When this journal was founded in 2007, Daiwie Fu's position paper in the inaugural issue initiated a series of inquiries into the meaning of East Asian STS studies. Four comments on Fu's paper, by Sungwook Hung, Hideto Nakajima, Fa-ti Fan, and Warwick Anderson, appeared in issue 2 that same year. In 2008, a panel discussion in volume 2, issue 3, deepened the journal's explorations of the relation between East Asian STS and area studies. That panel stimulated Anderson to rethink East Asian STS studies as a form of area studies in his introduction to the 2009 special issue on Southeast Asian STS (vol. 3, combined issue 2–3). In 2009, Togo Tsukahara reflected on the situation of East Asian STS, and especially Japanese STS, in his introduction to the panel discussion on STS in Japan and East Asia (vol. 3, issue 4). Yung-Sik Kim also expressed his view on the role of East Asian traditions in his introduction to the special issue “Specialized Knowledge in Traditional East Asian Contexts” in 2010 (vol. 4, issue 2). Yet despite all these discussions in the previous issues, Fu's inquiry in his position paper has not yet been answered in a complete form. No formal articles on the subject have appeared in EASTS to date. The present special issue compensates for this.
