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.

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.

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.

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.”

What these four quite different books broadly share is a focus on the role of the state in Myanmar society. Current scholarship describes the authoritarian state in Myanmar, which has been controlled by the army since 1962, as either dominantly present or neglectfully absent. Censorship and the repression of autonomous spaces in society, on the one hand, and the failure of the state to enforce efficient health and environmental policies, on the other, are keywords in these works that illustrate the double-faced appearance of the state's existence and role in society.

Burma/Myanmar's postcolonial elites have established a military-state with hybrid-imperial structures, characterized by high despotic but low infrastructural modes of power, and fueled by rent-extraction. Given the resulting evisceration of opposition political groups, citizens understand explicit politics as dangerous. That said, cleavages between state and the polity afford vast space for “civil society” groups (CS) to form and operate. CS stabilize the political economy by managing citizen needs; conversely, CS stand as a wedge between state and masses, (potentially) constructing spaces to coordinate and magnify potential demands. Yet CS currently err toward managing needs. Opposition must politicize Burmese masses and CS through idioms that interface with CS's material tasks—a “politics of the daily”—encouraging them to make, collectively, a multiplicity of non-adversarial demands. This may compel the state to pivot and seek new bargains, at which point elite advocacy-oriented CS can provide progressive policy reforms. The paper will examine recent inchoate social-political movements in Burma for models of this politics.

An oft-overlooked part of the Global Sixties, the seminal event of April 19th (1960) set the foundation for South Korea's combative, youth-driven democratization struggles between the years 1960 and 1987. This article turns to the eve of the eight-week protest movement in order to examine the production of students as a nationwide social organization of youths well-versed in nationalist discourse and conversant in patriotic practices. Throughout the heady weeks of February, March, and April 1960, youthful protestors drew on elements of this ideological training in an unlikely fashion to employ them in protests against the state. Taking full advantage of the privileged position of students in nationalist discourse, the protestors of April 19th cemented the importance of the upright student demonstration in South Korea's emerging postcolonial, Cold War political landscape.

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the “sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness.

As regionalism has become a politically and economically advantageous policy across much of Asia, vernacular popular music has concomitantly become an important arena for articulating and codifying shared regionalist sentiment. This article explores the reasons for the emergence of subnational regionalism within post-independence India, and its more recent resurgence since the 1990s, arguing that expansion and diversification of popular music (in combination with other media) industries have been central to these processes. Examining the case of the protest song “Nauchami Narayana” from the Uttarakhand Himalayas, the article then investigates how vernacular popular music can blend local signs of devotion and cultural identity in order to effect political change and articulate a space of regional belonging.

Since 2003, the dispute over the history of the ancient kingdom of Koguryŏ (37 bce, trad.-668 ce), located in Manchuria and northern Korea, has been one of the hottest issues between China and Korea. The debate seems to have fueled a new nationalistic or Sinocentric historiography of the ancient Chinese northeast. A ninth century BCE poem called “Hanyi” in the Classic of Poetry [Shijing] has been the cause of a far older history dispute. Whereas Chinese scholars have generally understood Han as a Zhou feudal state ruled by a Ji-surnamed scion of the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 bce), most Korean scholars have linked the polity with Old Chosŏn (n.d.-108 bce), the earliest known state in Korean history. However, by comparing the “Hanyi” with several bronze inscriptions with similar contents, this study seeks to re-read the “Hanyi” from a perspective that transcends the dichotomy of Chinese history versus Korean history.