Creative Context

Nissim Otmazgin is a professor at the Department of Asian Studies the Director of the Institute for Asian and African Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Israeli Young Academy of Science and Humanities. A political scientist in training, his research interests include cultural diplomacy in Asia, popular culture and regionalization in East and Southeast Asia, and cultural industry and cultural policy in Japan and South Korea. His PhD dissertation (Kyoto University, 2007), which examines the export of Japan's popular culture to Asia, won the Iue Asia Pacific Research Prize in October 2007 for outstanding dissertation on society and culture in Asia. As a part of this research, he conducted extensive fieldwork in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul. He is the author of Regionalizing Culture: the Political Economy of Japanese Popular Culture in Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) and coauthor (together with Miki Daliot Bul) of The Anime Boom in the US: Lessons for Global Creative Industries (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2017).

Eyal Ben-Ari is senior fellow of the Center for Society, Security and Peace at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee. He has carried out research in Israel, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. His main areas of research are the sociology of the armed forces, early childhood education, and popular culture in Asia. Among his recent books are Japanese Encounters (2018), (with Zev Lehrer, Uzi Ben-Shalom and Ariel Vainer) Rethinking the Sociology of Warfare (2010), (with Nissim Otmazgin) The State and Popular Culture in East Asia (2012), and (with Jessica Glicken Turnley and Kobi Michael) (2017) Social Science and Special Operations Forces . He has published articles spanning a variety of disciplines including the American Ethnologist , Cultural Anthropology , The Sociological Review , The Sociological Quarterly , Special Operations Journal , and the Journal of Strategic Studies .