As part of this year's anniversary of the October 6, 1976, massacre at Thammasat University, an outdoor exhibit of photographs of the violence and the three preceding years of student and other social movements was displayed upon the very soccer field in the center of campus where students were beaten, shot, lynched, and murdered forty years prior. Several of the photographs were printed on large sheets of acrylic and positioned such that the images of the buildings in the photographs were aligned with the actual buildings, which remain largely unchanged. The most striking of these was a photograph of hundreds of students stripped to the waist who were lying face down on the soccer field prior to being arrested and taken away. At the edge of the image was the top of the university's iconic dome building, which lined up with the existing building. The organizers explained that their intention was “to reflect a perspective on the past through the eyes of people in the present in order to show the cruelty of humans to one another.” The proximity generated by the image was underlined by the fact that the fortieth anniversary of the massacre and coup in 1976 that led to twelve years of dictatorship was taking place under yet another dictatorship, that of a military junta calling itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), which seized power on May 22, 2014, in the twelfth coup since the end of the absolute monarchy on June 24, 1932. Suchada Chakphisut, founding editor of Sarakadee magazine and Thai Civil Rights and Investigative Journalism, who was a first-year Thammasat student during the massacre, began her autobiographical account of the day, written for the anniversary this year, by writing: “We meet every year when 6 October comes around, and with it an inexplicable sadness always takes hold of my psyche. It has grown even more devastating since the 22 May 2014 coup, in which we must face the news of the arrest and detention of activists and those who oppose dictatorship.” This was not a commemoration after dictatorship such as those of the same era held in Argentina or Chile during recent years of democratization, but memories of dictatorship in situ.

A comparison of recent Thai and Japanese politics presents a puzzle. Both nations undertook similar electoral reforms at about the same time, but the results have been dramatically different. Thai leaders are party-oriented and have shifted away from the pork-barrel politics of the past. Japanese leaders and members of parliament remain candidate-oriented and continue Japan's pork-barrel policies. We explain these divergent outcomes by analyzing the different causes of and politics surrounding the electoral reform efforts in both countries. Our findings join with the growing literature that questions the one-way causal effects that are usually purported to flow from institutional changes. Rather, we argue that new institutions, such as new election systems, can be as much a result of political changes as a cause of those same changes.

One of the noteworthy trends of the last years of the Edo period was the production of gôkan (assembled volumes), reworkings of recently published material. Focusing on the digest Inu no sôshi (Storybook of dogs, 1848–81) and its source text, the famed yomihon (reading book) Hakkenden (Chronicle of eight dogs, 1814–42), I use theories of adaptation, remediation, translation, and bibliographic transcription to consider the transition from one book form to another and what these changes reveal about contrasting visions of book culture, the image-text matrix, and written language at the dawn of the modern era. Through comparison of the signifying mechanisms and aesthetic principles materialized in these texts, I strive to complicate the conventional understanding of how the interpretative operations of seeing and reading obtained toward these two book formats.

The kimono is often overlooked in the study of modern Japanese literature. Yet it plays a vital role in representing character, symbolizing critical aspects of the narrative, and illuminating historical and social contexts. Here I focus on Kimono (1965–68), an unfinished novel by Kōda Aya (1904–90) that depicts a girl's growing-up process through her experiences with kimono during the early twentieth century. While highlighting the protagonist's development, kimonos in this work also serve various other functions, particularly cogent during a time in which everyday knowledge of kimono was declining. I examine the novel from different perspectives, including the kimono culture of the 1950s–60s and the novel's revitalization during the 1990s–2000s, facilitated by Kōda's literary inheritor, daughter Aoki Tama (1929–). This essay presents a new view of Kōda and her novel while engaging with broader questions of material and cultural representation, and the role of objects in the interpretation of literary texts.

This article examines the writings of the nineteenth-century Indian essayist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay. Locating the writer within the history of colonial Bengal and a wider world of racial anxieties, it excavates the foundations of Indian conservatism outside the familiar terrain of anti-Muslim ressentiment. It argues that “traditionalist” conservatism in India was a transformative project that sought to intervene in the racial nature of a colonized people, focusing on the reordering of familiality, education, and health. Simultaneously liberating and constraining the individual subject, the interventions were expected to produce a population that, through engaging in a tense dialogue with Europe, could redefine its distinctive body of custom and also repair its perceived degenerative condition.

