This study aimed to provide insight into the daily lives of disabled Japanese veterans and their families during World War II (WWII). After the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese government expanded the conscription system in order to enable large-scale mobilization while providing comprehensive military support led by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The top priority was to create mechanisms to direct disabled veterans into the home front, so-called Saiki hōkō. Even under the scheme, families of disabled veterans in farming villages during WWII had difficulty recovering their pre-war living standards. However, some households economically exceeded their prewar living standards as veterans returned to work while also receiving pensions and taking advantage of support from the government.

Amid growing interest in studying China and India together, this special issue, “Methods in China-India Studies,” seeks to open a conversation on the relevance, approaches, and stakes of China-India research. Why should we pair China and India together, how can we best do so, and to what ends? In this introduction to the issue, the editors first discuss the rationales commonly evoked as justification for studying China and India together. The first section articulates shared intellectual commitments as lending a coherence to China-India studies, and as providing a common ground and point of departure for scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The second section outlines a history of the China-India pairing from the first century CE to the end of the twentieth century, with a focus on how a range of historical actors paired China and India under shifting political circumstances and with differing objectives. This section also offers an assessment of the methodological approaches recent scholarship has extended to studying each of these periods. As a whole, this introduction reflects on the unique challenges and opportunities of conducting China-India research, and outlines some of the contributions the China and India conceptual pairing can make to other fields of study.

Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.

The industrialization process generated many disabilities. However, the historical study of industrial disability has not progressed. This study examines disability welfare in the Japanese railroad industry. In particular, Testudō Kōsaikai, an organization of the Japanese National Railways (JNR) established in 1931, was uniquely devoted to welfare activities by linking a profit-making business and the provision of welfare. To cover welfare costs, such as providing workshops for disabled people, Kōsaikai conducted profit-making businesses, such as sales at station stalls. However, the welfare of disabled people in the JNR, including the activities of Kōsaikai, has not been previously examined. This study clarified the structure of disability welfare in the Japanese railroad industry until the early postwar period. People with a lower degree of disability, such as one upper or lower member amputation, were employed by the JNR, while some of these people were employed by Kōsaikai as sellers or officers, or accepted job training in Kōsaikai workshops. On the contrary, although few people with higher degrees of disability were employed by the JNR and Kōsaikai, the latter employed their family members to compensate them for their living costs.

Outbreaks of war create large numbers of disabled people. After Japan's defeat in World War II, the Japanese government, under the policy of GHQ, began to create labor policies for disabled soldiers and the general disabled. However, historical research on the labor market participation of the disabled in Japan has not progressed. This study examines the job placement program for the physically disabled in the immediate postwar period. The end of the war encouraged the participation of people with disabilities in the labor market. In the early 1950s, the Ministry of Labor actively tried to find jobs for the disabled to improve the lives of disabled soldiers and bring new labor market participation to disabled people. This research revealed an active debate on whether the participation of disabled people in the labor market should be promoted by coercive state policies requiring companies to hire people with disabilities or by public support. Through analysis of the labor market for disabled people in 1950s, we will provide hints for deeper thinking about who the workers are and what it means to work in our society.

The current study reveals that the Buddhist egalitarian spiritual message found global resonance in an era of globalized inequality. By comparing three modern retellings of an ancient romance between an outcaste (untouchable/Dalit) maiden and the Buddha's attendant Ānanda, this study showcases a shared socio-spiritual horizon that emerged in the Indian and Chinese Buddhist revivals and that thwarted colonial epistemic domination and offered powerful social critiques. More specifically, this study shows that the Indian and Chinese afterlives of the romance display innovative formations of Buddhist social consciousness. The authors reinterpreted equality and freedom on Buddhist terms, creating a new standard of civilization. Employing this “already democratic” Buddhist civilization, they launched critiques of the Indian caste system and Chinese patriarchy. This socio-spiritual horizon subverts the typecast images of “spiritual India” and “rational China.” Whereas these images reflect the limits of the comparative lens based on political regimes – namely, Indian democracy and Chinese socialism – the current study goes beyond regime types by examining diverse formations of universal religion in the cultural sphere. More broadly, a critical strategy for provincializing Europe is to block the colonial gaze and instead showcase the vibrant cultural productions and meaning-making that circulated at the margins of empire.

This paper uses the decade-long collaboration between the Indian paleobotanist Birbal Sahni (1891–1949) and his Chinese doctoral student Hsü Jen (Xu Ren 徐仁, 1910–1992) to offer a connected history of mid-twentieth century scientific activity in China and India. Possibly the first Chinese scientist to earn a PhD from an Indian university (Lucknow, 1946), Hsü was certainly the first to be appointed to a faculty position in India. Sahni and Hsü's attempts to build Asian networks of scientific activity, characterized by the circulation of experts, scientific knowledge, and specimens, provide the grounds for considering a practice of Pan-Asianism. Such a formulation adds to existing work on the Pan-Asianist articulations of intellectual and political figures and urges for an expansion of how we understand scientific activity across China and India from the 1930s to the 1960s. In so doing, the paper makes two historiographical interventions. In the first instance, the collaboration presents an opportunity to move beyond the two dominant frames through which histories of science in China and India are studied: the nation state and Non-West/West binaries. Second, a focus on science widens the scope of China–India history, a field dominated by research on cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic topics.

