• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.69-81
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• 2014

While much in the field of public management has emphasized the importance of nonprofit advocacy activities in policy and decision-making procedures, few have considered the relevance and impact of leading actors on structuring diverse patterns of information sharing and communication through social media. Building nonprofit advocacy is a complicated process for a single organization to undertake, but social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter have facilitated nonprofit organizations and stakeholders to effectively share information and communicate with each other for identifying their mission as it relates to environmental issues. By analyzing the Australian Marine Conservation Society's (AMCS) Twitter network data from the period 1 April to 20 April, 2013, this research discovered diverse patterns in nonprofit advocacy by leading actors in building advocacy. Based on the webometrics approach, analysis results show that nonprofit advocacy through social media is structured by dynamic information flows and intercommunications among participants and followers of the AMCS. Also, the findings indicate that the news media and international and domestic nonprofit organizations have a leading role in building nonprofit advocacy by clustering with their followers.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.35-47
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• 2013

This study aims to understand haiku phenomena from the viewpoint of communication, which emerges from reciprocal relationships among haiku poets, haiku societies, media on haiku, and other establishments relating to haiku. Such an analytic point of view, which tries to consider both the operation of each autonomous agent and that of the whole system consisted by the agents, is included in the realm of second-order cybernetics. The operation of a system cannot be reduced completely to a system's individual components, which is why such a viewpoint is required. Fundamental informatics, which is employed as a theoretical framework, and two haiku movements, which include shin keiko haiku ("new-trend" haiku) and dento ha haiku (Hototogisu-school haiku), forming an important part of modern haiku history, are the focus of this study. As a result, modern haiku history is considered to be an evolution of a haiku system, whose main incentive is an awareness of the production mechanism of haiku communication occurring through second-order observations in the system. This study also illuminates how haiku poets, haiku societies, and media covereage of haiku play roles in the evolution of the haiku system.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-20
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• 2012

This study analyzes messages from Korean TV debates on the conflict over U.S. beef imports and the process of negotiations over the imports in 2008. The authors have conducted a content analysis and a semantic network analysis by using KrKwic and CONCOR. The data was drawn from nine TV debates aired by three major TV networks in Korea (MBC, KBS, and SBS) from 27 April 27 2008 to 6 July 2008. The results indicate substantial differences in the semantic structure between arguments by the government and those by civic groups. We also investigated the relationship between the terms frequently used by both sides (i.e., the government and civic groups), and the terms used exclusively by one side. There was a gradual increase in the number of terms frequently used by both sides over time, from the formation of the conflict to its escalation to its resolution. The results indicate the possibility of general agreement in conflict situations.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.33-48
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• 2019

The current Moon Jai-in administration in South Korea is facing serious challenges as a result of a scandal involving the manipulation of news online. Staff in Moon's camp are suspected of manipulating public opinion by creating millions of fake news comments online, contributing to Moon being elected president. This South Korean political scandal raises a number of theoretical issues with regard to new platform technologies and media manipulation. First, the incident exposes the technological limits of blocking manipulation of the news, partly because of the nature of social media and partly because of the nature of contemporary technology. Contemporary social media is often monopolistic in nature; with the majority of people are using the same platforms, and hence it is likely that they will be subject to forms of media manipulation. Second, the Korean case of news manipulation demonstrates a unique cultural aspect of Korean society. News comments and readers' replies have become a major channel of alternative news in Korea. This phenomenon is often designated as "reply journalism," since people are interested in reading the news replies of ordinary readers equally to reading news reports themselves. News replies are considered indicators of public opinion and are seen as affecting trias politica in Korean society. Third, the Korean incident of news manipulation implicates a new form of populism in the 21st century and the nature of democratic participation. This article aims to explicate key issues in media manipulation by including wider technological, cultural, and political aspects in the South Korean news media context.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.49-67
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• 2019

Since returning to power in 2012, the second Abe administration has pressured Japanese mainstream media in various ways, from creating the Secrecy Act to forming close relationships with media executives and promoting anti-journalism voices on social media. This article focuses on the growth of a jingoist group called the 'Net-rightists' ('Neto-uyo' in the Japanese abbreviation) on the Internet, which has been supporting the right-wing government and amplifying its historical revisionist views of Japanese colonialism. These heavy Internet users deny Japan's war crimes against neighboring Asian countries and disseminate fake news about the past, which justifies Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's hostile diplomatic policies against South Korea and China. Over the past years, the rightist online discourses have become powerful to such an extent that the editorials of major newspapers and TV reports shifted to more nationalist tones. Who are the Neto-uyo? Why have they emerged from the online world and proliferated to the offline world? Two significant characteristics of new media are discussed to analyze their successful media manipulation: cultural transcoding and perpetual rewriting of collective memories. These characteristics have resulted in constructing and reinforcing the data loops of the 'Daily Us' versus Them, technologically raising current diplomatic tensions in East Asia.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.118-141
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• 2019

