How We Began
“[P]olitically and economically Americans and Asians have become almost as interdependent as Americans and Europeans,” but “do not, however have any understanding of one another comparable to the understanding–faulty though it often is–between Americans and Europeans.”– (1972) Ernest R. May, Harvard University
In 1990, Akira Iriye of Harvard University, after teaching twenty years at the University of Chicago, and Warren I. Cohen of Michigan State University, who jointly headed the Committee, agreed with the proposal by Anthony Cheung of Imprint Publications, formerly with the University of Chicago and then its Press, that a journal could fulfill an important mission. The advice from Iriye and Cohen was pivotal to Cheung. Under the editorship of Michael A. Barnhart of SUNY at Stony Brook, the first issue appeared in the spring of 1992. The authors of the articles and members of the Editorial Advisory Board were drawn from institutions in the United States, Japan, Korea, China, and elsewhere.
Until 2009, the Journal was sponsored by the Foundation for Pacific Quest, a general not for profit organization formed at the inception of the publication. Over the Journal′s first decade, the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College, founded by the late Frank Gibney, Professor of Politics and a former Time-Life journalist and executive of Encyclopaedia Britannica, was generous in sharing its resources. In 2005, the East-West Institute of International Studies of Gordon College added its support to help bring publication of the Journal up to date.
As a footnote, the original design of the Journal was the work of Toni Ellis of the University of Chicago Press; the cover was based on a sketch drawn by Anthony Cheung in Monterey on the Southern California coast in 1991 with the intended theme, “Bringing a closer understanding between both sides of the Pacific.”
The transition to Brill for the publication of the Journal from Vol. 17, with online edition and archival of all previous volumes and issues, is described in “A Note from Imprint.” Imprint remains responsible for the editorial part of the Journal.
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