Freyberg Place in Auckland’s central business district has emerged as a focal site for youth cultural gatherings. Within this space, university students have localised transnational popular culture, generating new cultural meanings, identities, and affiliations. Over the past decade, Hallyu, and K-pop in particular, has expanded significantly in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This study draws on personal accounts from university student K-pop fans of diverse backgrounds, with attention to their involvement in Auckland’s K-festival, random play dances, and the University of Auckland K-pop Planet club and its Konstellation dance crew. These narratives demonstrate how participation in K-pop activities facilitated adaptation to the residential, social, and academic challenges of university life, while simultaneously fostering peer networks and community belonging. Engagement in these events also enabled students to acquire leadership experience and transferable skills relevant to future employment. Face-to-face fan practices and embodied participation through dance provided an avenue for affective immersion, reinforcing identification with global fan networks. For these students, K-pop constituted both an alternative to Western popular music and a medium through which they articulated transnational identities, positioning themselves as globally connected cultural consumers.

Many institutions today promote “Global Asia(s)” and “Global Asian Studies” as both a method and an initiative. As a growing field, these institutions are committed to reimagining the studies of Asia through transnational, comparative, and boundary-crossing approaches. To map its contemporary landscape and identify emerging challenges, this study draws on interviews with ten directors from diverse institutions around the world, each engaged in Global Asia(s)/Global Asian Studies in distinct and pioneering ways. Despite varied contexts, these institutions share strong commitments – particularly a collective dissatisfaction with traditional models of Asian Studies and a common drive to transcend geographic boundaries, the East–West divide, and disciplinary silos. At the same time, local histories, community needs, academic traditions, institutional structures, leadership visions, and available resources shape divergent interpretations and implementations of Global Asia(s). Rather than advancing a unified model, this study emphasizes the field’s plurality and reflexive knowledge production process, arguing that its strength lies in this diversity and ongoing dialogue.

Focusing on the strategy game The Opium War (1997), developed in mainland China, this article argues that, while designed as a patriotic product about the Opium War, the game moves beyond simple propaganda. Through its rule-based systems, it constructs a nuanced historical argument that operationalizes the tension within the Marxist concept of historical inevitability and contingency. The inevitability of the Qing Empire’s structural weakness is conveyed through a high degree of difficulty and the mechanics of systemic corruption, while contingency is enabled by allowing skilled players to achieve a counterfactual victory, subverting the orthodox narrative of the Qing’s inevitable defeat in the war. This subversive design was politically tenable because it operated within the accepted framework of Marxist historiography. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that video games can generate more complex historical experiences than traditional media. By analyzing this non-Western case, the article calls for a more globally conscious approach to game studies, and it recognizes games as significant sites of historical debate within politically sensitive contexts. It addresses a dual gap: the Western-centric bias in historical game studies and a lack of inquiry into the extent to which video games can engage with Chinese history.

Between the arrival of firearms in Japan in 1543 and the crushing of the Shimabara rebellion in 1638, Japan transformed from a fractured country in a permanent state of war into a centralized, peaceful era. However, this was only possible thanks to several transformations made by the Tokugawa regime, not least the firearm itself. The copious amounts of firearms existing in Japan became a domesticated and common element of the Edo period and were prevalent in the country’s transformation. Rather than being just tools of war that could menace the shogunate, firearms gained a range of roles, from tools to regalia, depending on their owners’ social and political context, which sheds light on their social environment.

This paper examines the simultaneous use of the older handgun and the newer harquebus by Ming Chinese armies before and after the Imjin War (1592–1598), a conflict which saw the Japanese launch a destructive invasion of the Korean peninsula. Although the conflict foregrounded the value of the harquebus in the eyes of many Chinese, its aftermath saw a number of Ming Chinese civil and military officials continuing to affirm the value of the handgun vis-à-vis the harquebus and developing the designs and tactical roles of both types of firearm. Against the backdrop of their discourse on hand-held firearms, I will argue, in this paper, that the Eurocentric focus of modern military scholars has caused them to underestimate the advantages that the older handgun still held over the harquebus in the different Ming Chinese context. In Ming China, the harquebus was valued primarily for its accuracy, which led it to be assigned a different tactical role and undergo a different technological developmental trajectory compared to early modern Europe. Nevertheless, Ming designs tended towards a universal infantry firearm anticipating the solution eventually adopted by early modern European armies: a relatively accurate bayonet-equipped harquebus capable of high rates of fire.

