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Since the 1970s, a continuous exchange of information about conservation between Europe and East Asia has greatly influenced approaches to the treatment of paper objects as well as the tools and materials used. This knowledge is often disseminated and absorbed in a purely practical manner, stripped out of its wider cultural context. However, what is considered 'appropriate' treatment is closely linked to how a particular culture has historically interacted with artworks and arguably the lack of broader cultural perspectives can lead to misguided assumptions in the evaluation of those practices. This article reflects on the differences between European and East Asian cultures of paper conservation. By taking into consideration the relevant cultural, philosophical and historical contexts, the article aims to explore how approaches to conservation, as well as to the profession itself, have developed in these two different parts of the world. It further encourages paper conservators to reflect on their own training and practices while offering an understanding of how these approaches can sometimes be mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as they are to the events themselves, the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics have become central to academic research on the Games and their political, social, and cultural roles. And so the recent string of Olympic Games held in East Asia – two of them under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic – offer the opportunity to think both about region-specific meanings associated with these highly scripted affairs and about the ways they might destabilize broader judgments about the Olympics and their implications. This paper introduces the contributions to this special volume on the Opening Ceremonies at Asia's recent Olympic Games, aiming to draw attention not only to the specific contributions of each paper but also to the themes that they collectively engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Taiwanese officials view democracy and culture and how do they plan to utilise these two soft power resources as part of advancing the island's international position? Based primarily on interviews conducted with state officials in Taiwan, this paper analyses Taiwan's soft power repositioning in the regional and global soft power competition and examines its advantages and disadvantages. It discusses the institutional and geopolitical constraints Taiwan faces when trying to implement its soft power policy and addresses the internal disagreements over utilising its cultural and democratic achievements. It concludes that despite the utility of soft power in pursuing its foreign policy agenda, Taiwan faces a few major institutional and conceptual obstacles, keeping Taiwanese diplomacy in a transitional period from old thinking about culture and diplomacy while hesitantly evaluating its soft power resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between workforce competence, migration, and quality improvement in the Asia-Pacific through analysis of Early Childhood Education (ECE) policy texts from three East Asia Summit countries. Content (word level) analysis of salient policy texts was undertaken to address two questions: How are culture and diversity conceptualized in these texts? How are diverse educators positioned in these texts? We show that, despite differing historical trajectories of ECE, policy frameworks in all three countries fail to sufficiently acknowledge the potential contribution of migrant educators to quality improvement initiatives. We conclude by calling for greater attention to workforce mobility and diversity in ECE policies, and for further research into the untapped competence of migrant educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the author's fieldwork in China and Japan, literature research and the study of specimen materials and video data on weddings of ROK, Japan and China, which are collected by the Japan National Museum of Ethnology (or Minpaku), this paper attempts to explore the cultural symbolic significance that humans bestow on food, and to further reveal the cultural diversity in East Asia and the common structure of human mind by comparing the flow of food and the ways and scopes in which the wedding foods are consumed in East Asia. In East Asia wedding customs, expectations through food for the bride's fertility and her belonging to her husband's patrilineal family are very common. However, the food and eating behaviors that express expectations for the groom are rare, only slightly visible in the dry bonito at the time of engagement in Japan and the 12 bowls of rice that the groom will eat on the day of the Yao wedding in China. Dried bonito signifies virility and victory of men, reflecting the features of Japanese maritime culture and the influence of samurai culture in history. East Asian wedding rituals are diverse in form, but the commonality among them can also be seen, that is, human beings find cultural meanings in different natural environments that correspond to human society, and then internalize the natural attributes through homophonic pun, imitation and other ways. Food is used in weddings to express people's best wishes for the happiness of the newlyweds' families, to have descendants and longevity of their marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low fertility is a growing concern in modern societies. While economic and structural explanations of reproductive hindrances have been informative to some extent, they do not address the fundamental motives that underlie reproductive decisions and are inadequate to explain why East Asian countries, in particular, have such low fertility rates. The current paper advances a novel account of low fertility in modern contexts by describing how modern