In 2025, Cultural Typhoon swept through Kaohsiung, a harbor city in southern Taiwan—not merely as a metaphor, but quite literally as a typhoon still in motion. The project sought to question how culture and power have been organized in Taiwan as an island, a harbor, and a route where the traces of past and present colonialism, the Cold War, and global capitalism intersect. It illuminated the resonances among diverse voices, relationships, and experiences that have been forced into silence, while also revealing how processes of translation often involve misunderstandings and people talking past one another.

The questions raised in Kaohsiung—“What has been translated?”, “What has been misunderstood?”, and “What kinds of resonance have been produced?”—have not yet been fully answered. These questions remain suspended across East Asia, drifting from harbor to harbor, from island to peninsula. Meanwhile, Cultural Typhoon has so far avoided co-optation by established places and organizations, even as it seeks its next site of landfall, mobilizing thoughts and relationships as a force of destabilization. In the wake of this vortex, our attention turns to the Korean Peninsula in 2026.

The Korean Peninsula is a site where violence and its transformations since the twentieth century have been intensely compressed. This compression has taken place within a history shaped by modern Japanese colonial rule, Cold War division, and imaginaries of reunification that have repeatedly emerged and been thwarted throughout history.

At the same time, global cultural forms originating in South Korea—such as K-pop and K-dramas—have been produced within this historical and political context and are now deeply embedded in our everyday lives. They are often consumed “just for fun” as depoliticized commodities, even though we are never free from the political conditions surrounding their production and consumption, including labor, gender, national strategy, media capitalism, and fandom practices. In Japan in particular, the consumption of Korean popular culture is closely intertwined with anti-Korean discourses and a backlash against nationalism, while colonial memories and unresolved historical residues continue to haunt society in both visible and invisible ways. Culture acquires political overtones at the very moment of consumption and inevitably brings historical conditions and emotional structures of Japanese society to the surface. These contemporary cultural dynamics render the Korean Peninsula visible not merely as a site of past history, but as a site of ongoing transformation where memory and amnesia, governmentality and resistance, and ardor and control contend with one another.

Cultural studies seeks to understand culture not simply as consumption or expression, but as a site where power, history, representation, and subject formation are in constant tension. It has long sought to illuminate the voices of minority women positioned at the intersections of ethnicity, gender, class, and the nation-state. These voices have not only been denied opportunities to speak; they have also been distorted, replaced, or ignored—rendered multiply marginalized and invisible. Engaging with the Korean Peninsula brings us back to one of the foundational questions of cultural studies: who has been allowed to speak, and what has been rendered invisible within specific historical contexts up to the present.

To engage with the Korean Peninsula from within Japan is necessarily to turn the question back onto Japanese society itself. The representation of Zainichi Koreans, the structures of discrimination they face, and the forgetting and distortion of history are by no means external issues. As Edward Said once observed in relation to media representations of Islam, discourse surrounding the DPRK has been constructed through representations that strip away complex historical and political contexts while repeatedly emphasizing fear and otherness. Such discourses are deeply embedded within Japanese culture, institutions, media, and everyday sensibilities.

The next Cultural Typhoon will make landfall at Showa Women’s University in Tokyo. Beneath the surface of this city lie traces of imperial governmentality at its core, alongside the histories of people who were forced to move and labor under colonial rule—histories engraved across multiple, overlapping layers. Thus, to articulate the Korean Peninsula here in Tokyo is not to treat it as an external issue, but to undertake an act of excavation: unearthing the histories, silences, and mechanisms of invisibility embedded within Japanese society itself.

From Taiwan to the Korean Peninsula, and onward to a metropolis where the memory of empire has settled into layers, Cultural Typhoon sweeps across East Asia, continually unsettling established configurations of borders, centers and peripheries, past and present. We hope this convention will become an intellectual typhoon that unsettles theory and practice, history and the present, as well as Japan and its outside, calling forth new relationships and imaginaries.