2021-2022

Photo via Wikimedia Commons After a long and harsh winter, the cherry blossoms (Japanese: Sakura) are blooming with the rising temperature represent the coming spring. Traces of cherry blossoms can be seen in embankments, parks, streets, schools, and many other places. Events held in parks with many cherry blossom trees, tree-lined avenues, and other flower viewing areas are called “Sakura Festival (Japanese: 桜まつり),” also known as Japan’s Cherry Blossom Festival.  The Cherry Blossom Festival happens from around March 15th to April 15th. As dates depend on the forecast of cherry blossom, it varies from year to year. The content of the event of the festival varies depending on the location. Some will hang lanterns to light the cherry blossom trees at night, which has a differ...

From ancient times to the early 20th century, women in China have experienced gender inequality in family, marriage, and society. Women revolutionaries played an important role in bringing the end of the Qing Dynasty and calling for changes in gender inequality in China. Following the past revolutions, the 1911 revolution addressed gender inequality by emancipating people’s minds with nationalism. Photo via Wikimedia Commons Before the 1911 Revolution, the late 19th century imperialism exposed the late-Qing political thinkers and reformers, such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, to Western and Japanese ideologies, including the concepts of equality and nationalism. According to Kang’s perceptions of the Grand Commonality, he pointed out that only “peace-and-quality and humanness ...

Among the many achievements that have benefited humanity, a survey from December in 2000 showed that the Japanese voted instant noodles as Japan’s greatest invention of the 20th century (BBC, 2000). The results of this survey may be unbelievable, but do you know how such a convenient and delicious food was invented? Image from Cup Noodles Museum The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, formerly known as Go Peh-hok (吳百福), was born in Taiwan’s Kagi-chō (now Chiayi County) in 1910 during the period of Japanese occupation. He was Taiwanese Japanese. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by his grandparents who ran a small wholesale fabric store. At the age of 22, Momofuku Ando used his father’s legacy to start his textile company, and the following year he establis...

Image: Wikipedia A leading figure of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun was a Chinese writer, essayist, poet, and literary critic. He was highly acclaimed by the Chinese government after 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, and Mao Zedong was a lifelong admirer of Lu Xun’s writing. According to Lu Xun’s preface to Outcry, “Imagine an iron house: without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers — all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing them inconsolable agony before they die?” (Lu, 2009, 19). Lu Xun named the book Outcry and utilized literature as a means of awakening sleeping Chinese. He argues in My Vi...

Hot Pot, also known as steamboat or soup-food, is a cooking method in which raw ingredients are cooked in a  simmering broth. It is characterized by cooking and eating at the same time. The food is still hot when eating. People, therefore, love to have hot pot in freezing winter. Typical ingredients to put in a hot pot include seafood, sliced potatoes, sliced meat, tofu, mushrooms, meatballs, glass noodles, vegetables, etc. Ingredients will be pre-sliced into smaller and thin sections so that they will be cooked quickly. Moreover, it is common to dip that already-cooked food in various seasonings to add more flavor. Different types of hot pot have different seasonings such as soy sauce, sesame paste, chili sauce, Shacha sauce, and vinegar.  The origin of hot pot is actually re...

Image: Deepa Iyer On January 31st, 2022, the Forever Foreign series invited lawyer, activist, and writer Deepa Iyer to talk about solidarity post the 9/11 era in the webinar “From Silos to Solidarities: 9/11 and Beyond.” “Solidarity” is one of those terms that have been thrown around quite a bit in relation to activism, but…what is “solidarity” and in what contexts has “solidarity” been used? How has “solidarity” been practiced? Through a quick Google search, solidarity (noun) is the “unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.” What Iyer addresses is how solidarity can be a verb when it becomes a practice and a strategy by living every single day showing up for people you share simil...

The Lantern Festival, also known as the “Little Lunar New Year,” falls on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar calendar and is the end of the New Year celebration. The ancients called the night “Xiao.” It is the night of the first full moon in the year, and it is also the night of the rejuvenation of the earth, symbolizing the coming of spring. On this day, people light up beautiful lanterns, set off fireworks, solve riddles on lanterns, and eat Yuanxiao or Tangyuan to celebrate this happy festival to express the continuation of the celebration of the New Year. How much do you know about the origin and customs of the Lantern Festival? Lantern Festival origins There are many beliefs about the origin of the Lantern Festival. Two likely origins are: the purpose of commemorating ...

Dongzhi, also known as Winter Solstice, Winter Festival, and Tunji (in Japanese), is the twenty-second solar term of the 24 solar terms. The ancients divided a year into 24 solar periods based on the annual motion of the sun. Each period was called a solar term. The winter solstice festival originated in the Zhou Dynasty, flourished in the Tang and Song dynasties, and is still one of the most significant solar terms today. The court and the people had always attached great importance to it, and emperors had held grand sacrificial ceremonies since the Zhou Dynasty. In the ancient Tang dynasty, the Winter Solstice was even as important as the Lunar New Year. The winter solstice generally falls on December 21 or December 22 in the Gregorian calendar. This year, the Winter Solstice is on Decem...

Earlier this academic year, CC launched its year-long series, “Forever Foreign: Asian America, Global Asia, and the Problem of Anti-Asian Racism,” to address the ongoing, racist violence the Asian and Asian American diasporas in the United States face. Anti-Asian violence is not new. During the pandemic, the increase of news coverage of anti-Asian violence, such as the assaults on the elderly and the Atlanta shooting on March 16th, 2021, brought more awareness to the types of traumas an Asian person could experience.  The purpose of the “Forever Foreign” series is, as Professor Yogesh Chandrani states, to invite the CC community to “unsettle popular understandings of Asia and Asian diaspora communities” by bringing awareness to the many different histories, narratives, and experien...

The high rate of economic growth has been an important element of the environmental debate in Asia. Meeting the desire for economic growth with long-term protection of the environment is one of the most fundamental challenges in attempting to achieve sustainable development into the next century in Asia as well as the rest of the world. Since the western model of industrial development is not viable for most Asian countries or for the world as a whole, learning about China and Bhutan is necessary for other developing countries as well as the rest of the world. Even though China and Bhutan are neighbours, their environmental policies are largely different from each other. The evolving environmental policies in China and Bhutan offer global perspectives on how domestic circumstances can affe...