Popular music is a dynamic portal through which to gain a greater understanding of a vast array of social phenomena within Asia. In particular, the power of pop to actively shape conceptions of self and inform the ways in which we interact with others at the individual, communal, and even national and transnational levels has taken center stage, but understanding just how these identities are formed through the performance of popular music is quite complex in the current global moment. Through comparison of recent scholarship covering diverse types of popular music throughout Asia, this article explores how identity formation is informed by an increasingly nuanced understanding of globalization. Moving from a most intimate sense to broad transnational and inter-ethnic contexts, it not only expands the concept of identity in Asia, but also reveals how the study of popular music in general can illuminate other social issues important to Asianists.

In 2003 a monument was erected at the site of the 2002 Islamist militant attacks in Kuta, Bali. Government and other official discourses, including the design brief, represent the monument as an integrated and culturally harmonious public testimony to the victims. However, the monument is also a discordant association of ideas, meanings, and political claims. While originally designed to subdue insecurity, the Bali bombings monument, in fact, constitutes a site of powerful “language wars” around its rendering of memory and its presence in Bali's integration into the globalizing economy of pleasure. This paper examines the ways in which the monument is being articulated and “consumed” as a social and cultural marker for the island's tourism geography. The paper pays particular attention to the increasing diversity of Bali's visitors and the ways in which a precarious “cosmopolization” of the Kuta-Legian area is being experienced and expressed at the monument site.

We study the propensity for protest in the context of individuals’ alternative choices in urban China. Depending on the number and quality of social ties (or guanxi in Chinese), individuals may resort to one of two alternatives: to engineer life-changing events through personal connections or to join others in labor protest. We call one “adaptation” and the other “voice.” As our working hypothesis, we first expect them to be mutually exclusive. That is, adaptation through guanxi networks may help diffuse the will to protest, as those who enjoy better guanxi networks would advance their class status through such networks. With data from a national survey, our analysis rejects this working hypothesis. Those who are better connected are not only more likely to adapt but also more inclined to voice, and the effect of social ties on protest is significantly smaller for those who are connected to people with power. The implications are twofold. First, our data not only confirm the well-known effect of social connections on protest, but also specify the effects caused by high-class versus low-class connections. Second, in a comparative vein, the individual decision making on adaptation and/or voice offers a glimpse into the intertwining domains of social space in contemporary China.

Although China's Tibetans profoundly mistrust the ideologies of the party-state, associating them with illegitimate practices of domination, protest and revolt are rare and effectively suppressed. This might be seen as quasi-colonial domination, the state securing subjection through the performance of paramount power, demonstrated by its suppression of the 2008 protests, or it could be attributed to a form of indirect rule, by which local officials engage with local leaders to generate hegemonic consent. While both dynamics are present on the Tibetan plateau, ethnographic fieldwork among the Tibetan populations of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces reveals that consent is primarily generated by local officials who negotiate a form of local order with religious and tribal leaders. Ignoring the ideological demands of their superiors, they engage constructively with the expectations of the Tibetans about how order should be maintained and, in doing so, subvert the state's ideal of uniform and unitary sovereignty.

This essay examines how Japanese Esperantism developed after the Russo-Japanese War in a manner that departed from the global Esperanto movement. Esperantists viewed Esperanto as a language that amplified the diversity of and symbolized equality between cultures. Esperanto was studied and discussed by elites and nonelites alike in noninstitutional spaces such as in rural homes and coffee shops, often at night, when institutions privileged by state and financial power had closed. By looking at these hidden space-times outside the realms of state guidance, we become privy to an imagination and practice of peace and world order that operated outside the institutions of the nation-state. The history of this movement offers us a rare window into a popular concept of world order in Asia.

Through investigating the construction of one of Japan's largest infrastructure projects during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), this article examines the formation of a technocratic regime of colonial development expertise that was an important pillar of Japanese imperial rule and continued to have powerful effects throughout postwar Asia. It analyzes how a particular form of technical expertise and the wider discourse of “Scientific Japan” as the modernizer of Asia were legitimated and naturalized, as well as how they operated as a system of colonial power. Japan and other East Asian regimes after the war continued to invoke forms of technocratic expertise with origins in the colonial era as part of their state-led development programs, often with adverse effects on their populations. Thus this article concludes that there is a continuing need to critique, historicize, and denaturalize such regimes of expertise invoked by networks of bureaucrats, businessmen, engineers, and experts.

This article introduces the 1952–56 hiropon crisis, Japan's sole major domestic experience with illegal drugs, and the world's first methamphetamine “epidemic.” In the early postwar years, hiropon addiction came to symbolize the dependent, traumatized state of a defeated Japan. This ideological significance made the eradication of hiropon a leading public issue, mobilizing the Japanese government, medical establishment, and social actors such as educators, parents, neighborhood associations, the media, and others. The process of eliminating methamphetamine restored public confidence and agency, and created a new identity for Japan as a cosmopolitan, independent nation. Unlike drugs in other contexts, hiropon was not embedded in the postwar political economy or culture, making possible its swift suppression. However, resolution of the methamphetamine crisis also sowed the seeds of its recrudescence in the 1970s. The ongoing “second stimulants epidemic,” reflecting consumption patterns typical of developed nations, has proven resistant to solution.