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The article presents the discussion on high-tech electronic industrial development in Taiwan and the challenges to ill-equipped environmental governance. Topics include industrialization or urbanization related pollution disputes such as citizen science initiatives around fenceline communities in petrochemical industrial clusters; and showing worst wildfires in Australia's history, locust infestations in East Africa, marine litter, and loss of biodiversity.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including history of science in East Asia; Korean and Taiwanese academic contexts; and conversations among Asian societies.

Given the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Japan is at a major point to reevaluate its policies on the public communication of science. However, the government's self-reflection on their measures and policies of science communication has been inadequate. This study reviewed and analyzed descriptions of science-related public communication in the successive Japanese white papers on science and technology (S&T) from 1958 to 2015 with quantitative-qualitative hybrid approaches. Traditional enlightenment activities have always been given higher priority, even after the S&T Basic Plan aimed at two-way science communication, and have used such justifications as "the shying-away of young people from S&T," "accountability for research investment," and "problem-solving on issues related to S&T and society," without considering the reality of science communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latest issue's "Editor's Note" of EASTS, Wen-hua Kuo made a call to East Asian science studies scholars to commit to an archeology of the social and technical infrastructure of epidemics. Coincidently, ten historians and sociologists working on science, technology, medicine, and environment with a focus on China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea had just begun a collective effort to understand how face masks had become the most important part of the current pandemic governance in East Asia. As its first step, a virtual workshop, "The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia," was held at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science on 26 October 2020. This forum aims to introduce the virtual meeting's outcome to the wider EASTS community and encourages them to engage with the collaborative enterprise to investigate the history of masks. All papers focus on the socio-material dimension of masks while problematizing current culturalist explanatory narratives about "masked societies" in East Asia. By doing so, the papers show how mask use is closely linked to heterogenous but interconnected entanglements of environmental governance, political movements, and risk cultures in East Asian polities. It interrogates these relationships in the context of scientific controversies and quarantine regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how disease as a social diagnosis can evoke institutional responses to pathogens and actions for social reform, while as a social actor disease is "a factor in a structured configuration of social interactions. Topics include concept of discovering the individuality of a disease; and pay equal attention to the infrastructures of healthcare in East Asia.

Based upon the view that walking is a highly social act, i.e. "grounding" oneself in the realities, not just the medium of "moving," this paper explores robot-assisted rehabilitation and patients' aspirations concerning it. Fieldwork conducted in rehabilitation hospitals and disability centers in South Korea, reveals that rehabilitative medicine settles uneasily on the notion of neuroplasticity as a theoretical tool to legitimize robot-assisted therapy sessions, in the absence both of upstream treatment options such as stem cell therapy and their discernible benefits over human-based intervention. The patient's clear preference to walk rather than to move, and hence to regain the whole package of sociality associated with the bodily technique underlies their high expectations toward robots. Under these insights, the paper argues that, for the field to enhance its clinical impact, the current regime focused on mechanical, or neurophysiological, aspects of walking should incorporate elements vitalizing the sociality constitutive of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the challenges posed by a rapidly aging society and its associated socio-economic difficulties, the Japanese government has encouraged the adoption of AI and robotics technologies for care. Conspicuous investments in these technologies in Japan underscore the dominance of techno-politics of innovation and the advocacy for the robotization of care practices. Such narratives — disseminated by the Japanese state, industry, media, and academia — often overlook the perspectives of the expected users of these technologies. This paper, rooted in a 14-month-long ethnographic study conducted at robotics labs in Japan and the UK in 2022–2023, examines the performance and ethical implications of technoscientific imaginaries portraying Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) as already reliable, safe, and efficient. It sheds light on the intricate relationship between science, technology, the state, and society, emphasizing their use as instruments of power for state-led national development objectives. Moreover, it exposes how technology is presented, creating an illusion of efficiency while neglecting the necessity of involving society in co-designing and co-producing these technologies. The paper ultimately advocates for responsible innovation, emphasizing in particular the need for user involvement to ensure these technologies are not only more efficient and reliable, but also more accessible, inclusive, and fairer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how AI ethics has been developed at the national level in Japan, and what this process reveals about broader Japanese state imaginaries of how advanced technology should be developed and