One year has passed since the earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku. How should we as scholars approach, think about, and teach about the disaster? In generations hence, will 2011 be treated as a historical turning point on a par with 1945? Will it appear more significant than the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, despite the far greater loss of life in that event? We have a long process of analysis and contextualization ahead before the traumatic events of March 2011 have sedimented into history. Meanwhile, the nuclear disaster continues. When the Japanese government announced in December that complete decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors would take forty years, it became clear that even in the most optimistic scenario the world would be living with this disaster for a long time to come.

In August 2011, India was in the headlines due to an anti-corruption hunger strike that played upon Gandhi's legacy of civil disobedience and mass protest. The strike was initiated by a short, bespectacled, 74-year-old man called Anna Hazare to protest the government's new anticorruption legislation, which Hazare said was too weak. Hazare's call for a strong anticorruption Lokpal (ombudsman) had slowly gained momentum in the first half of 2011, when the self-styled Gandhian had collected a sizeable following. But it was Hazare's unexpected arrest on the eve of the August hunger strike that pushed him into the limelight, sparking candlelit marches across the country. A shaken government ordered his release in less than twelve hours, but in stunning turnaround, Hazare refused to leave and began his “fast unto death” in Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail, South Asia's largest high-security prison.

About the time of the one-year anniversary of the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a conversation about the politics of nuclear power started up among Japanologists, mostly political scientists, on a listserv I read daily. The original discussion emerged from the question of whether Japanese political leaders would push for restarting a number of the offline nuclear power plants across the country in order to cover expected gaps in Japan's electricity supply. At first the debate's participants took up the countervailing pressures Japanese policymakers face: the need to provide affordable power to Japanese companies in order to spur economic recovery, the inevitable increase in greenhouse gas emissions that would be produced by a shift from nuclear to fossil fuels, the polling data suggesting an overwhelming majority of Japanese citizens are opposed to restarting the plants (Mainichi Shinbun 2012). Then the listserv debate broke away from scholarly assessments of the electoral and policy dilemmas faced by the ruling Democratic Party into thinly veiled arguments between proponents and opponents of nuclear power. Some assertions were made about the nuclear power “phobia” and “emotional” opposition of those who, it was suggested, do not understand the science of it, and a debate commenced over the question of how many people the Chernobyl accident of 1986 had really killed.

The political, economic and social changes experienced by China over the past decade have been mirrored by transformations in the literary realm. Writers, editors, critics and readers have contended with the acceleration of commercialisation, the rise of the Internet, and the Communist Party's subtly changing attitude to creative freedom. This essay examines the creative responses of three critically acclaimed generations of novelists – born between the 1950s and 1980s – to this new climate. It considers the way in which writers have become entrepreneurs, managing their own personality cults over the Internet and through media spin. It discusses widespread corruption in literary reviewing; the weaknesses in editorial standards that affect the work of even the most mature voices writing today; and the fluid way in which novelists often abandon fiction for other professions or expressive forms, such as film. Finally, it considers the limits of literary freedom in China's one-party cultural system.

With the earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the expanding nuclear disaster that followed, our “affluent postwar” has finally reached a decisive end. Indeed, this closure had been clearly augured since the 1990s. The collapse of the bubble economy, the close of an era of single-party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attacks that came in rapid succession in 1995—these events forced upon us the reality that the “affluent postwar” was over.

When I was a child at the height of the Cold War, the press painted China in vivid primary colors—red menace, yellow peril, blue-clad masses. China was a back-burner story, however, compared to the Soviet threat, and my education through high school never touched upon it. A shift in public attention began with the 1971 China visit of the U.S. ping-pong team and Nixon's state visit in February 1972. Suddenly the mainstream U.S. press discovered beggar-free streets, healthy children, acupuncture anesthesia, and national optimism.

This article examines how recent books by academics and public intellectuals are reshaping the discourse of the rise of China. While earlier trends argued that China was being socialized into the norms of international society, many texts now proclaim that due to its unique civilization, China will follow its own path to modernity. Such books thus look to the past—China's imperial history—for clues to not only China's future, but also the world's future. This discourse, which could be called “Sino-speak,” presents an essentialized Chinese civilization that is culturally determined to rule Asia, if not the world. The article notes that nuanced readings of China's historical relations with its East Asian neighbors provide a critical entry into a more sophisticated analysis of popular declarations of “Chinese exceptionalism.” But it concludes that this critical analysis is largely overwhelmed by the wave of Sino-speak.

This article provides a Muslim perspective on the eighteenth-century Qing conquest of Xinjiang. It explores the career of Emin Khwaja, a leader of the Muslim community of Turfan and the most prominent Muslim ally in the Qing conquest. I investigate how the notion of “protection” (ḥimāyat in Arabic), a key concept in the Central Asian Muslim understanding of religious and political patronage, informed Emin's decision to ally himself with the Qing. I argue that Emin understood his alliance with the “infidel” Manchu not as a collaboration in betrayal of Islam but as a positive policy to achieve security and prosperity of the Muslim community in the changing political and commercial environment of eighteenth-century Eurasia. Emin was able to build a local coalition of Muslim commercial interests for the support of the Qing, while promoting his standing within the regional political hierarchy of Muslim Central Asia.

