Introduction

As we have been doing for several years, the editorial office hosted a roundtable at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) meetings in the spring of 2016 in Seattle. Long before then, as we contemplated issues of relevance throughout Asia, our thoughts turned to global conflicts and the ways in which everything—from policy, to diurnal habits, to performance aesthetics—is molded and refracted by tectonic shifts in political power. When we were planning for that March 2016 roundtable, many parts of the world were commemorating the end of World War II, a transition that we discussed in these pages (JAS 74(3) and 74(4)) via commentaries that highlighted the degree to which different parts of Asia experienced a singular commemorative event in varied ways. That confluence prompted us to think about how the end of World War II ushered in a new era of global politics and local realities falling under...