Notes from the Field | Hannah Osborne, Response to Diamant & Bender, Where Are All the College Faculty?
Ed. Note: This statement by Japan Forum Chief Editor Dr. Hannah Osborne is written in response to the recent CAS Commentary Board Note from the Field “Where Are All the College Faculty? Editorial Inequity in East Asian Studies Journals” by Dr. Neil Diamant and Dr. Shawn Bender.
Japan Forum is the official journal of the British Association of Japanese Studies (BAJS), a charitable organisation that promotes and supports the Japanese Studies community in the UK through various initiatives, such as: funding final-year PhD research, disseminating information on research and teaching opportunities for PGRs and ECRs, and organising and hosting postgraduate workshops and an annual UK based conference. All of Japan Forum's revenue goes to BAJS to support these activities and therefore the editorship of Japan Forum (which rotates every five years to different editorial teams) is necessarily selected from institutions based in the UK. The UK does not have a distinction between liberal arts colleges and universities (as is true of many other countries in Europe). Therefore, Japan Forum, as a journal based in the UK, cannot be expected to be conform to norms that may or may not be applicable to journals based in North America. The article completely overlooks this crucial point.
Our international editorial board is similarly criticised by the article. However, our IEB currently consists of sixty-eight names: of these only ten come from the USA (a proportion quite different from US-based journals), while the rest come from the UK (28), continental Europe (9), Canada (2), Japan (9), Australia (4) and other countries. Since the overwhelming proportion of our IEB comes from countries which do not have liberal arts colleges as found in the USA, it is a statistical distortion to conclude that Japan Forum has a 'clear institutional bias against college faculty’.
“The singling out of Japan Forum as a journal presumed not to uphold these values is a gross distortion of both the historical ethos of the journal and its current ethos and editorship.”
Further, the article's introduction evokes the AAS Board of Directors' request that members 'pledge themselves to take action aimed at building equitable institutions, departments, classrooms and communities'. The singling out of Japan Forum as a journal presumed not to uphold these values is a gross distortion of both the historical ethos of the journal and its current ethos and editorship. Indeed, Japan Forum was first established to provide a venue for early career researchers to publish. Since that time, Japan Forum has, both through its own editorial endeavours, as well as by the very fact of its being the official journal of BAJS, created and enabled an academic ecosystem designed to support researchers across diverse specialisms and institutions, at every career stage, but especially ECRs. Moreover, the article’s implication that the current editorial team might be the result of ‘institutional bias’ completely obscures the fact that the selection of our journal's current editorship is a success story for diversity and inclusion.
Every five years, when the journal is about to rotate, institutions in the UK are asked to bid to take over the editorship. The University of East Anglia had never hosted Japan Forum before, it does not have a traditional East Asian Studies department, nor is it a 'Russell Group' university (the British equivalent of the Ivy League), all of which were common factors for previous editorial teams for Japan Forum. I led the UEA's bid and on my selection for the role by the BAJS Council, I became the first woman and the first early career scholar to hold the position of Chief Editor at the journal. My team is balanced equally between genders; we are comprised of a mix of nationalities; and finally, we are not solely based at UEA but, as BAJS have changed the rules so that the editorship does not have to be located solely in one institution, and as both BAJS and I are keen to include institutions that do not have a Japanese Studies department, we now have editors at Teeside University (a former polytechnic) and the University of Bristol.
In short, the article pays no attention to the nature of Japan Forum as a publication of the British Association for Japanese Studies and is distorted by its extrapolation of the higher education scene in the USA which it applies to all countries. In fact, in its insistence on viewing other countries’ higher education systems through the prism of the US system and in its lack of enquiry into the specific circumstances of each journal it examines, the article reveals its own cultural insensitivities.
Dr. Hannah Osborne
Chief Editor for Japan Forum
Dr. Hannah Osborne is Japan Foundation Lecturer in Japanese Literature at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing and the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia, as well as Chief Editor for Literature at Japan Forum.
To cite this post, please use the entry suggested below:
Hannah Osborne, “Response to Diamant & Bender, Where Are All the College Faculty?,” criticalasianstudies.org, July 1, 2022; https://doi.org/10.52698/HRJK1653.