used, and what a future with these technologies should look like. Key developments in the Japanese government's approach to AI ethics and governance between 2014 and 2023 are laid out, based on an analysis of official reports and policy documents supplemented by data collected via semi-structured interviews with three expert members of the committees that formulated several key sets of ethical principles. The paper considers Japan's positioning in the global race to develop AI ethics principles over this period, as well as the imaginary of AI within the wider historical context of imaginaries about the knowledge society in Japan. I suggest three ways in which AI ethics has been understood and instrumentalized in the Japanese context, and argue that the main methodology used to date—ELSI—complements the government's utopian and techno-determinist imaginaries of the future while concealing a deeply conservative approach that serves to reproduce structural inequalities and discrimination despite the apparent internationalism and progressive values that are repeatedly expressed in state-promoted ethical principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red-crowned white cranes, large migratory birds symbolizing longevity, fidelity, and independence from power across East Asian cultures, came to live in scholar-official households in late Chosŏn. With the residency of this elegant bird in scholarly households around the mid-eighteenth century, a new knowledge practice that took serious interest in things like cranes emerged. This paper illuminates the roles of these highly cross-cultured things in late-Chosŏn knowledge transformation, echoing material turns in various disciplines. Necessitating knowledge to properly possess and accompany them, cranes led to a new scholarly attachment to things. It opened up an unprecedented intellectual attitude that valued curiosity, taste, and facts concerning things and emphasized usefulness of that newly obtained thing-knowledge. Curiosity, taste, facts, and the usefulness of knowledge obtained new meanings in other parts of the world that experienced similar transitions in knowledge practice by and towards things. While delineating the roles of cranes specifically in late-Chosŏn's transformation through the imprints that they left in scholarly acts and works, this paper proposes a new way to connect knowledge transformations in different parts of the globe, via these newly migrating things, moving away from the narrative that requires an origin and transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan and Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) of Korea are among the most acknowledged public research institutes in East Asia. This paper applies the evolutionary perspective for a comparative case study, emphasizing the path dependence with the innovation system context. Also, this paper elucidates the factors that configured the dynamics of ITRI and KIST in populating spin-offs and advancing biotechnology, respectively. It sheds new light on what particular organizational structures and routines would posit functionality in propagating certain activities and outcomes. The case of ITRI implies a strong mechanistic push in its organization to expedite its research activities and spin-offs. Meanwhile, KIST is endowed with patient capital and instituted service seniority in its career ladder, thus enabling it to develop science-based technologies and to evolve into a university-like institute. The structures and routines of the two PRIs are profound and productive in advancing their respective desired research agendas. However, their instituted routines might limit their pursuit of other kinds of growth ventures. This paper shows a depiction of organizational career ladders and spin-off mechanisms, which provides a useful guide for a government aspiring to construct similar structures and routines for certain outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, public health policy in Japan transformed from a stricter focus on anti-disease measures to a more discursive and long-term strategy, one that attempted to train local and prefectural administrators to implement top-down directives regarding hygiene (eisei 衛生). This paper uses the early speeches and articles published by The Sanitary Society of Japan (Dai Nippon Shiritsu Eiseikai 大日本私立衛生会, lit. "Great Japan Private Hygiene Association"), the nation's largest forum for the discussion and dissemination of knowledge related to hygiene, to analyze how and why this change took place. Founded in 1883 by leading figures in medicine and the medical social sciences, the Society attempted to reformulate popular understandings of hygiene and health after widespread manipulation of the government's early public health programs. I argue that the Society repurposed and reformulated supposedly native Japanese healing practices in order to ground unfamiliar medical concepts, including the term "hygiene" (eisei) itself, within the familiar vocabulary of supposedly shared medical traditions. In recuperating and mobilizing these ideas, the organization broadened the discourse of hygiene while also immuring the concept within a circle of medical elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the scientific and entrepreneurial career of one of the most prominent genetic engineers, Jin-Soo Kim, in order to analyze the fate of a vision of biotechnology in South Korea, in which academy, government, and industry came together to "correct" Korean academic and economic life. I show how the scientific and the economic were intertwined in Kim's entrepreneurial lives, and so were the public and the private, commerce and law and virtue. As the founder of Toolgen, a biotech company specializing in genome editing, Kim built his career as a pioneer in biotech venture from the late 1990s, at a time when the Korean government tried to find certain opportunities in biotechnology amid the Asian financial crisis. I situate Kim's early career as a CEO of Toolgen and his return to an academic post at Seoul National University (SNU) within the rise of biotechnology