environments produce a mismatch between our evolved mechanisms and the inputs they were designed to process, leading to preoccupations with social status that get in the way of mating and reproductive outcomes. We also utilize developed East Asian countries as a case study to further highlight how culture may interact with modern features to produce ultralow fertility, sometimes to the extent that people may give up on parenthood or even mating altogether. Through our analysis, we integrate several lines of separate research, elucidate the fundamental dynamics that drive trade-offs between social status and reproductive effort, add to the growing literature on evolutionary mismatch, and provide an improved account of low fertility in modern contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigations of non-Western art forms and non-Western subjects are needed to understand cross-cultural empirical aesthetics. This study examined the aesthetic evaluation of Chinese calligraphy, a distinguished visual art in East Asia, through people's preferences among five scripts. These scripts are representative of major artistic writing styles of Chinese characters. We conducted an experiment with Chinese (mean age = 22.64, SD = 2.90) and non-Chinese participants (International students from Asia, Africa, and Northern America; mean age = 26.76, SD = 2.35) and investigated through subjective measures and eye-tracking measures. We adopted Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking (PIA Model) and measured fluency processing, affective feelings, motivational evaluation, and overall likeness as subjective measures to capture the aesthetic evaluation. The two groups evaluated the scripts differently and showed distinctive preferences for scripts. Chinese participants perceived the stimuli to be more fluent than non-Chinese participants. Chinese rated cursive script most fluent, pleasant, interesting, and liked it most, whereas non-Chinese liked the official script the most and rated it most interesting. Regarding eye movement, Chinese participants had fewer fixations and shorter total fixation durations, relative to non-Chinese participants. Non-Chinese participants were more sensitive to the features of the scripts compared with Chinese participants. We suggest that culture could affect aesthetic evaluation of Chinese calligraphy. Experience of Chinese characters and aesthetic expectations of different cultures may contribute to the evaluation differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been growing interest in the social-emotional development of children. However, the social-emotional development of children in Asia remains a knowledge gap. This systematic review identifies and summarizes existing studies on children's social-emotional development in Asia. We conducted a systematic review using the Guidelines for Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA). We reviewed 45 studies that met the inclusion criteria, and they were from 12 Asian countries, primarily the East Asia region (China and Hong Kong). Most of the studies were cross-sectional in design (n = 28, 62.2%). Six themes emerged, including (a) social-emotional development (overall) (n = 24, 53.3%); (b) social competence (n = 7, 15.6%); (c) emotional development (n = 5, 11.1%); (d) social-emotional learning (n = 3, 6.7%); (e) problem behavior (n = 3, 6.7%); (f) self-regulation (n = 2, 4.4%); and (g) both social-emotional learning and problem behavior (n = 1, 2.2%). The findings highlighted the paucity of studies, the need for examining more diverse variables in a similar population, and the low quality of intervention studies in social-emotional research in Asia. Research gaps indicate the need for more social-emotional and ethnocultural studies in other Asian regions. Parent and teacher knowledge of children's social-emotional functioning should be examined more closely in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has associated social marginalization with the rejection of mainstream cultural values. Since cultural values reflect affect valuation, the present research investigates the relationships between social marginalization and ideal/actual affect in two different non-WEIRD cultures, Brazil and Japan. As a social marginalization index, we used the NEET-Hikikomori Risk Scale (NHR). We predicted that cultural differences would emerge in the valuation of affective states. Affect valuation theory suggests that in East Asia, individuals are encouraged to pursue and value low arousal positive emotions (LAP: e.g., calmness, serenity) over high arousal positive emotions (HAP: e.g., excitement, elation, etc.) as they can harm social relationships in these societies. In contrast, Latin American cultures value HAP over LAP, because social relationships are promoted through vibrant positive emotional expression in these cultures. Hence, we hypothesized that individuals' ideal affect, actual affect, and the discrepancy between ideal and actual affect would be associated with higher risk of social marginalization. Participants from Japan (N = 54) and Brazil (N = 54) reported their ideal affect and actual affect and completed the NEET-Hikikomori Risk Scale (NHR). Regression analyses showed that actual HAP and the discrepancy between ideal and actual HAP were negatively associated with NHR in Brazil, but no association was found in the Japanese data. The other variables, including ideal affect, were only minorly or not significantly associated with NHR. Though the study has limitations regarding its small sample size, we can explore future perspectives and discuss the relationships between emotion and cultural marginalization. Socioecological factors that promote actual HAP in Brazilians may encourage other mainstream cultural ideals, which buffers against cultural marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]