Chinese men in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Japan often maintained amorous liaisons with Japanese women. This experience has rarely attracted scholarly attention. The present study recovers this elided past while pointing out its implications for better understanding the history of Chinese migrants in Japan. Developments in global history and imperial history since WWII have exposed the frequency and problematic nature of the interaction between “foreign” men and “local” women (this being the usual pattern) on imperial and migratory frontiers. However, such research tends to assume a white/non-white dichotomy as the basis of analysis, ignoring similar relations between non-white male migrants and local women. The present study is an attempt to fill this a gap by focusing on Chinese men in late nineteenth-century Japan. It reveals them to be—as is generally the case the world over—socially and sexually active in the land of their overseas sojourn. Specifically, this study will (1) reinsert Chinese into the discussion of the liaison between Japanese women and foreigner men where the latter is almost always assumed to be Western men, (2) highlight the phenomenon of Japanese-Chinese marriages in the history of Chinese migration to Japan, a topic that is also largely missing from the literature, and (3) bring gender/sexual politics/dynamic back into the narrative of Japanese treaty-port society, which like other imperial/colonial frontiers was mired in sexual liaisons of various nature.

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Recent studies on the relationship between media culture and populist mobilization generally considered media contents rather as an instrument for social movement, than for its own end. This methodological assumption led to the ignorance of so-called “pre-movement” period. This article investigates on the change of online expressive culture with the example of an Internet meme called “Golden Monster Card”. The motif of “monster” first appeared in an anti-censorship protest in Mainland China in 2008 and later reused in Hong Kong in 2011. The paper unraveled that this meme captured the emergence of Hong Kong boundary consciousness before the said rise of localist camp after 2014. This article concluded that there are linguistic and cultural rules of using two modalities in the language game that creates the “Golden Monster Card” meme. These two modalities include 1) the Chinese characters used to name the monsters, considering the decoupling of script and sound; and 2) the captions and the illustrations of the monsters that are derived from the naming. These two components are governed by the conceptual metaphor of “Godly Monster” (神獣). The language game of “Golden Monster Card”, while defending an effective linguistic boundary against Putonghua speakers with complex replacements of Cantonese homophones, showed an ambiguous stance towards different actors related to different modes of Chineseness, i.e., Chinese government, Chinese people, Chinese cultural traditions, as well as the recent resistant culture in China. By reading these monsters as “icons” in Peircean semiotics, this paper also provides an alternative theoretical framework to reconsider the transcultural and transregional resonances of media discourses between different social movements appear in near simultaneity around the globe. This kind of transregional reference can also be traced as early as in Benedict Anderson’s periodization of “early globalization”, when print media and telegraph were used to transmit affective political messages by the virtue of similarity and iconicity.

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Chinatowns, cultural and economic bases for Chinese living overseas, have attracted the interest of researchers from various academic disciplines. The three major Chinatowns in Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki are widely known in Japan. However, New Chinatowns, where mainly newcomers overseas Chinese reside, have increased their presence in the host society in recent years. In recent years, Nishi-Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture in Japan has been recognised as one of the typical New Chinatowns in Japan. However, Nishi-Kawaguchi is not historically an overseas Chinese settlement. Many immigrants from diverse backgrounds reside in Nishi-Kawaguchi. In addition, the discussion of Nishi-Kawaguchi as a Chinatown occurred only briefly between 2018 and 2019. This article reports that internet media, including SNS, played a significant role in the persistence of this portrayal. Furthermore, it discusses how Nishi-Kawaguchi’s diversity was overlooked while the portrayal persisted. Also, this article describes how the portrayal of a Chinatown can quickly become fixed, focusing on various actors’ practices in the virtual world. Finally, the article reveals the characteristic of “the production of space,” that Henri Lefebvre describes, conducted in the virtual world. It attempts to add a new perspective to the spatial approach attracting attention in recent Chinatown studies. The production of space as a Chinatown in Nishi-Kawaguchi was conducted even by people who had never been there.

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Originally used by lowlanders and Spanish colonial administrators to refer to mountain peoples, the term “Igorot” became a collective term for the ethnolinguistic groups living in the Gran Cordillera Central in the early 20th century in the census and anthropological surveys conducted by the US colonial government. Some people who were called “Igorot” also read discriminatory nuances into the term and debate continues as to whether to accept or include the designation “Igorot” as a collective term. However, there are some Cantonese-Filipinos with Igorot roots who identify themselves as “Igorot”. How do these “dual minorities” with Cantonese roots and Igorot roots position themselves in the local society? This paper focuses on Cantonese-Filipinos with Igorot roots, who have not received much attention in previous studies, and examines how they position themselves in the local society, focusing on case studies in Baguio City. The case studies revealed that the mixed roots, have different identities. However, three of the four informants are active in the Cantonese community and share something in common. There was the establishment of the Baguio Filipino-Cantonese Association-CAR and the shared history of Cantonese-Filipinos as the pioneers of Baguio that lead to the subsumption of mixed roots with different identities and maintain the boundaries of Cantonese-Filipinos.

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This research note aims to discuss the situation of accepting Taiwanese students,using KINDAI University as an example. It goes without saying that fostering internationalization requires accepting students from various countries. Accepting Taiwanese students has been one of KINDAI University’s long-term projects. The initiative to welcome Taiwanese students started in 1968,and over the years, a strong bond has been built between KINDAI University and Taiwanese students. However, the number of Taiwanese students coming to study has been decreasing in recent years. Yet,the fluctuations in the number of international students can be attributed to various factors, including national policies, changes in the international landscape, and individual strategies. If we can identify the reasons behind this trend and find solutions, it would greatly benefit Taiwanese students and naturally lead to an increase in the number of international students at the university. Taiwan and Japan have shared deep political, cultural, and economic ties since 1895.In the 21st century, researching the acceptance of international students would be of great significance to further strengthen the bond between Taiwan and Japan.

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This essay creates a juxtaposition of Sinophone literary texts by “translating” an untold source text about the life of a woman who moved to Cebu from ko-long-su (in Hokkien dialect, Kulangsu in English transliteration). The source text is not actually told in a coherent form, but if it were, it would have been told in a “Minnan-y” Sinophone literary text, similar to the form of the “su-siang ki” (folk songs in Taiwan). On the other hand, the “translated” Sinophone text would be a work that is not in the normative “Japanese” language, but rather a Sinophone literary text that is sensitive to the style of “su-siang ki” and the vocabulary of the Southern Island. Although the author’s versification skills are undeniably insufficient to translate this delicate story, the Sinophone literature as the simulacrum copies lies in the juxtaposition of various Sinophone literary texts.

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