entrepreneurship and the institutionalization of academic patenting in South Korea as an alternative to catch-up industrial and innovation policy that would free the country from the dependence that its own lack of science and technological innovation imposed on it. By 2005, as I show, Kim had emerged as an exemplary entrepreneurial scientist at SNU, a role model for reforming an old, tradition-bound research university into an entrepreneurial university, thereby helping to transform South Korea's industrial economy into a knowledge economy in an age of globalization. The fate of Toolgen and the scientific career of Kim, however, reflected the emergence of biotechnology entrepreneurship not only of perceived opportunity but of considerable resentments. I will end this paper with a brief discussion of a recent controversy over the ownership of his invention of the CRISPR technology at SNU. His story is thus a vista of the new ideas and sentiments of the 21st century global biotechnology manifested in South Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technical solutions are being presented for the healthcare and welfare of the aging population. One example is Hyodol, a robot developed for older adults living alone in South Korea. By offering various services such as religious chanting, dementia-prevention quizzes, and daily medication reminders, Hyodol is expected to serve as a companion for lonely older adults. This paper analyzes how the robotic care program for older adults is operating within the Korean public welfare system. Based on our fieldwork at regional welfare institutions and older adults' homes, we show that the robots along with its monitoring system, older adults, institutional managers, caregivers, company staff, and family are forming what we call a "robotic multi-care network." Within this network, the elderly users cultivate their own ways of building relationships with the robot, some perceiving it as a "grandchild" while others view it as a medium to connect with caregivers. The introduction of the care robot at the welfare institutions does not make their elderly care work unmanned, nor does the robot substitute for human caregivers. Instead, it displaces and redistributes the caregivers' tasks and responsibilities, leading to multiple eldercare practices—tactile, digital, proximate, remote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an empirical account of the case of Taiwan in her innovative efforts in the herbal medicine sector through scientific and technological development. This study aims to propose a network analysis approach, which is typically found in innovation studies, to illustrate the sociological dimensions of actor network theory. The sector is of interest from a social studies of science perspective due to the collision between traditional knowledge philosophies, which are well accepted in East Asian communities, and scientific regulatory standards, that have raised issues regarding the legitimacy and safety of the products. This study considers the actor network linkages between universities, government and industry which act as indicators of knowledge diffusion and collaboration. Relevant records were captured using a heuristic search string and was used to visualize: (i) the number of researchers (agglomeration denoted by the size of bubbles), (ii) organizational linkages through co-authorship (connectedness indicated by the presence of lines between organizations), and (iii) position of the organization (centrality in relation to other organizations). The case presented in this study takes a snapshot of how an advanced economy such as Taiwan, has developed a productive innovation system for herbal medicine. The development of the actor network has evolved mainly from productive working relationships in a close-knit community of researchers that mainly interact through the research organizations in Taipei. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioprospecting refers to the scientific investigation of plants and folk medicines in the hope of developing new drugs. Its 1980s revival raised concerns about the intellectual property of indigenous people, requiring bioprospecting scientists to make legitimate benefit-sharing agreements with resource owners and communities. Despite the "ethical" look of such a movement, it has been criticized as a new form of "biocapitalism." This is especially true in India, where the government has initiated databases of "valuable" traditional medicine, such as Ayurveda, and criticism has been directed at the way the complex composition of Ayurveda was disentangled and reorganized into elementary botanical units commensurate with the global pharmaceutical industry. This paper explores the politics embedded in the material-semiotic process of databasing Ayurveda and herbal plants. Focusing on a state government project in Uttarakhand, India, the study reveals how the project relies on colonial herbal relations while generating new and unexpected relations among particular medicinal plants (jadi buti), folk Ayurvedic healers (vaidyas), and local plant taxonomists. This study highlights the necessity of grasping the emergent biodiversity databasing initiatives in India as "experiments," open-ended, uncertain, and indeterminate projects rather than part of a universal process of pharmaceuticalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By extending the late Osamu Kanamori's notion of science fiction (sci-fi) as it "re-articulate[s] various issues that bioethical studies had formally discussed," this paper provides a cultural analysis of Japanese sci-fi stories from the 1990s with reference to the exchange of body parts. By focusing on the time when organ transplantation from brain-dead donors was part of many intensive debates, this paper pays particular attention to the fictional representations of humanity, which feature body-part exchanges between the living and the dead, in genres ranging from Noh 能dramas to manga 漫画. In this paper I shed light on two issues: (1) how sci-fi representations described the matter of humanity vis-à-vis exchanging parts of the