My comments in this essay focus on recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the state in Southeast Asia and include brief remarks on some of the literature regarding Southeast Asians in the diaspora. In the interests of transparency, I begin by noting that I am an anthropologist by trade and that many of my observations pertain to writings by anthropologists and historians, though I also engage work in other disciplines.

Overshadowed by its massive cousin just to the west, the island and civilization of Taiwan is easily overlooked but has long been a bastion of great intellectual activity on all disciplinary fronts. Many of us in Chinese studies visit Taiwan regularly, use its resources, mingle with Taiwan-based academics, present our research there, and take time to enjoy what it offers in cuisine, art, music, and natural beauty. A much smaller number of us focus our research on Taiwan itself, and the way that research is carried out is fraught with the problems of a contested epistemological geography. Some center their research solely on Taiwan. Others take a comparative approach. In my opinion, both of these ways of organizing and presenting ones findings are acceptable, and the litmus test for judging research on Taiwan should be the intrinsic quality of that work and not based upon whether one is a “pure” Taiwan studies scholar or not. All this stems from Taiwan's continued ambiguous and indeterminate status in the world politically and ethnically. This problem will not go away soon, but that does not mean we should shrink from it. The motivation for writing this short piece came from my reading of Emily Baum's (2011) review of Yomi Braester's new book Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Conflict (2010).

This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.

Almost every destructive earthquake opens social and political fault lines as well as natural ones, and those of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 are notable only for their local depth and global circulation. Seismicity is a geographically selective concern, but because radiation is involved in the present instance, the stake-holders in debates surrounding the earthquake are much more numerous and spread over a far wider map. In fact seismicity, as opposed to radiation, has receded in most contemporary discussions of the earthquake's aftermath, just as “Sanriku,” the area most damaged by the tsunami, has been displaced by “Fukushima” as shorthand for the event as a whole.

Attendees of the 2012 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in Toronto were treated to two extraordinary speeches at the presidential address and awards ceremony. First, Charlotte Furth's acceptance of the AAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies was a primer in the history of China-related gender studies (Furth 2012). Then, as Rachel Leow discusses in her paper in this forum, outgoing AAS President Gail Hershatter followed up with an inspirational critique (reprinted in this issue) of the current state of gender and sexuality studies in China. Taken together, these two speeches showed how far gender and sexuality studies in Asia have come in the last forty years, but also suggested that it is time for some fresh approaches. For example, Furth explained that when the Cambridge History of China volumes on Republican China were commissioned, she and others argued strenuously for the inclusion of a chapter on gender; but in the end, one could not be written because no one had yet done the scholarship on which such a chapter could be based. Fortunately, all of this has changed: the scholarship is there now. But Hershatter quite rightly pointed out that it is time to rethink many of the categories of analysis we have been using, because they are preventing us from asking questions we should be asking, and therefore making us miss the meanings of crucial social events and phenomena.

There is a long history of Theravada Buddhist monk involvement in militarism in mainland Southeast Asia. Here, I examine recent Lao monk support for political and military activities directed against the communist Lao People's Democratic Republic government and its Vietnamese supporters since 1975. Monks have not become directly involved in armed conflict, as monastic rules do not allow participation in offensive violent acts, or arms trading, but they have played various important roles in supporting armed resistance against the Lao government. Some monks assisting insurgents have been shot in Thailand. Now most of the Lao insurgent-supporting monks live in the United States, Canada, and France, where a few continue to assist the political resistance against the Lao government, arguing that providing such support does not contradict Buddhist teachings. This article demonstrates how Lao Buddhist monks have negotiated religious conduct rules in the context of strong nationalistic convictions.

We argue that the 2007 state elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's largest state, were the first “mass mobile phone” elections in India. The paper charts the spectacular growth of the cheap cell phone in India and in Uttar Pradesh, documents the organizational strengths of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and explains how a party once based on Dalit (ex-Untouchable, or Scheduled Caste) support was able to cooperate with Brahmins. In these processes the mobile phone acted as a remarkable “force multiplier” to the existing BSP organization and helped party workers to circumvent the general hostility of mainstream media. The paper does not contend that the mobile phone won the 2007 elections; rather, it argues that the BSP was able to exploit a potent new tool, ideally suited to poor people who often were limited in their ability to travel. The paper points to similarities with the Obama campaigns of 2008 and notes that though other political groups in India attempt to imitate the methods, they may lack the essential organization and dedicated workers.

On March 15, 2011, late at night at the Osaka train station, I met the first refugees from the earthquake that I would come to know. The family of four did not look like what I thought that people who were fleeing the horrendous images on television would. The mother, father, and two young daughters were neatly dressed, and their yellow lab was obediently packed into a crate that stood in the middle of their matching suitcases. Each wore a crisp, white mask. Much as I wanted to hear stories of what they had seen, I imagined that they did not want to talk. My son, however, zoomed a toy train over to their youngest girl, who was about six or seven; she happily raced it back. I motioned for him to stop and smiled at the mother, who acknowledged me from behind her mask as she brushed a hand across her forehead in exhaustion. “Are you OK?” I asked, not knowing how to avoid noticing that something appeared wrong. “Mmmm-hmmm.” “Are you traveling further tonight?” “Kanazawa.” “How terrible it all must be.” “We're from Fukushima,” she said. “We're fine. Our house is fine. It all looks fine, but we don't know what will happen, and the girls are so young.”