Many books have been written about the incorporation of the Caribbean region, South Asia, Africa and Latin America into the global economy. Remarkably, few have dealt with Island Southeast Asia or Maritime Southeast Asia as a macro-region. For the Caribbean nations, it has been amply discussed how the legacies of the plantation economies consisted of meagre economic growth and massive unemployment. Conversely, scant attention has been given to the question how societies in Island Southeast Asia were turned into providers of cheap commodities and how this impacted their long-term development prospects. This silence is even more remarkable considering some striking parallels with Caribbean socio-economic trajectories. Today, emigration of millions is the fate of Island Southeast Asia, as it is for the Caribbean region. To break the silence and to invite further discussion I wrote The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter. After reading the review by Dr Aguilar on this book in a previous issue of this journal, I felt that it could be worthwhile to highlight some of the main points of my argument about the peripheral integration of Island Southeast Asia in the global economy. I am grateful to the editors of the International Journal of Asian Studies for granting me the opportunity to do so.

In his response to my review of his book, Ulbe Bosma reiterates that high demographic growth and the consequent abundance of surplus labor as well as local systems of labor control were important factors in the peripheralization of Island Southeast Asia. Colonialism itself, he argues, is not responsible for the making of a periphery.

As the Cold War prompted anxieties throughout Asia about the status of postcolonial state-building and decolonization, the possibility of friendship and cooperation between China and India despite their differing political and economic systems inspired hope and political repercussions far beyond their borders. This paper reveals how Japanese commenters, in their analysis of Sino–Indian friendship and both countries' respective political trajectories, saw the two countries as providing a rubric for a new type of politics. Utilizing an array of published, unpublished, and archival sources, I will study how diverse individuals, from the historian Uehara Senroku to burakumin activist Jiichirō Matsumoto, believed that Sino–Indian friendship, unlike the failed project of Japanese imperialism, could unite “Asia” in its struggle against imperialism amid the Cold War and accelerating decolonization. In following this model, they also believed that Japan could escape American hegemony and become “Asian” again. Japanese analyses of “China–India” as offering an “Asian” recipe for overcoming imperialism and navigating bloc politics help showcase how ideas of Asia continued to serve as a space for contemplating political possibilities during the early Cold War, transforming Japan from the region's former tutor to its pupil.

The mid-1920s to the 1950s witnessed the uneasy imbrication of the rural, the peasantry, and women as symbols and subjects of the nation in the era of anti colonial and socialist movements in both India and China. This essay examines this rural/peasant/woman nexus within conflicting representations of the peasant woman as embodiment of the nation's past, present and future, to map a range of connected global political-aesthetic imaginations of Indian and Chinese nationhood. A close analysis of the convergence of three texts – Pearl Buck's novel, The Good Earth (1931), Katherine Mayo's polemic, Mother India (1927), and Indian director Mehboob Khan's re-staging and transformation of both in his 1957 film, Mother India – opens up to a wider set of entangled Indian and Chinese co-texts within an expanded space of global aesthetic circulation. Together, these texts reveal a contested history of representations of the rural, the peasantry, and women in projections of Indian and Chinese national becoming that, in the end, cannot be easily recuperated or consolidated within singular nation-state narratives.

This paper investigates the framework of Islamist politics of Jama'at e Islami in Indian-administered Kashmir. Even though Jama'at e Islami creates the notion of “other” in the Indian state and challenges it but Kashmir's provincial relationship with India also forces it to work within the limits set up by the same state. This paper, thus, conceptualizes the relationship between Indian state and Islamists in a Muslim Majority region that demands the right to self-determination. In doing so, the paper interrogates Jama'at e Islami's rhetorical opposition to the political doctrine of Indian secularism and raises queries about minority rights and their place in the Islamist project.