body, and (2) in what ways and on what terms bioethical discourses relating to Japanese organ transplant medicine from brain-dead donors were rearticulated through these sci-fi narratives. I also argue that such rearticulated values were inscribed in the process of constructing the bioethical code of practice in transplant medicine and deathbed care that took place during the late 1990s. By doing so, this paper confirms the role that sci-fi plays in bioethical imaginations, as Kanamori has pointed out and as can also be seen in East Asian societies like Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 Epidemiological Investigation Support System (EISS) is a digital epidemiological tool, which utilizes location data from cellular base stations, credit card transactions records, and QR codes. It is a mass surveillance system that uses big data to track the entire infected population, featuring an extensive, automated, and speedy processing of data on personal location and the linkage of multiple databases from various governmental agencies. Based on interviews with people who have developed Korean digital epidemiology systems, this paper explores the technical, infrastructural, social, and institutional factors that have shaped Korean digital epidemiology since the 2014 avian flu crisis and examines the essential conditions of big data for digital epidemiology. The main findings are as follows: The feasibility of EISS goes beyond the matter of privacy; it is closely connected to technological infrastructures such as a high density of cellular base stations and private cloud systems; people's behavior such as a high rate of smartphone and credit card usage; and new forms of governance and institutions for speedy data processing. Multiple database linkage would develop EISS into a big data surveillance system that enables the prediction of risk-prone groups in a more preemptive manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of online teaching has brought new opportunities to computer coding education. In this paper, we examine how the move online is generating a new kind of dynamic within computer programming classes on an online EdTech platform in South Korea. As the platform seeks to solve some old problems within large-scale programming classes, such as machine dependency and labor-intensive operation, its online classes face unique challenges arising from temporal and spatial separation. The new environment requires that class participants coordinate their actions and relationships with other members, which means technical adjustments and human adaptations. Instructors, students, and managers form a distinctive three-party relationship as they respond to the tricky problems of online teaching, such as the time delay between audio and video transmission. The automation of evaluation labor by the platform also influences the human relationship as well as educational efficiency. Our study suggests that the most challenging task in online EdTech experiments would not be to move classes online completely, but to rearrange roles, identities, and relationships within the class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan, like other countries, recognizes the need to shift the focus of the public communication of science and technology from science literacy via one-way communication to the public engagement of science and technology via dialogue. During the shift of perspectives, Japanese science policy tried to encourage science communication (SC) by cultivating the professional science communicator and communication capacity of scientists. This study aims to analyze the structural issues of developing science communication, particularly focusing on the gap between science policy and graduate education (GE) policy concerning the human resource development of scientists. The analyses found a lack of science communication development in graduate education policies, despite the emphasis on this in government science and technology (ST) policies. Simultaneously, it showed that there are few training courses for science communication and job recruiting for academic institutions. Discussions for systematic implementation of SC training in the GE system are expected to bridge higher education and ST policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second-generation (2G) biofuels are promoted worldwide as remedy to sustainable-energy challenges in the transport sector and as response to the criticism of first-generation biofuels. By utilizing agriculture and forest residues, 2G biofuels claim to support agricultural livelihoods and boost rural economies. Quantitative estimates exist of the availability of "waste" or "unused" or "surplus" biomass that could be fed into producing bioenergy. Most of current discourse on 2G bioethanol is about developing efficient technologies and supportive policies for biomass utilization and energy distribution, while availability and supply of that biomass are often taken for granted. This paper challenges these presumptions of biomass availability and technological feasibility. Following a social-constructivist analysis of technology and focusing on how political actors, scientists, industry, green-revolution and organic farmers envision biomass, this paper argues that the innovation for 2G is hybrid and complex, rather than merely logistical and economic. Biomass as feedstock is not an off-the-shelf commodity, but a dynamic and fluid entity, the availability of which is dependent on a number of cultural, social, technological and economic factors. Policies are needed that recognize the multiplicity of agricultural practices if a sustainable biofuel system is to be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including witnessing an explosion of papers, Cultures of Science, and Population Control and Reproductive Politics in Cold War Asia.

An introduction is presented which discusses the articles in this issue that focus on research misconduct cases in East Asia, including political interests in research in South Korea, the STAP Cell research case in Japan, and postproduction misconduct in China.

