Reading, writing, and literary engagements are often assumed to be solitary practices, but looking at the places where books are sold and discussed, and amateur literature written, reveals the relational side to this creative engagement. This article presents an ethnographic study of haiku composition in Booktown Jimbōchō in Tokyo, Japan, an area known for its literary bookstores, to explore how the social practices of literature unfold. Sketching the social life of a bar in Jimbōchō, I explore collaborative creativity through an ethnographic study of a bi-monthly haiku meeting that takes place in this social space.

This article examines professional diviners employed by the Qing (1636–1912) government to assist in local administration. Known as yin-yang officers, these officials served among the technical and religious specialists embedded in prefectural and county governments across the empire. Although they held marginal or unranked positions within the formal bureaucracy, yin-yang officers played a vital role in both administrative and ritual life at the grassroots level. By tracing their training, sources of authority, and everyday responsibilities, this article sheds light on the Qing’s local technical and religious bureaucracy—an often-overlooked dimension of imperial statecraft that bridged ritual, cosmological knowledge, healing and divination, and official governance. It argues for the importance of examining imperial bureaucracy from below, showing how these unsalaried, low-level figures helped sustain the empire’s overstretched administrative apparatus well into the early twentieth century.

In-person networks based on imperial legacies, immigrants, and general trading companies that share a common language and culture can help expand trade in differentiated goods. However, little is known regarding how such networks can facilitate deals for differentiated goods. To investigate the role played by general trading companies in this context, we study how major trading companies navigated a sensitive transaction—the procurement of distillation facilities for oil shale in Manchuria—in imperial Japan during the first age of globalization. Our archival research revealed that trading companies logistically supported Japanese buyer engineers when they met in person with engineers associated with Western suppliers, and visited plants in the West with the aim of acquiring tacit knowledge beyond the scope of written specifications. The role played by Japanese trading companies in this context involved promoting knowledge spillover from the West by providing logistic support for such in-person meetings.

Although some modern popular songs are deliberately composed for the purpose of commentary or protest, most are produced for commercial reasons. However, such songs may nonetheless be adopted by political, cultural, and social movements, and in these cases, fans’ participatory meaning-making has an important role in the songs’ new purpose. Taking the 1935 Korean ballad ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ as a representative example, this article traces how the melancholy love song acquired successive layers of meaning against the backdrop of changing politico-economic contexts throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on political, popular music, and sports histories, I first examine how ‘Tears of Mokp’o’ became known as an anti-colonial anthem under Japanese rule, a position that persisted in postwar South Korea. I then investigate the ways in which fans of the Haitai Tigers, a professional baseball team, utilized the song to express a complex set of emotions and commitments regarding their politically oppressed and economically neglected home region of Chŏlla. Against the backdrop of their traumatic memories of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Haitai fans, through their collective singing of ‘Tears of Mok’po’ in stadiums during games, transformed it from a colonial-era pop hit/anti-colonial anthem into a baseball fight song that expressed their spirit of regional insubordination in the 1980s and 1990s. Entering the twenty-first century, ‘Tears of Mok’po’ no longer played the same role for the Tigers and their fans, and it receded into historical memory. This change in meaning and association shows how the political and historical meaning-making of popular songs can be constructed, reintegrated, and even dismissed.

Historians of the Indian Partition focus on the permit systems the governments of India and Pakistan put in place to stem refugee entry and prevent the return of evacuees. However, the prevention of exit became, alongside non-entrée and the prevention of return, part of an official strategy of immobility in South Asia directed at marginalized castes. At Partition, Pakistan saw the labour of ‘non-Muslim’ marginalized castes as essential to its national wealth. It believed it had to retain them at all costs. On the other side of the border, the article discusses the Indian government’s laggardly, and often indifferent, response to the struggles of caste-oppressed groups trying to migrate to India. The article builds on scholarship on mobility capital and partial citizenship in the aftermath of Partition to argue that with the prevention of exit, citizenship incorporated an imposed nationalization that embodied the status of marginalized castes as more than a minority and produced a form of bonded citizenship.

Critical scholars and intellectuals are often viewed as vanguards of intellectual rigor, moral integrity, and left-leaning/left-liberal politics. In particular, their trajectories tend to be examined from a sympathetic lens: as supporters of lower-class social movements. Unfortunately, this approach overlooks the varied agency of these critical scholars and their complex relationship with the very movements that they often claim to represent. It obscures their potentially unequal socioeconomic status and cultural gap with the movements they engage with. This is not to dismiss their contribution or deny the reality of state repression against some of them, but a more grounded, sober approach to studying these cognitive workers is needed.

This study investigates the value-appropriating, politically-moderating, status-seeking tendency in some parts of critical knowledge production and activism. It advances several claims. First, the increasing neoliberalisation of the research sector exacerbates the process of class differentiation among critical scholars and intellectuals. The majority join the swelling rank of precarious cognitariat, whereas a selected stratum becomes part of the professional managerial class. Second, the latter stratum contains new intellectual actors who enjoy economic, cultural, and, political benefits from their advantaged position at the expense of precarious scholar-activists and marginalised communities, as exemplified in their public celebrity status or appointment into policymaking decisions. Lastly, as an illustration, and a form of self-criticism, I interrogate my position as an early-career researcher of Indonesian politics, show my own role and complicity in the neoliberal research industrial complex, and reflect on possible ways out of this politico-intellectual impasse.

Two members of the United States Congress, Representative Lane Evans (D-Illinois) and Representative Chris Smith (R-New Jersey), have introduced a non-binding resolution (H.Res. 759) in the current congressional session which calls on the government of Japan to “formally acknowledge and accept responsibility for its sexual enslavement of young women” during the 1930s and 40s.

StopAsianHate protests arose in the West during the COVID-19 pandemic, opposing a perceived increase in hate incidents directed against Asians in general and Chinese people in particular. These events raise a question: what is the nature of attitudinal biases about Chinese people in the English-speaking world today? Here, we seek answers with AI and big data. Using BERT language models pre-trained on massive English-language corpora (books, news articles, Wikipedia, Reddit and Twitter) and a new method for measuring natural-language propositions (the Fill-Mask Association Test, FMAT), we examined three components of attitudinal biases about Chinese people: stereotypes (cognitive beliefs), prejudice (emotional feelings) and discrimination (behavioural tendencies). The FMAT uncovered relative semantic associations between Chinese people and (1) cognitive stereotypes of low warmth (less moral/trustworthy and less sociable/friendly) and somewhat low competence (less assertive/dominant but equally capable/intelligent); (2) affective prejudice of contempt (vs admiration); and (3) behavioural discrimination of active/passive harm (vs help/cooperation). These findings advance our understanding of attitudinal biases towards Chinese people in the English-speaking world.