Dear Friends of the Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus:

As the year draws to a close, we request your support for the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.

The need for accessible, timely, and informed analysis about the Asia-Pacific world will surely continue in 2025. The ongoing major shifts in the global power system, the decline of conventional media, and the proliferation of “fake news” all intensify the need for high-quality research and expert analysis. At Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, we will continue to provide such scholarship freely throughout the world.

APJ continues to enjoy a steady inflow of high-quality writing from both well-known and emerging scholars on a wide range of topics related to Japan and the broader Asia-Pacific region. Our 227,000 discrete readers are spread across the globe, including 17,000 subscribers to our newsletter.

The past year has been a busy one for APJ. The two co-editors, Tristan Grunow and Mary McCarthy, have now settled in. Last winter they orchestrated the transition to our crisp new website, which provides a more welcoming face to the world along with better access to the Journal’s archive of over 3000 articles. We have published 60 articles since they began work, including two important thematic collections, Behind the Scenes of Media and Legal Responses to the Abe Assassination, organized by Levi McLaughlin and Tomomi Yamaguchi in October (22:10), and Food Charity, Religion, and Care in Vietnam, organized by Sara Swenson and Le Hoang Anh Thu in February (22:2). Other notable publications this year included Gennifer Weisenfeld’s visual essay, “On Gas Mask Nation: Thinking about Japanese Wartime Civil Air Defense Through Mass Culture,” (22:2), and “Monstrous Melodies and Island Fantasies: Mothra, The Peanuts, and Japan’s Cold War Cultures,” by Michael Bourdaghs, (22:4), allowing us to actually hear The Peanuts sing on the Ed Sullivan Show. In addition, Hae-Nam Park, et. al., “‘Big Brother’ at Brothers Home: Exclusion and Exploitation of Outcasts in South Korea,” from 21:6 (June 15, 2023) is already among the most widely read articles from our backlist.

As previously announced, as of January 1, 2025, Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus will be published through Cambridge Core, the non-profit publishing unit of Cambridge University Press. This change will allow APJJF to continue to produce exactly the same mix of high-quality research articles and news it has featured for over twenty years, despite the fast-changing publishing environment that has made the original platform for doing so increasingly difficult.

Every article in the journal — past, present, and future — will remain completely free and Open Access to all readers via both the Cambridge Core portal and our own website, which will continue to operate. Editorial policies will continue to be set by APJJF, as is true for all journals that publish with Cambridge Core. We also expect that this change will make it easier to publish rapidly, always one of our goals.

What will change is our reach and the durability of our archive: joining Cambridge Core means that APJJF will be easily accessible globally and into the foreseeable future. This step vastly expands the discoverability of each article, including the back list, all of which will have DOI numbers and enhanced HTML and dynamic PDF capabilities, and provides us with expertise in the ever-increasing hidden tasks of maintaining a glitch-free, secure website.

We took this action in part to respond to the requests of younger scholars, who need this infrastructure for their publications. All articles published through CC will be covered by Creative Commons licenses, with authorial freedom to republish versions of the work on a non- commercial basis.

Our next focus will be to further develop the independent APJJF website to feature web- exclusive content not included in the Cambridge Core site, such as work in unconventional formats, shorter analyses, and artistic and activist commentary. These Reflections and Insights will not be assigned DOI numbers or be included in the other Cambridge Core-generated metrics. They will be announced in our monthly newsletter and will be available long-term through our webpage. Please talk to the editors about your ideas for such material. We welcome your ideas.

As an open-source journal, APJ relies on the generosity of its community of readers to fund its operations. Please make a meaningful donation.

Please find the link for donations here. Asia-Pacific Journal, Inc. is registered under Article 501(c) (3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, so contributions are deductible against US tax obligations.

Thank you in advance.

Best wishes for the Year of the Snake,
from the Asia-Pacific Journal Board of Directors and the Founding Editor:

Laura Hein, Asato Ikeda, David McNeill, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Matthew Penney, Lawrence Repeta, David Slater, and Mark Selden