This paper argues that Mr. Science and the May 4th Movement was a significant chapter in the global history of science. To contextualize the story better, I will adopt three broad interpretive frames. First, I shall place Mr. Science and May Fourth in a longer view than the particular events in the 1910s–1920s. This will allow us to trace the historical changes and the evolving institutions, discourses, and practitioners of science over a few generations. Second, I shall highlight the most relevant global conditions. Western imperialism was of course a crucial setting, but there were more specific historical moments that also deserve attention. Finally, comparisons and connections; it is necessary to examine the transmutations of ideas, knowledge, and institutions across political and cultural borders. In other words, we should study Mr. Science and May Fourth in the mode of global intellectual history. Other than China, my main comparative cases are India and Japan, though I will also refer to Ottoman Turkey. Taken together, these examples provide a range of comparisons central to our inquiry into Mr. Science and the global history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The May Fourth movement is widely recognized as a watershed within Chinese cultural and political history, but it was also a significant local episode within a global history of science activism. Quaintly idiosyncratic as Chen Duxiu's "two gentlemen," Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, may appear, they have also animated (in only somewhat less personified form) a transnational "conversation" very much alive today. Focusing on neglected Marxist participants, this paper reconstructs meaningful snatches of that long conversation in China, Russia, Britain, the US, and Japan. It finds that Chinese voices contributed in timely and important ways, especially on the problem of imperialism for science and democracy. It further shows that Marxists, in China and beyond, have shared certain modernist values with their liberal counterparts, including a faith in the democratic potential of universally valid scientific knowledge; however, they have offered highly divergent perspectives on what constitutes democracy and how it relates to science, challenging liberal efforts to separate science from politics and highlighting the contradictions generated by capitalism. A fuller understanding of the significance of Marxist and Chinese contributions to the cumulative discourse on science and democracy, and a livelier engagement with their voices, will help generate more liberatory socio-technical imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a public engagement exercise held in 2017, 471 Korean citizens decided to resume construction of two nuclear reactors. This article examines the white paper, academic articles, and interview accounts to discuss how distinct groups in their contexts articulated "lay knowledge" as the basis of participatory science and technology governance enacted in Korea. Reflecting on both Brian Wynne's emphasis on public meanings and the STS literatures' attention to lay actors' knowledge-ability, the article reveals the articulation of "lay knowledge" as a process of simultaneously empowering and disempowering the lay public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"High-tech" provides a cachet of futuristic wonders to localities claiming cutting-edge technological research and industrial innovation. But the high-tech electronic manufacturing processes release hundreds of chemicals and are no doubt ridden with extremely high but hidden environmental health risks. This article aims to increase our understanding of "ignorance" about electronics hazards in the Asian context. It argues that the electronics industries have been under constant innovation, and novel uses of chemicals are introduced to the industrial operation at a much faster pace than the health and environmental assessment can work to comprehend the impacts of the chemicals. In such a context, regulatory science has often failed to effectively monitor and control toxic waste discharges in the high-tech electronics sector. Taking several high-tech pollution disputes in Taiwan as examples, and based on interviews with experts in pollution regulation, this paper discusses multiple constraints on scientific advance in studying toxics that are exacerbated by lagging regulations. These are further entangled with research resource limitations, privileging of high-tech industries in suppressing negative information about toxicity risks, and knowledge repression within the scientific community due to dependence on government and industry, all of which has crippled building knowledge for effective regulatory science–resulting in knowledge gridlock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on STS, anthropological, and geographical studies of infrastructure and extended forms of media theory, this paper examines events and processes unfolding around the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia as an ontological experiment. The initiate is elicited as a massively distributed arrangement for making futures the contours of which no one can foresee with much precision. After sketching some conflicting diagnoses of the BRI, I turn to its implementation in Cambodia. I move between two coastal towns, Kampot, where its impacts are still barely felt, and Sihanoukville, which has been greatly disrupted. These settings facilitate characterization of the BRI's scale-making capacities as consequent upon fuzzy relations between the infrastructure core and heterogeneous companions and parasites attaching to the initiative in search of untapped potentials opening at the edges. These complex developments provide the backdrop for a more speculative extrapolation of an infrastructural strategy oriented to emerging potentials. Over time, I suggest in conclusion, this strategy of maturation is likely to have dramatic social, environmental and climatic implications in Cambodia and far beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial insemination by donor (AID) began in 1948 in Japan at Keio University. Due to criticism of this procedure, perhaps for the first time in the world, the university's obstetrics and gynecology researchers conducted follow-up surveys of children conceived through AID, showing the "superiority" of these children based on their mental development. This paper, by considering such surveys as evidence of children's "superiority" and positive eugenics, aims to clarify how such evidence was created and used. The survey reports were published in the medical journals from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and obstetrics and gynecology researchers at the university referred to the survey results when writing articles for various media, including popular women's magazines, to promote AID. Eugenics started to lose its legitimacy from the 1970s due to the prevalence of movements for the disabled. After