Visions of a grand hydraulic civilization and a pastoral ideal of paddy cultivation–based village life have shaped Sinhala nationalist discourse since the late nineteenth century. Derived from colonial sociology, the local political elite fashioned these ideas into a discourse of Sinhala authenticity that positioned themselves as legitimate representatives of the people while simultaneously placing them as custodians of national culture. However, this was a fraught dynamic given the elites’ highly Anglicized nature and their inability to maintain control over this discourse in the face of wider participation in public culture in the first half of the twentieth century. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, who became prime minister in 1956, eight years after Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule, is popularly seen as one of the few elite politicians of the late colonial period who sought to engage substantively in mass-based politics and is remembered as a heroic anti-colonial figure. This article explores the contradictions and ironies in Bandaranaike's turn to indigeneity and the political and cultural implications of this turn. It also briefly discusses authenticity's continued resonance in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Catastrophic Asia began as an experimental initiative of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Culminating in a spring 2014 symposium where three of the four papers presented here and earlier versions of the two commentaries were delivered, the project sought to bring together a diversity of perspectives on Asian experiences of and vulnerability to disasters. We sought to collect an unlikely group of scholars whose work is not typically discussed in a single forum. They included natural and physical scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and scholars of literature. The project sought to discover what common epistemological ground might be found when such diverse approaches are brought to bear on catastrophic events, as well as the risks of catastrophe, in a particular area of the world.

Asia as a region bears the brunt of both natural and industrial disasters, and when these catastrophes occur, the consequences are disproportionately deadly. Between 1970 and 2011, 74.6 percent of the world's disaster-related fatalities occurred in the Asia-Pacific region (ESCAP and UNISDR 2012, 5). And the toll may be even worse than these numbers indicate; it is easier to assess gross mortality in the acute period of a disaster than to assess the scope of the long-term health effects. This is especially true in developing areas, where there may be preexisting risks and hazards, such as extreme poverty or endemic infectious disease.

I first heard of “radioactive coal” in the summer of 2012, when I was living in the small village of Koyan, one of many settlements in Eastern Kazakhstan that hosted the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. A scandal over the sale of radioactive coal had erupted in the fall of 2011 when local media began reporting on a train from Kazakhstan carrying more than eight thousand tons of it (in 130 wagons) to a heating plant in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Upon discovering that radioactivity in the shipment was eight times higher than normal, Kyrgyz authorities had it removed from the Bishkek's central heating plant. Rather than discarding it, they put it to use elsewhere, including in the heating stoves of more than one orphanage, a kindergarten, and several rural schools. When media covered this development, public outcry forced Kyrgyz politicians to demand that the coal be returned to Kazakhstan; allegations of corruption and arrests of Kyrgyz officials ensued. Political wrangling over responsibility and refunds meant that negotiations between Kazakh and Kyrgyz authorities took more than a year to complete. Finally, Kazakhstan allowed the coal to be returned.

Of the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons, six are located in Asia and another, the United States, borders the Pacific Ocean. Russia and China were the first Asian nations with nuclear weapons, followed by Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Most of the world's nuclear powers are reducing their arsenals or maintaining them at historic levels, but several of those in Asia—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—continue to pursue relentless and expensive programs of nuclear weapons development and production. Hopefully, the nuclear agreement reached in July 2015 between Iran, the European Union, and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council will be a step toward eliminating nuclear weapons throughout Asia and the rest of the world. As we will discuss below, any country possessing a nuclear arsenal is on a path leading toward self-assured destruction, and is a threat to people everywhere on Earth.

Asia, a region grappling with the impacts of climate change, increasing natural disasters, and transboundary water issues, faces major challenges to water security. Water resources there are closely tied to the dramatic Hindu-Kush Himalayan (HKH) mountain range, where over 46,000 glaciers hold some of the largest repositories of fresh water on earth (Qiu 2010). Often described as the water tower of Asia, the HKH harbors the snow and ice that form the headwaters of the continent's major rivers (Bandyopadhyay 2013). Downstream, this network of river systems sustains more than 1.3 billion people who depend on these freshwater sources for their consumption and agricultural production, and increasingly as a source of hydropower (Immerzeel, Van Beek, and Bierkens 2010; National Research Council 2012; Rasul 2014).

The four articles in this “Catastrophic Asia” collection, while showcasing distinct disciplinary approaches to the subject of what anthropologist George E. Marcus (1994) might identify as “technopolitical” catastrophes, are united in the attempt to uncover the sociopolitical resonances of “manmade” damage in what we take to be regional Asia. In his book Technoscientific Imaginaries, Marcus recognizes that science is deeply political and already embedded in events. In this special section of JAS, anthropologists join with scholars in the physical and natural sciences to apply this idea to catastrophic phenomena, continuing a transdisciplinary conversation that began in April 2014 at the Catastrophic Asia Symposium at the University of Colorado. Here, I contribute to this transdisciplinary enthusiasm by sharing with readers of an Asia-focused journal my own perspectives on catastrophe as a scholar of Brazil and a cultural anthropologist interested in medical anthropology and critical science studies. Specifically, I consider how experts working on issues related to the Angra dos Reis nuclear energy plant in Brazil—the site of my current research—viewed and discussed the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown of 2011. By reading the current articles through the lens of my own research, I seek to situate catastrophe within a broader anthropological literature on environmental toxicity.