Editor's Note

Just like other academic fields, STS respects language. This is especially so in East Asia, where English has long been the predominant first foreign language for students and academics. But it is not just that. Along with their professional training, STS researchers in East Asia acquire, like their Western colleagues, other European languages, and an increasing number of scholars are learning additional Asian languages to comprehend classical texts or do fieldwork. Against the conventional notion pertaining in the West, STS in East Asia projects a culturally bound network upon which its scholarship evolves. This network has been well represented in the organization of EASTS's editorial board since its inception in 2007, consisting as it does of representative academic communities in this region.

STS has been changing. Statistics is now recognized as a "language" for STS studies. The subject to which it is applied, "big data," is gaining increasing legitimacy in coping with a more complicated, interrelated world of science and technology and their public presentations. EASTS is witnessing this change and welcomes it. It is not only adding new tools and methods but also providing new ways to reflect the cultural network as East Asia gradually becomes a field for global STS.

Three research articles in this issue address different aspects of a changing Asia. They share concerns over language, data, networks, and the ways in which these deepen our understanding of science and policy. Seiko Ishihara-Shineha's article is a critical review of science and technology policy in postwar Japan. Starting with a reflection on the government's public response to the 2011 earthquake, this article nicely reveals a continual gap between policy claims and ways to achieve them. Using data-mining technology, Ishihara-Shineha examines Japanese white papers on science and technology from 1958 to 2015 to identify trends in the science communication model. This structural assessment also provides information necessary to understanding why the old model of "public understanding of science and technology" still persists, despite policy language having shifted to a model of "public engagement in science and technology."

Hee Je Bak and Daniel Kleinman's article compares the ways in which the Korean and US media treated bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) during the controversy over the Korean government's decision to resume importing US beef in 2008. At first glance, the article might not surprise anyone familiar with mass media in East Asia. Even so, what is new is the methodology, which analyzes scientific accounts from media coverage archives on "mad cow disease" (aka BSE) in Korea and the United States. Like Ishihara-Shineha's treatment of Japanese white papers, the authors use the database to select critical moments at which BSE was the subject of heated dispute. Furthermore, and using the United States as a reference point, they examine Korean media culture by analyzing the ways in which it reported BSE through its particular political viewpoint. Although the scientific accounts provided by the media were not "made up," the authors demonstrate that these accounts are selected and interpreted, a process that can never be immune to the political context in which controversies emerge.

Prasanna Kumar Patra and Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner's article on clinical stem cell intervention (CSCI) captures the emerging ties between Japan and India. Using "bionetworking," a concept created by the authors to analyze "social entrepreneurial network activities involving biomedical research and health care institutions," this article follows the India-Japan Centre for Regenerative Medicine, which offers CSCI in Chennai, India, delineating the social ground on which such experimental treatment continues to thrive after the provision of stem cell therapy regulation. Like organ trafficking and illegal trade in patented drugs, the CSCI case makes obvious the necessity for transnational STS and, in so doing, the need to revise the conventional frame that divides South and East Asia, to manage the complexity of medicine and business.

In the second half of this issue, we proudly present a forum on science and language and a set of essays on gender and science, along with a review of Cultures without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge, a ground breaking, boundarycrossing new book that deals...