The rapid development of tongzhi (literally ‘comrades’, a term adopted in Hong Kong in the late 1980s as an identity for LGBTQ people; see also Martin in this volume and Tang in this volume) communities in China since 2000 poses another major challenge to institutionalised heterosexual monogamous marriage. Same-sex relationships have existed in China as […]

Both women and men may suffer from pressure to get married, but this may be experienced and expressed in different ways according to gender. The pressure to marry is felt particularly strongly by women and usually starts at an earlier age than for men because women are expected to marry earlier than men. A woman […]

Heterosexual monogamous marriage has been the state-enforced model of intimate union since the introduction of the country’s first marriage law in 1950. By 2013, the law had undergone a number of amendments and new official interpretations. In the first marriage law, marriage was referred to as heterosexual and monogamous (yifuyiqi, one husband and one wife). […]

Lucetta Yip Lo Kam Introduction Many aspects of love and intimate relationships have undergone transformation in China since the economic reform period (after 1979). Both state interventions, in terms of policies and law, and economic imperatives play a significant role in shaping people’s private lives. Guided by these, the social expectation to lead a ‘normal’ […]

The main island of Okinawa today is an intensely militarised US ‘garrison island’ in the Pacific. US Forces in Japan (USFJ) are concentrated here and more than 18 per cent of the main island is occupied by US airfields, warehouses, barracks, firing ranges, hospitals, and post-exchange shops, making up what are known as ‘America Towns’ […]

Vietnam has been subjected to various waves of colonisation. After the end of the period of French colonialism, the country suffered occupation by Japan during the Asia-Pacific War and then decades of civil war between the Soviet-affiliated North and the US-affiliated South. In the Vietnam War, US troops were supported by troops from Australia, New […]

At the end of the Second World War, the Korean peninsula was split between the Russian — affiliated North and the US-affiliated South. War broke out from 1950 to 1953. The North — South conflict is still unresolved, with the two sides in an uneasy truce to the present. Some of the Allied soldiers who […]

One of the first actions of the Japanese government on its defeat in 1945 was the creation of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), for the purpose of providing sexual services to the occupying armies and thereby supposedly ‘protecting’ other women from sexual violence. The logic which had seen the setting up of military brothels […]

While the military managed the sexuality of soldiers through the military brothels, the sexuality of men and women on the home front in Japan was also being managed. Patriotic women’s organisations forged a relationship between the departing soldiers and the real and surrogate mothers who bade them farewell as they departed for the front or […]

As we have seen, the Japanese army was initially stationed on the Asian mainland in order to protect Japanese trading interests after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Taiwan was annexed in 1895 and Korea in 1910. In the Manchurian Incident of 1931 some Japanese officers set off explosives on […]