In 2013, the Malayalam film Drishyam, a suspenseful story of the cover up of an accidental murder, became a huge hit in India that inspired remakes in many regional languages including one in Hindi that, as with other recent Bollywood hits, traveled to China. This time, though, instead of screening the Hindi film in theaters, the narrative reached Chinese audiences with a Chinese language remake, titled Sheep Without A Shepherd《误杀》. The original film has been accused of lifting its story from a popular Japanese detective novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, which was also made into films in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This essay traces the many versions of the narrative to explore how comparing the Indian and Chinese films can recenter our understanding of global cinema and film circulation. When considering the many version of Drishyam, instead of focusing on tensions between center and periphery, we can examine both the anxieties and the creative power of cultural borrowing and the retelling of narratives in an increasingly inter-connected Asian film market

This paper examines how Islam in Japan tends to be tolerated as (foreign) “culture,” especially within the framework of tabunka kyōsei, multicultural coexistence, and cosmetic multiculturalism to circumvent religious apathy, phobia of religion, and prejudice against Islam. In doing so, this paper will: first provide a history of Muslim–Japanese relations and Muslim communities in Japan as well as an overview of the total estimate of the Muslim population in Japan as of 2018; historicize and denaturalize religious apathy, phobia of religion, and prejudice against Islam among the general Japanese public; analyze the rhetoric of tabunka kyōsei and its relation to cosmetic multiculturalism as well as its problematics; investigate the cases of local oppositions to the building projects of mosques and my observations made at events organized by Muslim groups; and conclude with a critical remark on the cosmetic multiculturalist understanding of “Islamic culture” and its approach to tabunka kyōsei.

Scholarship on urban China and urban India has been prolific. Studies have separately addressed urban processes of migration, spatial transformation, governance, infrastructure, land conflicts, policing, and more. However, research on these areas has rarely intersected. This article discusses the challenges of comparison in China–India urban studies, and examines recent works through an analysis of “styles and scales of comparison.” Some seek to explain national-level variations by studying selected cities in each country. Others identify convergence and divergence in the context of broader global processes, and some incorporate historical trajectories to structure a temporal comparison. Because the most rapid periods of urbanization in the first half of the twenty-first century will take place in India and China and will soon account almost half of the planet's urban population, studies of urbanization in India and China are of great importance. Careful reflection on the study of urbanization in China–India studies can also re-center urban studies away from the historically dominant American/Eurocentric perspectives.

This paper offers a first analysis of the philosophy of history developed by Jian Bozan (1898–1968), the author of China's earliest comprehensive exposition of historical materialism. Despite his central importance for the establishment of professional historical studies in PRC, the existing studies neglect Jian's original contribution to the development of Chinese Marxism and his pre-war works in general, focusing solely on his participation in the debate over the relation between history and theory in the 1960s. The paper seeks to fill this lacuna by providing a critical account of Jian Bozan's understanding of historical laws, progress, the stages of history, human freedom and the class struggle. Jian's synthesis of historicism and historical materialism, which at a time was seen as an alternative to the Maoist view of history, was officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution and led to his premature death. However, this paper demonstrates that, following the public rehabilitation of the thought of Jian Bozan in 1978, it was his system that had an important impact on the historiography in Dengist China. Furthermore, the paper argues that Jian's approach to historical materialism brought many novelties in relation to the preceding Sino-Marxist views of history.

The North Korean police were arguably one of the most important organisations in liberated North Korea. It was instrumental in stabilising the North Korean society and eventually became one of the backbones for both the new North Korean regime and its military force. Scholars of different political orientation have attempted to reconstruct its early history leading to a set of views ranging from the “traditionalist” sovietisation concept to the more contemporary “revisionist” reconstruction that portrayed it as the cooperation of North Korean elites with the Soviet authorities in their bid for the control over the politics and the military, in which the Soviets merely played the supporting role. Drawing from the Soviet archival documents, this paper presents a third perspective, arguing that initially, the Soviet military administration in North Korea did not pursue any clear-cut political goals. On the contrary, the Soviet administration initially viewed North Koreans with distrust, making Soviets constantly conduct direct interventions to prevent North Korean radicals from using the police in their political struggle.

Interculturalism in theatre, although much critiqued, is an inevitable category for understanding theatre practices and histories. Critical approaches have highlighted the complicity of “hegemonic” Euro-American-led theatre with imperialist structures. Newer critiques tend to focus on encounters in European languages in multicultural cities, and to posit multilateral non-Western collaborations as liberated from colonial power structures. This paper argues that it is necessary to fundamentally rethink interculturalism in theatre by taking seriously the long-standing major theatrical exchanges which do not reference, and are not principally influenced by, Western theatre's sphere. Considering a major example of Sino–Japanese collaboration from 1989, Ryū-Ō (Dragon King), we place it within the genealogy of the two countries’ long-standing theatrical practices of interculturalism. Ryu-O, a kabuki-jingju collaboration, shows that intra-Asian interculturalism has its own genealogy and is neither new nor beholden to Euro-American models, nor necessarily characterized by the idealism easily invested in overtly counter-hegemonic projects. By examining the show's production process, performance and reception, we re-evaluate how interculturalism in theatre is conceived, urging serious engagement with areas of practice historically grounded and fully independent of both “hegemonic” and “new” intercultural theatre tendencies.