About
About East Asian Journal
An independent publication about East Asia, built for people who want to check the source.
Scope
The centre of gravity is East Asia: Japan, both Koreas, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, and Mongolia — together with the relationships among them and the East Asian diasporas.
Coverage extends to the wider Asian region and beyond where the connection is genuine rather than incidental: a trade relationship, a migration corridor, a shared writing system, a diplomatic dispute, a research collaboration. The test is whether understanding the other place is necessary to understand something about East Asia.
Who writes it
Reference and data material is published under the house byline, EAJ Editorial, which at present means a single editor rather than a masthead. The publication does not claim outside reviewers it does not have. The reasoning behind that, and what it means for accountability, is set out in the editorial standards.
Funding and independence
EAJ is independently operated. It is not affiliated with any language platform, learning product or commercial partner, and it carries no display advertising or sponsored placement. Nothing appears on this site because someone paid for it to be there.
Links to books and materials may carry an affiliate tag, which earns a commission at no additional cost to you and does not influence what gets recommended. The terms are set out under disclosures.
Reading here
Most publications treat a reader arriving from social media as someone to be processed — an interstitial, a consent wall, a newsletter prompt, then three paragraphs before the point. EAJ is built on the opposite assumption: the link should be worth more than the post that carried it.
In practice that means static pages that finish loading before you touch them, the answer at the top rather than the bottom, and the full underlying material — the table, the sources, the caveats — on the page itself.
Contact and corrections
Write to editor@eastasianjournal.com. Corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page. If something here is wrong, reporting it is genuinely useful and it will be fixed with the change on the record.