About Us

The East Asia Forum was born ten years ago out of a conviction that graduate students very frequently produce scholarship of publishable quality, but find few outlets to display it in a landscape crowded with the work of better established academics. Along with several colleagues in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, I hit upon the idea of producing an annual journal, which would feature the best papers of our own graduate students.

Our aim was twofold. We sought not only to showcase the variety of research taking place in our doctoral programme, but also to expose graduate students to the processes of revision and rigourous external review which would later become a part of their lives in the academy. As the East Asia Forum began to take on a life of its own, a partnership was formed with doctoral students in the East Asian field at York University, and in recent years, articles by young scholars from American and Asian Universities have found their way into the journal. These latter are the more outstanding papers presented at the International Graduate Student Conference held each year in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.

In the previous nine years, more than forty articles on a wide range of subjects have appeared in the East Asia Forum. The choice of articles for review has always been left to a student editorial board, whose members are rotated each year so that as many students as possible are exposed to the experience of academic publication. The index of articles in this volume will suggest that while China-related subjects claimed the most attention in the early years of the journal, the last few years have reflected a greater emphasis on Japan, Korea and Taiwan as the field of East Asian studies broadens, becomes more cross-cultural, and reflects a greater commonality of East Asian approaches to current discourses such as those concerned with nation/nationalism, post-modernism, memory, civil society, gender and identity.

The prospect for the East Asia Forum is a fuller engagement with these issues.

The East Asia Forum is now found in many university libraries throughout North America. Several of the authors hold academic positions in Canada, the United States, China and Japan. It is our expectation that the East Asia Forum will continue to provide a platform for leading-edge research on East Asia, both traditional and modern, well into the future.

R. W. L. Guisso

Chair, East Asian Studies, 1980-1985 and 1998-2004.