In South Korea, as awareness of gender equality increased since the 1990s, policies for gender equality and social awareness of equality have been established. Until recently, however, the gap between men and women in social and economic activities has not reached the globally desired level and led to social conflict throughout the country. In this study, we analyze the content of online news comments to understand the public perception of gender equality and the details of gender conflict and to grasp the emergence and diffusion process of emerging issues on gender equality. We collected text data from the online news that included the word 'gender equality' posted from January 2012 to June 2017 and also collected comments on each selected news item. Through text mining and the temporal semantic network analysis, we tracked the changes in discourse on gender equality and conflict. Results revealed that gender conflicts are increasing in the online media, and the focus of conflict is shifting from 'position and role inequality' to 'opportunity inequality'.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.41-56
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• 2014

This research paper advances our understanding of complex interdependence among countries. Existing research has found that total factor productivity (TFP), the residual from the economic growth function, is hindered in the absence of a country's strong political and legal institutions or if a country does not already have a sufficiently high level of TFP. We also know that regional efforts to eliminate pollution are complex. Bridging these two areas while focusing on a high polluting yet high innovating region, the following research questions are posed: Are Northeast Asian countries key collaborators in pursuit of green R&D? Are Northeast Asian countries collaborating extensively with each other? What are the implications for other regions' attempts to establish these kinds of relations? To answer the above questions, biofuels-related technology as defined in the International Patent Classification's "green inventory" of environmentally sound technologies is examined. Patent data is drawn from the USPTO and inventors' country origin as the unit of analysis. For the 1990-2013 period, the Northeast Asian countries are in the core of a small set of collaborating countries. There is evidence that their centrality has increased in recent years. Most importantly, East Asia is becoming a singular research hub in terms of biofuels-related R&D, offering a counter in the foreseeable future to the dominance of the American and European research network hubs.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.15-39
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• 2014

This research conducted a before/after naturalistic field experiment, with the early Arab Spring as the treatment. Compared to before the early Arab Spring, after the observation period the associations became stronger among the Web terms: 'Jihad, Sharia, innovation, democracy and civil society.' The Western concept of civil society transformed into a central Islamist ideological component. At another level, the inter-nation network based on Jihad-weighted Web hyperlinks between pairs of 46 Muslim Majority (MM) nations found Iran in one of the top two positions of flow betweenness centrality, a measure of network power, both before and after early Arab Spring. In contrast, Somalia, UAE, Egypt, Libya, and Sudan increased most in network flow betweenness centrality. The MM 'Jihad'-centric word co-occurrence network more than tripled in size, and the semantic structure more became entropic. This media "cloud" perhaps billowed as Islamist groups changed their material-level relationships and the corresponding media representations of Jihad among them changed after early Arab Spring. Future research could investigate various rival explanations for this naturalistic field experiment's findings.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.45-55
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• 2015

This article assesses factors that affect the ability of local fire branch heads in Taiwan to mobilize volunteer organizations in local emergency responses. Data from a survey of local fire branch heads in Taiwan is analyzed by using an OLS model to test three hypotheses regarding the relationship between the dependent variable, perceived ability to mobilize volunteer organizations in emergency response, and three explanatory variables: organizational capacity, quality of communication, and the quality of citizen engagement ex-ante to emergency response. The model indicates a positive relationship between the ability to mobilize volunteer organizations in emergency response, the quality of communications, and the quality of citizen engagement in preparedness. The research suggests that local fire branch heads and volunteer organizations should begin the process of emergency response mobilization in the preparedness stage. The quality of the citizen engagement in preparedness stages should increase the ability of local fire branch managers to mobilize external resources in emergency response.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.5-15
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• 2015

A growing number of studies have examined the relevance and impact of social media in building organizational resilience, which the ability to recover from a crisis, in the field of emergency management. However, few studies have assessed how these emergency response organizations perceive their own use of social media in crisis situations. In attempting to fill this gap, this study conducted a structured survey with emergency-response organization representatives in Seoul, South Korea, to examine how such organizations evaluate their utilization of social media in an urban emergency situation and how their social media uses are related to promoting organizational resilience during adverse events such as a flood. Overall, the findings imply that organizations are not yet taking full advantage of social media. Respondent evaluations of their own social media use in all three assessment areas-information provision, information dissemination, and emotional messages-were not satisfactory. However, their perceptions of how well they utilize social media were positively related to how they view their organizational resilience. Therefore, it may be that these organizations realize the powerful role of social media in building organizational resilience but lack the knowledge and experience to make the best use of social media services.