of sharp differences between the two societies, but also a time of shared preoccupations with productivity and national growth. In their different political contexts, Japanese and Chinese women were acting out many of the same roles.

This article explores Robert Bellah's engagement with Japan in formulating his communitarian critique of American individualism. Bellah's early contribution to post–World War II modernization studies, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan, embraced the Weberian framework of social development, but it also described a system that departed from Weber's narrative of liberalization and rationalization in important ways. Bellah argued that in early modern Japan, the profit motive was contained by social obligations and ethical rules. Through his explorations of Japan, Bellah articulated a critique of liberal individualism, drawing on Japanese cultural nationalism in his search for a modern, capitalist system that could be contained by overarching cultural and moral values. One finds a surprising resonance between Bellah's ideal of American “civil religion” and the ideas of interwar philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō and Watsuji's own critique of liberalism and popular democracy as lacking cultural foundations. Bellah's engagement with Watsuji reveals the tensions within Bellah's thought and in his subsequent call for community in America as a means of overcoming the excesses of American individualism. This article considers both the contributions and the limits of Bellah's attempt to invoke Japan as an alternative modernity in Japan studies.

The purpose of this JAS roundtable is to reflect on the Cold War in Asia. Even to frame the issue in such terms is to confront the “formidable semantic contradiction that is inherent in the idea” of the Cold War (Kwon 2010, 7). For the very notion of the Cold War—as a “long peace” in which bipolar tensions did not lead to hot war—sits uneasily with the reality that in Asia bipolar tensions were imbricated in horrific conflicts that left millions of human casualties. On the other hand, to use the term “Cold War” simply as a label for a historical period, or “epoch” in Alfred McCoy's terms, is to invite imprecision. Moreover, even as a label for a historical period, the term still effaces the experience of much of the world, since the end date of the period is defined by the experience of Europe and the superpowers.

These intriguing articles explore the production, the selling, and the use in East Asia of two transformative modern machines. They look primarily at China but both give significant attention to Japan. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to comment on them. I will spend more time with Antonia Finnane's article, “Cold War Sewing Machines,” as it treats an object near and dear to me (Gordon 2012).

Today, seven nations have maritime or island claims in the disputed South China Sea. This article historicizes the claims of one of the dispute's participants, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It argues that cartographic representations of its territory have their origin in the period of French rule, and locates a key moment in the formation of an Indochinese—and later Vietnamese—space encompassing the South China Sea in a series of four maps that represented research carried out by the colonial Institute of Oceanography. By recreating the biographies of these maps, the article reveals their origin in a contingent interplay of multiple factors, including global scientific networks, economic development, imperial defense, and personal research agendas. The article suggests that attention to the biographies of maps could be an effective means of deconstructing and denaturalizing many of the territorial claims that drive the dispute in the South China Sea today.