the 1990s, the "superiority" of the children was no longer claimed while the safety of assisted reproductive technology (ART) was being pursued to produce children who were "not inferior." This study concludes that, in the context of ART, physicians are adhering to the safety of the technology and prolonging the values of eugenics while dissociating from the pursuit of "superior" children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Modern medicine has developed a number of technologies to observe, diagnose, and intervene in the human body. Medical technologies make bodies visible by number and form. Many historians have studied how such medical technologies as the stethoscope, pulse meter, cardiograph, and thermometer were invented and subsequently influenced societies. However, recent historians have turned their attention to the technology-in-practice to show a unidirectional history intertwined by devices, clinicians, and users. This paper aims to follow this line of study by focusing on a history of clinical thermometry inmodern Britain and Japan. First, it surveys secondary works on medical technologies in history and explores how clinical thermometers were invented, improved, sold, and consumed in two distinct cultures in Britain and Japan. It argues that clinical thermometry was used for consumers' own sakes, for example, performing a gender role and dreading influenza, and also framed by such external factors as war and pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Osamu Kanamori (1954-2016) was a prolific author of science and technology studies in Japan in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He represented many new directions, which he originally learned from France, the United States, and Japan. He influenced histories of scientific ideas and STS in Japan and East Asia. Around the same period, a new history of medicine in modern Japan started to take off. Many historical studies of modern medicine in Japan are published in English. This special issue tries to examine the relationship between Kanamori's works and Japanese medical historians and medical sociologists. After extensively reviewing and summarizing the variety of themes and genres within the works of Kanamori, these four papers will discuss four topics of medical technology, infectious diseases, psychiatric war pensions, and bioethical sci-fi works which have all been inspired by the works of Kanamori. This special issue explores the extensive works of Kanamori and the new history of medicine in Japan and argues that the new history of medicine in the near future becomes a core academic discipline within the relationship of the philosophical discussion of medicine in society and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented to the article the first issue published by Routledge of Taylor & Francis Group, our new publishing partner. Topics include in 2020, hundreds of scholarly works about the social, cultural, and historical aspects of COVID have produced; and researchers like to widen the readership of work via non-traditional media, such as podcasts or videos on social media.

Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews conducted in Singapore, Canada, and the United States, this paper shows that biomedical experts are deeply concerned about the shortcomings of the biomedical model of health. Precision public health, when anchored in genomics, can be considered a twenty-first century version of the medical model of health, which originated from nineteenth century germ theory. First, concerns regarding the adoption of genetic testing to identify disease susceptibility, and limitations of genome-based disease prevention exist. This includes limited evidence of the utility of screening measures in reducing mortality, lack of reimbursement for genetic screening, negative implications of genetic screening, and limitations of race/ethnicity-based genetic screening. Second, there are also concerns regarding the treatment of diseases, particularly the management of the costs of treatment and genetic testing in the context of national public health systems. Ultimately, it was found that healthcare-related inequities can be reduced in a universal, publicly funded, single-payer healthcare setting. These findings provide strong evidence supporting the social model of health by highlighting the key role of social systems and non-clinical interventions in precision public health to improve health outcomes for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microplastics, an increasingly widespread environmental problem, have built a high profile on different communication platforms in Japan. Inspired by Davies and Horst's understanding that science communication is constitutive and material, this article empirically analyzed the general situation of microplastics communication in the Japanese context. We examined the development in the meaning of microplastics as the exemplification of the constitutive dimension, as well as its communication stages, authorship, and readership with different interests as the representation of the material dimension. We chose the database National Diet Library Online as representative of Japanese literature. We extracted 190 microplastic-relevant journal articles published in different journal types from 2016 to 2020 and collected 162 online news articles as supplementary material. We found that even though the constitutive meaning of microplastics grew up fast, especially around 2018 and 2019, material factors varied that showed inclinations in practical communications. Despite the similar scale of communication in the specialist and the popular stages, the influences of scientists and interests from scientific fields on microplastics topics were overwhelmingly over the public fields, the divergences of which suggested several difficulties in solving such a complicated environmental problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a historical case where local residents in South Korea had been alienated from the decision-making processes in nuclear policy as their sociotechnical visions remained marginalized. Narratives of nuclear experts, activists in environmental NGOs (ENGOs), and local residents supporting or resisting against the siting of a repository in a southwestern rural town, Buan, from 2003 to 2005 were used for our comparative textual analyses. Imaginaries of desirable forms of life and order that constitute nationally-shared visions of "good society" profoundly delimit the shapes of futures by enabling key political decisions of a nation. With our findings, we argue that ethical problems of how to recognize and compensate for what has already happened to people around (candidate) sites of nuclear facilities remains a source of latent social conflict. Buan residents' visions of a "good society" attainable through their practices around nuclear technology were collectively held and publicly narrated yet failed to become widely shared in the nation. If