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This study focuses on Chinese football fans' reactions to the Japanese national team and their fans' behaviour during the World Cup 2022. Despite the historical and contemporary problems that make friendly relations with Japan difficult to achieve, football fans in China largely welcomed the good performance of the Japanese national team. This attitude may be described as 'thin cosmopolitanism' because Chinese fans' major frame of reference was still nationalistic. For them, the impressive performance of the Japanese national team means that Asians and the 'yellow race people' can also play good football. However, the Japanese fans, whose cleaning up of stadia received wide coverage during the World Cup, were criticized by the Chinese fans who interpreted the Japanese fans' action as reinforcing the existing global racial order. The findings of this paper help reveal the limits regarding football's role in contributing to a more cosmopolitan worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan's national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing theories of international relations have failed to interpret the hostile relations between Korea and Japan due to their Cartesian assumptions about the nature of national sovereignty and identity. Such theories view the hostilities between the two states as the result of incorrect policies or unhealthy interactions between domestic norms and foreign policies, because they believe that there are few negative structural elements between Japan and Korea. This study suggests an alternative explanation by utilising the worldview of East Asian medicine. By interpreting the formation of the Japanese and Korean national identities from the late nineteenth century and by viewing the hostility between the two states not as evidence of 'malfunctioning' inter-state relations but as a core element of their national identities, this study proposes an alternative understanding of 'problem-solving' with respect to Korea–Japan relations that is directed towards healing their relations with a long-term perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article delineates how actors invoke nationalizing accounts—accounts that turn local conditions, actions, and actors into national ones—in everyday talk. Taking the case of Japanese university scientists depicting their commercialization trajectories after the adoption of a set of policies that originated from the U.S., the article delineates how scientists stipulate what they do is Japanese. I outline the discursive practices through which they posit that the cause of others' actions, or of they themselves, derives from some kind of ethno-national distinctiveness. Interviews show how such nationalizing accounts were made through the inevitable gaps between local practices and formal global structures. Scientific and commercialization practices in Japan that deviated from the original form were explained not only through the institutional differences between the U.S. and Japan, but also through lay categories of "culture," ethno-psychology, and readily available tropes about Japanese history. In such nationalizing accounts, what the Japanese scientists did under these new, and explicitly global policies, was argued to be fundamentally Japanese because they were rooted in and caused by the ethno-national character. As new institutional theory suggests, a decoupling between formal rules and local contingencies is a hallmark of any institution. The article further shows that such decoupling could then be used as a resource for everyday nationalism. At least in some cases, the global adoption and the localization of a global form may create an opportunity to enact the nation, contributing to a discourse that posits that an imagined community is distinct and special, precisely as the world becomes more globalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"'Us' and 'Others': The Chinese Diaspora in Japan and the Negotiation of Their Membership in the Sphere of Chineseness" examines the way first-generation Chinese diaspora in Japan make sense of their relationships with the Chinese nation. With empirical evidence collected from both the in-depth interview with 69 informants and the media ethnographic observation with 26 research participants, this thesis contributes to conceptualize the diasporic experiences as well as the identity politics of the Chinese diaspora who live in a crucial era – while we have witnessed China's rise and its transition from a diminishing to a returning power, as a response to this Japan has continuously articulated a "China threat" discourse, which not only further promotes its ethno-nationalistic ideology, but also directing the ethnicity-based marginality toward the Chinese diaspora in Japan. In this context, this thesis contributes to present that while these events create complex Sino-Japanese power dynamics, the presence of digital media means that the Chinese diaspora in Japan are influenced by them in a new way – "new" in the sense that the digital mediation fills those power and forces into every dimension of their lives, making their daily reality a constant identity negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]