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Shinzo Abe, Japan's former and longest-serving prime minister was assassinated on 8 July 2022. As the world expressed sorrow of the human tragedy, nationalists in China were celebrating the disappearance of a hardline Chinese hawk with great enthusiasm. When a Chinese journalist sobbed for Abe's death during a live report of the assassination, the surging anti-Japan sentiment exploded and soon developed into a hashtag-based nationalist protest attacking Abe and the journalist. Drawing from cyber nationalism and hashtag activism literature, the author coined a concept 'hashtag nationalism' to analyze this protest, the interactions between state-led nationalism and popular nationalism, and the role of digital media in the public-state relation. This article also generalized three affordances of hashtag – interconnectivity, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity – to approach the role of social media in digital activism from a relational perspective. Finally, the analysis revealed the discursive and networked nature of hashtag nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses how Spanish and Japanese Social Science textbooks represent Europe and Asia discursively, and in what way the national viewpoint from each country is manifested in that representation. We analysed 15 textbooks used in secondary schools, and we focused on Geography and Civic Education subjects. Our analysis was developed mainly at semantic levels, and we examined the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ answering four interrelated questions. We found that in both countries’ textbooks, Europe is in general described in a positive or even idealized way as a developed and rich region, whereas Asia has a reverse negative image. Underlying this opposition, we can observe a Western ethnocentric view which takes Western development as the implicit standard to rank all societies hierarchically and builds discursively the dichotomy between developed and underdeveloped countries. ‘Our’ country’s position in the world is also conditioned by this Western-centred perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]