local people's understanding of what the past has been and what the future should be like continue to stay marginalized, Korean nuclear governance with participatory initiatives will remain in its current form of "partial" inclusiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract From the perspective of the history of technology, this paper reviews the development of a hypersonic wind tunnel in China. The key figure is Yu Hongru 俞鸿儒, who began his research into shock tube wind tunnels in the 1950s, and proposed ways to use detonation driver technology. His insight, however, was stymied during China's "Cultural Revolution." After China's reform and opening-up began in the late 1970s, Yu 俞 designed a hypersonic tunnel driven by backward hydrogen-oxygen detonation utilizing a dumping section and carried out verification experiments with RWTH Aachen University. After 2000, the high-temperature gas dynamics team of the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences built the first long test-duration detonation-driven shock tunnel. This case study draws extensively upon Chinese literature, documents, and interviews. It adds to the history exploring Cold War science and technology. While much research has focused on activities in the USA and the USSR, this article contributes to the less-explored history of scientific research and development in China after 1950, demonstrating the importance of knowledge flows within the wider concept of Cold War transnational science. In addition, this transnational emphasis contributes a non-western chapter to the western-centric history of aerospace technology development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cambodia's urban environments have changed rapidly over the last decades, and perhaps especially over the last few years. After the 2018 election, democracy was widely perceived as eroding. This change created a new context for real-estate investment, which appeared more stable than ever. As investments exploded, the already fast-paced construction business accelerated. Combining an STS focus on distributed agency with an anthropological interest in practices of worlding, this paper analyzes urban transformations in Phnom Penh (and Sihanoukville) as effects of assemblage. Setting in motion new material itineraries, patterned flows of people and things, the construction boom has been felt across the urban spectrum. Modularizing and segmenting cities and filtering populations, these itineraries have also catalyzed changing perspectives on life in the cities, on local and regional relations with "the Chinese," and on what the future has in store for Cambodia. Interspersing street-level observations and ethnographic materials with media reports and political commentary, I show tuk-tuk drivers, journalists, businessmen, politicians and academic scholars to be simultaneously engaged in assembling the city. Their vastly different projects and practices generate different urban scales – economic, cultural, political, and ethnic – which co-exist, layer, or overlap – incongruently. The resulting image is kaleidoscopic: Phnom Penh kaleidoscope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global climate change, development organizations aim to align their aid schemes with new environmental concerns. Since the transport sector is crucial to achieve carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the introduction of environmentally-friendly transportation systems and technologies to developing countries has become a major focus of development aid. This paper examines one such sustainable transport project in Laos, centering on the introduction of electric vehicles (EV). At the beginning, aid professionals envisioned the establishment of an EV network, in which batteries, hydroelectric powerplants, the CO2 market, and numerous other entities would be rolled out in the capital of Vientiane and several other towns. A few years later, it had been downscaled to introduce a small number of EVs to the World Heritage town of Luang Prabang. The article analyses this process of transformation by examining the network extensions and cuts that shaped the trajectory of the EV into Laos. It further scrutinizes how the contexts of more-or-less urban places influenced the material itineraries of the project. This process, which led to the eventual implementation of EVs in Luang Prabang, and their subsequent disappearance, provides a window of opportunity for analyzing the significant challenges of green urban development in Laos and Southeast Asia more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bangkok often floods. This paper examines the effects of city deluge as a result of urban assemblage: complex, distributed and disjunctive relations between the city's amphibious ecologies and landscapes, its dilapidated drainage infrastructure, its varied transport systems, its weather patterns, and the movements of people. During cloudbursts, many of Bangkok's missing masses become plainly and frustratingly, visible. Using ethnographic description as a "material diagnostics," I explore how irritated, perturbed, urban atmospheres emerge out of disjunctive infrastructural constellations. Cloudbursts make perceptible such atmospheres as forms of sentient urbanism, in which distributed sensations are generated by intersecting material itineraries moving across multiple assemblages. As affects and agitations move from street level to social media, rain precipitates matters of urgent, urban concern and critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of medical experts have become famous overnight in China since the outbreak of COVID-19. This research investigates four representative Chinese scientists by employing search analytics of the Baidu index (from December 2019 to May 2020) and content analysis of answers and commentaries on the Zhihu website (from January 2020 to May 2020). We find that the four scientists present different images and spark unprecedented publicity. In particular, the key to the transformation from scientists into public intellectuals is to demonstrate moral responsibility in public images, or to realize humorous and effective communication with the public. The birth of celebrity scientists has not only reshaped the public's traditional perception of scientists but also played a crucial role in the governance of pandemic risks by guiding the public's behavior and offering scientific ways to cope with risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article details the events that led to the periodical's decision to hold a written forum discussing feminist scientist and scholar Evelyn Fox Keller's paper "Globalization, Scientific Lexicons and the Future of Biology," which analyzes the English scientific language used in the field of biology. Topics discussed include the countries where the panelists came from, the various disciplines represented by the commentators of Keller's paper and the significance of the forum for science.

