Asian Ethnology 77 | article Editors' Note

Benjamin Dorman & Frank J. Korom

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We are pleased to present the latest issue of *Asian Ethnology*. As we announced in our last note (AE 76–2), we decided to publish this year’s volume as a double issue. We wish to announce that Nanzan University has agreed to provide the journal with a new part-time position for an editorial and web assistant, whose main duties include dealing with technical aspects of podcast and journal production. This decision has had a profound impact on the journal over the past eight months, and we are grateful to Nanzan University for providing this opportunity to the journal. In April, we welcomed Ben Huffman, a graduate student at Nagoya University, as the new editorial and web assistant based at Nanzan University. Ben’s presence and technical proficiency has allowed us to develop the journal further, including our new social media presence on Facebook and Twitter, as well as podcast production. His addition to the team working on the journal has given us the opportunity to maintain production as in past years, which will allow us to publish two issues next year. One of these will be a special issue. Readers will notice that we have introduced a number of stylistic changes to the journal, including the use of the Chicago Manual of Style format. In the past, we used a mixture of Chicago and other elements, including the use of small caps. We also included Asian scripts as much as possible. However, we have decided not to include foreign scripts any longer—apart from exceptional cases where the inclusion of a particular script is vital to the understanding of the essay in which it is being used—because it became a burden to decide when to use scripts other than English and when not to use them. *Asian Ethnology* is an English-language journal and while we still include diacritical marks as determined by the Library of Congress’ Transliteration System (https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html), the inclusion of Asian scripts is not relevant or even applicable to all the material we publish in the journal, but transliteration does help specialists in their readings of articles included in the journal. We have also simplified the layout to a certain extent. These changes may seem minor but when we consider the production of the journal, they are actually quite significant in terms of the time required to prepare it for publication. We have made these changes in order to keep the journal production smooth, efficient, and on time. This, in turn, means that we are able to publish more material while still maintaining the journal’s quality standards. We are now rejecting more articles than we are accepting, which means that we are receiving greater recognition in the fields of anthropological and folkloristic study, not to mention cultural studies in general. This ultimately allows us to include only the best and most rigorously refereed articles submitted to us. We trust that you will understand and accept these decisions, while also considering submitting elements of your own work to the journal. Finally, in addition to changing the reviews layout slightly, we have introduced a new policy whereby there will be separate country notifications if there are two or more reviews per country, but if there is only one review we will use the broader regional identifications, like Central Asia, Inner Asia, South Asia, or Southeast Asia. As always, we thank you for your support of the journal. 21 December, Nagoya