Introduction

This introductory chapter explains the concepts in the book "Information Regimes During the Cold War in East Asia". The Cold War was a period of roughly a half century, from the close of World War II in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when much of the world was split along the divide between two giant empires, the Soviet Union and the United States. Kevin Doak, a specialist in Japanese law, religion, and political philosophy, writes about Japanese Catholicism during the Cold War, seeing important continuities between pre-Cold War and Cold War Japan. David A. Tizzard, assistant professor at Seoul Women’s University, traces the lineage of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a diplomatic subject, finding in the Cold War the defining Gestalt of North Korea’s international posture. Robert D. Eldridge writes about a key moment in the Cold War in East Asia, Edwin O. Reischauer’s famous 1960 Foreign Affairs article “The Broken Dialogue”.