The impact of imported firearms on Southeast Asian states has been a topic of much debate, but is often discussed in relatively general terms. This article uses the archive of the Dutch East India Company to analyse the importation of muskets into late seventeenth century Ayutthaya, which took the form of diplomatic gifting, as well as their intended uses. Muskets are found to have been used mainly for the suppression of internal popular revolts, which was aided by extremely strict gun control aimed at keeping firearms a royal monopoly. The importation of these guns was responsive to immediate need and stopped once revolts became less frequent. The volume of the trade between 1658 and 1709 is found to have been surprisingly low.

This article examines how, since the late 1980s, Hong Kong directors have reimagined China’s western frontiers in the wuxia genre through collaborations with the mainland amid a process of deepening cross-border integration. To contextualize these representations for English-language readers, this study employs a comparative lens. It first examines the cultural and historical significance of the American Old West and China’s premodern western borderlands and then analyzes how Hong Kong wuxia filmmakers construct particular forms of nationalism through mythic depictions of geopolitical peripheries in dialogue with Hollywood Westerns’ frontier portrayals. The analysis reveals that, as Hong Kong directors’ mainland coproduction has increasingly integrated into China’s film industry and cultural discourse, their depiction of frontier space has gradually shifted from an extralegal, anti-authoritarian martial world of cultural ambivalence and abstract nationalism – echoing the anti-establishment ethos characteristic of revisionist Hollywood Westerns – toward a symbol of state-centered nationalism and global cultural outreach, paralleling the golden-age Hollywood Western’s construction of the American frontier as a unified national myth reinforcing U.S. exceptionalism.

In the 1820s, the East India Company commissioned a steam-powered dredging vessel to be constructed and set to work on a series of rivers that connected their capital of Calcutta with the Ganges River, and thus major commercial and population centers in northern India. The vessel, however, was a failure. It could not float on the rivers it was meant to dredge. This hitherto untold narrative of early steam engines on the subcontinent argues that the ultimate failure and abandonment of the vessel was not due to insurmountable technical difficulties but rather to a failure of imagination by the EIC administration. They were limited by what they believed an imperial river should be and what were appropriate ways for humans and their technology to interact with that river. This illustrates how the British Empire in India conceptualized modern technology as European and therefore “naturally” in opposition to the Indian environment, as well as how such conceptualizations ultimately stymied their imperial ambitions.

The Rohingya refugee crisis, a major humanitarian tragedy in contemporary global politics, has gradually precipitated major security challenges to Bangladesh and other states. This paper employs the Copenhagen School’s securitization theory to examine how securitization, especially by the Bangladeshi government and media, has framed these challenges as existential threats. It makes two basic contributions to existing literature on the Rohingya crisis. Firstly, it provides a theory-informed analysis of the security dimensions of the crisis, considering the interplay between the refugee crisis and national and regional security dynamics. Secondly, the paper explores how the refugees securitize their current plight. Empirically, the study utilizes interview data from 60 local residents, law enforcement agencies, and employees of local and international NGOs. The discussion suggests the possibilities and limitations of the securitization theory in the field of refugee or forced migration studies in the Global South.

This article examines how during the 1970s, state, media, and research institutions transformed bōsōzoku – the contemporaneous label for cohorts of motorcycle-riding youth – into an object of governance. Between 1972 and 1979, national news media, police bureaucracies, and legislative authority aligned to transform scattered riding practices into a unified phenomenon. Drawing on police white papers, newspaper databases, and research archives, the article reconstructs the recognition infrastructure through which bōsōzoku moved from journalistic trope to legally actionable population. Preemptive authority did not arrive as a leap but formed the endpoint of a system that had already taught officials what to see, how to count, and when to intervene. Checklists, roadside predicates, and standardized forms aligned across organizations and persisted even as youth practices shifted. The anxiety surrounding bōsōzoku reflected not merely concerns about traffic safety but alarm at working-class youth visibly rejecting corporate-loyalty paradigms of Japan’s “enterprise society.”

