The Latest Breaking News from East Asia

World War II casts a very long shadow in East Asia. Eighty years after ending with Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on Sept. 2, 1945, the conflict continues to stir debate over the past, in the context of today’s geopolitical tensions.

Eighty years have passed since Japan’s surrender ended the second world war. But the way Japan thinks about its wartime history is changing at pace. This is coinciding with a political shift that risks renewed Japanese militarism, an outcome that would complicate politics across east Asia.

A powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck near the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, triggering widespread tsunami alerts across the Pacific on Wednesday morning. It was the strongest quake in the region since 1952 and disrupted lives from East Asia to the Americas, as evacuations and alerts were initiated.

The 300,000 year-old tools show that hominins in East Asia made planned foraging trips to lakeshores and designed instruments for specific purposes.

For the past 75 years, America’s nuclear umbrella has been the keystone that has kept East Asia’s great‑power rivalries from turning atomic.

Perhaps it’s a tired trope to say so much of East Asia is in the future. But it really does feel like China is living in a tech-utopian world only fantasized about in novels and movies. 

Silicon Valley has been a universal symbol of innovation for decades. Because of its reputation, governments around the world have tried to foster their own versions by investing heavily in tech hubs.

Discovery disputes idea Middle Stone Age was stagnant in East Asia

New technologies today often involve electronic devices that are smaller and smarter than before. During the Middle Paleolithic, when Neanderthals were modern humans’ neighbors, new technologies meant something quite different: new kinds of stone tools that were smaller but could be used for many tasks and lasted for a long…

How and when domestic cats arrived in China has been a mystery. A new analysis of cat DNA suggests traders and diplomats likely carried the pets with them along the Silk Road 1,400 years ago.

As an environmentally conscious consumer, buying a new phone can be challenging. Today, most chips come from East Asia, assembly happens in China, and tracing the environmental and social impact of production is all but impossible. On top of that, rare-earth elements from China are increasingly used as geopolitical leverage.