Do covers still have a place in our digital age? The physical book has proved more resilient than champions of electronic texts once predicted, but the overall trend is plain: with each passing year we are reading less from printed paper and more on phones, tablets, e-book readers, and computers. The question this article addresses is: Do cover images still have a place when the publications that they previously covered are becoming nothing more than digital bits? By pointing out how they communicate very differently than the texts that they represent, the article argues for the continuing importance of cover images and for the need to meditate anew on the poetics of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which author discusses articles on topics including focuses on "From Postcolonial to Subimperial Formations of Medicine: Superregional Perspectives from Taiwan and Korea" extends the discussion on the formation of colonial knowledge by the Japanese Empire.

This article examines how the notion of a tradition of invention, which took shape in China in the nineteenth century, became entrenched there by the 1920s. It begins by looking at how invention received heightened attention from Chinese elites in the May Fourth era, when many of them upheld the primacy of science for national salvation while science's very rectitude was being contested. It then explores how these elites took up and contributed to narratives of a past inventiveness as a way of imagining possibilities of a better future, the most notable expression of which was the idea of the "four great inventions." Finally, it delves into a particular paradox that underlay this glorification of prior scientific and technological achievements. While staking claim to a tradition of invention may have been ultimately for the purpose of charting a course toward a technoscientific tomorrow, the fixation on those past accomplishments led many Chinese across China's long twentieth century to either ignore or downplay domestic developments in science and technology that were actually taking place. Ironically, then, the nagging sense of inferiority that underlay the lauding of ancient inventions came to be reinforced rather than alleviated by that very act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a network composed of politicians, regulators, bioscientists, clinical researchers, and Chinese medicine specialists has emerged that seeks to bridge an imagined gulf between the modern West and ancient China in order to create a new type of personalized medicine. The central building block of this bridge is the Chinese medical concept of zheng, variously translated into English as syndrome, pattern, or type. My paper places side by side two different genealogies of how zheng assumed this central role. The first genealogy examines the process by means of which zheng came to be considered as something shared by both ancient China and cutting-edge biological science and, by extension, how it manages to hold together the entire institutional, political, and economic framework into which this bridge is embedded and which it co-creates. The second genealogy shows zheng to be central to a much older series of redefinitions of Chinese medicine and Chinese medical practice that extend from the eleventh century to the present. Read together, these two genealogies--neither of which should be seen as exhaustive--raise three important issues that are further discussed in the conclusion of the paper. First, I explore how the concept of zheng has come to tie a medical tradition derided by its adversaries for being a pseudoscience to one of the most cutting-edge fields of bioscience research. I ask what is at stake in this synthesis, for whom, and why, and how it transforms Chinese medicine and/or systems biology along the way. Second, I am interested in finding out how and why the very same concept can be at the heart of two apparently agonistic visions of Chinese medicine's future as it is popularly imagined in China today. Finally, I insist that the medical humanities need to become actively involved in the construction of emergent articulations such as the ones I amexploring. Merely writing a history of the present will not be productive unless its critique can somehow be articulated into the very processes of emergence that historians or anthropologists seek to examine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents that the author expresses gratitude to those who have supported the EASTS journal and acknowledges the contributions of the outgoing editor-in-chief, Professor Wen-Hua Kuo. It highlights Professor Kuo's leadership in maintaining a clear vision and creatively leading the journal while strategically managing multiple facets.