In recent years, there has been a growing body of scholarship that distinguishes post-colonial and post-imperial migrations from other forms of migration. However, because this literature largely excludes non-European cases, it remains predominantly Eurocentric. This review article seeks to demonstrate how these studies can be further enriched by incorporating Ottoman migrations (muhacir) as a distinct form of post-imperial migration. To this end, the article evaluates four recently published works on Ottoman migration: İpek’s Migration in the Imperial Territories (Memalik-i Şahanede Muhaceret), Fratantuono’s Governing Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire, Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees, and Oktay Özel’s Katamizes In Pursuit of the Blue (Kiske Kuşunun Peşinde Katamizeler). Through a comparative analysis of these works, the article explores the potential contributions of Ottoman post-imperial migration studies to the broader literature on post-imperial migration. In particular, it addresses issues such as the role of official historiography in shaping migration histories; debates over whether migrants were framed as returnees or repatriates; the effects of different imperial structures; and the ethnic and religious composition of both host societies and migrant populations.

Public opinion has become an increasingly consequential force in shaping international relations, with perceptions of China standing at the center of debates across East Asia. Notably, while youth in South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia tend to hold more negative views of China than their elders, Japan presents a reverse pattern: younger generations display higher affinity toward China compared to older generations. This paper investigates the sources of this divergence using 2023 survey data from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. Building on generational cohort theory and collective memory, the paper redefines Japanese generational groupings and applies regression analysis to identify the key drivers of affinity toward China. The results show that younger Japanese cohorts, though highly curious and actively consuming China-related information, exhibit limited knowledge of China’s political and social structures and display weaker attentiveness to political dimensions. By contrast, older cohorts anchor their perceptions in political memory and bilateral disputes, leading to increasingly entrenched disillusionment. These findings suggest that Japan’s generational gap reflects internal variations in cognitive socialization rather than an overall warming of bilateral relations, underscoring the need to closely monitor evolving youth perceptions in the years ahead.

Throughout the Russo-Japanese War, Lat Pau and Thien Nam Sin Pao, both based in Singapore, followed the war closely, fueling the nationalism of their readers. Far from portraying China as a passive non-belligerent, both newspapers drew attention to both China’s precarious international position and her self-strengthening efforts. Chinese nationalism was born out of an international outlook among the overseas Chinese, who were concerned with the fighting in Manchuria, even though the battlefields were distant from both their hometowns in southern China and Southeast Asia. To them, the Russo-Japanese War was not simply a localized conflict on East Asia’s periphery; China’s fate hinged on its outcome, and it threatened to escalate into a worldwide conflagration anytime. The keen interest displayed by overseas Chinese in the war is indicative of their international outlook, and the nationalism that partly resulted from this attention to the war ultimately fueled their participation in the 1905 anti-American boycott as well as revolutionary activities.

Many pressing riverine problems in Asia today can be traced back to the development of a set of new conceptualizations, technologies, and institutions of river management between roughly 1800 and 1945, a period moulded by the expansion of modern imperial powers on a global scale. This special feature investigates the multifaceted entanglements between rivers and imperialism in modern Asia by bringing together cases in Japan, India, China, and Vietnam. Building on the understanding of the dual potential of rivers to support and resist imperial ambitions, the articles in this special feature reconstruct the complicated human-river interactions across Asia that confounded anthropocentric expectations and show how imperial ethos, technologies, and institutions of river management were carried out, resisted, or transformed in varied local contexts by human and non-human actors alike. Understanding the unruly history of rivers in imperial Asia can help us to better understand the precarious future of rivers and their management on the warming continent.