Editor's Introduction: This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, an event that had profound implications for many Asian countries. This “Asia Beyond the Headlines” feature focuses on the impact that the Japanese surrender, which came several months after the German one, had across East Asia. I put a series of questions to three scholars—modern Japan historian Carol Gluck, China specialist Rana Mitter, and Koreanist Charles Armstrong—who have thought deeply about 1945 and its aftermath. Contacting them initially before the seventieth anniversary of VE Day had come and gone in early May, and then following up after that first big commemorative date had passed but well before the mid-August and early September dates associated with Japan's surrender, I invited them to reflect on the following issues: (1) how discussions associated with this year's anniversary have been and are likely to carry forward or break from those of one, two, three, or four decades ago; (2) what we should expect from the statements and other activities to come in mid-August and in early September; and (3) the varying ways that 1945 can be understood, depending on the part of the region in question, as bringing one era to a close, beginning another, or doing both of these things. Their responses, which engage to greater or lesser degrees with the three themes flagged in my initial questions, can be read as standalone short essays. They also fit together neatly to offer a collective window onto the varied meanings of the war and the wide-ranging debates that continue to swirl around how it should be understood, remembered, and commemorated.

In 1933 and 1934, the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway Company and the government of the newly formed nation-state, Manchukuo, sponsored a Manchuria pavilion on the Japanese exhibition grounds of Chicago's A Century of Progress World Exposition. Though small, this pavilion bore immense political weight. Opening a year after the Japanese Kwantung Army declared the formation of the new state in Northeast Asia and just three months after the Japanese delegation announced Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Manchuria exhibit demonstrates how Japanese military and corporate interests attempted to sway international public opinion on the cultural world stage. This paper examines the ways in which the Manchuria displays functioned during this crucial diplomatic moment and how the visually dazzling American exhibit, the Golden Temple of Jehol, upset Japanese claims of dominance in the region.

This essay examines Japanese-Chinese arranged cross-border marriages and investigates the ways in which participants legitimate and render such marriages comprehensible in light of national and local histories. Marriageability in this context is produced not through conceptions of “exotic difference” but instead distinct discourses of “familiarity.” On the one hand, Chinese participants tactically narrate “blood ties” (xueyuan guanxi 血缘关系) to interpret current marriage migration as following relational bonds and thus a “natural” phenomenon. On the other hand, Japanese participants stress Chinese women's “familiarity” (shinkin kan 親近感) with Japan, a familiarity that is claimed to stem from positive historical ties forged by colonialism, and thus effaces Japanese wartime culpability. In short, multiple layered notions of familiarity, shaped by the colonial legacy in East Asia, are at work in rendering these transnational intimate relations possible.

What does the dog mean in Chinese culture? The answers can be found in China's first dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi, written by Xu Shen in 121 CE. The Shuowen holds cynological knowledge well beyond the dog's olfactory ability, because it includes notes on vocalization discrimination, situational gait, and even behavioral and personality traits. The dog is also upheld as the representative of all nonhuman animals, undoubtedly because of its morphological and functional versatility but certainly also because it was the human's main interface and companion at the beginning of Chinese civilization. The Chinese graphs for the word “dog” embody both views: generically animalistic or eerily resembling human depictions. As a rift slowly took place in the partnership between humans and dogs when urbanization began, the graphs themselves were manipulated to clearly demarcate one from the other. Eventually dogs became discursive scapegoats. This paper traces the destiny of the dog in semantic and graphic terms.

How can crisis, breakdown, violence, and collapse be explained in the social sciences? This paper engages with this broad question by studying an extraordinary episode of mass tension and anxiety in postwar Sri Lanka caused by a mystery male predator known as the “grease devil.” Reports of widespread attacks on women in mid-2011 by this shadowy, ubiquitous, and powerful being led to heightened levels of vigilance and fear across large parts of rural and peri-urban Sri Lanka. It had a particularly strong impact on the formerly war-torn northeastern part of the island, where it led to violent confrontations between affected communities and the police and military. Drawing on primary research and by engaging with a range of literatures across the historical and social science literature, this paper attempts to reconstruct and understand the grease devil crisis. In doing so, it identifies and evaluates the different ways in which the crisis could be explained and the extent to which these approaches produce analytically relevant insights.

Amid the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry finds its authority over the forested areas (kawasan hutan) under pressure and continues to pursue strategies to legally maintain the areas within its jurisdiction. Combining insights from legal studies with political economy, this article applies the concept of “political forests” to contemporary contestations and the development of “rule of law” in relation to Indonesia's forested areas. Establishing legal certainty and “rule of law” are widely asserted to be important but never fully achieved. Two cases demonstrate this: the first focuses on the negotiated resolution of overlapping permits in the kawasan hutan between the center and the region in Central Kalimantan Province. The second examines the maneuvers of the Ministry of Forestry to (re)assert its authority over kawasan hutan by classifying palm oil as a tree crop. The article concludes that the widespread quest for certainty and rule of law is quixotic because it ignores the realities of political economy, including social conflict, beneath the veneer of law.

Based on a neo-Confucian vision that the monarch's mandate relied on listening to his people's grievances, the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) empowered subjects regardless of gender or status to address grievances to the sovereign that had not been rectified in lower courts. Contrary to the preconceived notion that women of the Chosŏn were silent subjects outside their domestic boundary, their petitioning activity shows that women, irrespective of their status, had the same legal capacity as their male counterparts to appeal grievances at local and capital levels. This article focuses on women's petitions and their linguistic practices to show how their petitioning activity complicated the gender dynamics of Confucian society. While the gender hierarchy was reinforced through women's narrative strategy as they appropriated the discourse of domesticity, I posit that women as legal agents were regendering legal identity by constructing a sense of personhood via their petitioning practice. Through articulating their gendered narratives, women struggled to defend not only themselves and their own sense of morality but also their entire family.

The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi‘ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its entanglement with state regulation of religion. An advertising campaign by a Shi‘ite media center illustrates that such religious activism with global ramifications can only be understood if one also takes its intersection with state-sponsored regimes of religious diversity into account. Media practices of Indian Muslims as a vulnerable minority are especially responsive to normative discourses and images of religious diversity, and mobilize alternative strands of Indian secularism in order to counteract the fragility of their citizenship.

It is hard to argue against the view that liberalism and empire have historically shared the same terrain of political ideas. If Raymond Williams is correct, then there is indeed an older set of implications attached to the words “liberal” and “liberalism” dating back to uses of the word “liberty,” commonly known in Shakespearean England, especially as expressed in “liberties of the subject,” that is, to a far more limited construction of the word “liberty” than its modern usage would allow (Williams 1976, 180). Liberty in this instance was the recognition of certain rights granted to subjects of a sovereign authority. In this brief essay on how historians and political theorists in recent years have debated the tortuous relationship between the ideas of empire and liberty in British India, I would like to pause on this constricted and negative definition of liberty rather than its widest possible connotation in terms of human freedom and reflect on how the British Empire in India provided a critical arena for the exercise of sovereign power in the name of both freedom and responsibility. It might be worth stressing that the term “liberal” itself, with its various connotations ranging from licentious to the humane, predates the narrower body of ideas typically attributed to political liberalism, and moreover, that liberalism by far precedes imperialism as a coherent doctrine.