Matthew Allen is Adjunct Professor at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Identity and Resistance in Okinawa (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Undermining the Japanese Miracle (Cambridge University Press, 1994/2009), and in 2014 co-edited a 4-volume series on Japan and popular culture for Routledge UK (Japanese Popular Culture). He has written on Okinawan ethnopsychiatry, culture and identity, and popular culture in Japan, among other topics. He has recently been working on memory and the Pacific War in the Asia-Pacific, focusing in particular on Okinawa and Japan. He also owns and does hard labour on a vanilla farm in Far North Queensland.
Simon Avenell is an Associate Professor in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific and Director of the ANU Japan Institute. His research interests include civil society, environmentalism, transnational activism, and political thought with a focus on contemporary Japan. His work has been published in journals such as Environment and History, The Journal of Japanese Studies, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Environmental History and Modern Asian Studies. His monograph Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (University of California Press, 2010) traces the emergence and evolution of civic activism and thought in postwar Japan. He is currently completing a book on environmentalism in contemporary Japan, tentatively titled Transnational Archipelago: Japan in the Global Environmental Movement.
Kimi Coaldrake is an Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, where she is Head of Postgraduate Programs at the Elder Conservatorium of Music and teaches music studies. She is a Fulbright Scholar and Affiliate-in-Research at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, where she has previously been a Visiting Research Scholar. She is also a professional performer on Japanese koto (zither). She has published in the areas of Japanese music theatre with Routledge and on the incorporation of tradition into Japanese contemporary culture in journals including Japanese Studies, Japan Forum, Musicology Australia and Perfect Beat. Her current research uses Finite Element Analysis to investigate the acoustic properties of the koto and its relationship to the culture of sound in Japan.
Inhye Heo is a Research Professor at Korea University. She teaches political economy, Korean politics, regional studies, diplomacy and negotiation, and comparative politics. Her research explores political economy of Asian countries, with a particular focus on policy studies and democratic governance. Her recent work includes ‘Neoliberal Developmentalism in South Korea’ (Asia Pacific Viewpoint, forthcoming), ‘The Role of the State as an Inter-scalar Mediator in Globalizing Liquid Crystal Display Industry Development in South Korea’ (Review of International Political Economy, 2014), ‘Changing Aspects of Government–Society Relations in South Korea’ (Contemporary Politics, 2013) and ‘The Political Economy of Policy Gridlock in South Korea’ (Politics and Policy, 2013).
Ki-Joon Hong is an Associate Professor and Head of the Peace and Global Governance Major at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies (GIP), Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. He studied at the University of Leuven in Belgium for his MA and PhD from 1990 to 1996. His publications include The CSCE Security Regime Formation: An Asian Perspective (Macmillan, 1997), ‘Path Emergence on the Korean Peninsula: From Division to Unification’ (Pacific Focus, 2012), ‘The Six-Party Talks in the Post-Kim Jong-il Era: An Emergent Path toward a Northeast Asian Security Mechanism’ (North Korean Review, 2012), ‘The Unintended Consequences of the Helsinki Final Act: A Path Emergence Theory Perspective’ (International Political Science Review, 2013) and ‘Institutional Multilateralism in Northeast Asia: A Path Emergence Theory Perspective’ (North Korea Review, 2015). His current research interests are focused on the path emergence theory that is suggested by the author as an alternative to the path dependence theory.
David Hundt is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University in Melbourne. His research interests are the political economy, economic development, and international relations in the Asia–Pacific region. He has published in the Journal of Development Studies, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Japanese Journal of Political Science and Asian Perspective, among others.
Ohn Daewon is Director of the Centre for International Cooperation and Strategy and Professor of International Relations in the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. He is the author of numerous books and articles on inter-regional relations between Europe and East Asia and Sino–EU relations. His current research topics include the EU’s evolving common foreign and security policy towards East Asia and the future role of the EU and NATO in conflict resolution, peace-building and regional integration in the Korean Peninsula and East Asia.
Sang Mi Park is an Associate Professor at Yokohama National University in Japan. She received academic training in the history of East Asia, and earned a PhD from Princeton University in June 2007. After offering courses on Japanese history from the medieval through the modern periods at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in various departments and graduate schools at Waseda University and the University of Tokyo in Japan, she joined the YNU faculty in October 2014. Her most recent publications include ‘Ri Kōran by Asari Keita’, Theatre Journal 66(2), May 2014, pp. 274–76 (performance review); and ‘The Formation of a “New Japan” under the US Occupation (1945–52): Popular Theater and the Cultural Restoration’, East Asian Studies 33(1), February 2014, pp. 135–68. Her research interests focus on Shōwa Japan’s cultural diplomacy and performance policies within a global context.
Mason Richey is Associate Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. His research areas are European foreign and security policy as applied to Asia, East Asian security dynamics, and great power diplomacy. He has recently published articles in Foreign Policy Analysis, the Korean Journal of Defence Analysis, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, the Journal of International and Area Studies and the 2014 Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought.
Alistair Swale is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Following on from his earlier research in Japanese intellectual history, which culminated in the book The Meiji Restoration: Monarchism, Mass Communication and Conservative Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), he has been exploring the role of contemporary popular culture texts in negotiating historical memory and nostalgia. He has more recently been working on a new work entitled Anime Aesthetics: Japanese Animation and the ‘Post-Cinematic’ Imagination, which is currently scheduled for release through Palgrave Macmillan later in 2015.