Counterwinds: Media for grassroots struggle across Asia
Counterwinds is an English translation of an Okinawan word, keishi kaji, the winds that blow in a reverse direction after the typhoon has passed. The word had long been used as the name of a local community journal for over three decades until it was discontinued in December 2024.
Inspired by the spirit of Keishi Kaji, a collective of individuals from all walks of life gathered from Okinawa, Hawai’i, Palestine, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, and beyond, to start Counterwinds in July 2025.
What is it that emerges in front of our eyes when we try to see the connectivity of the anti-imperial struggles in respective locales?
Our mission is to serve as a platform where the existing interconnections between communal struggles across the region are articulated, shared and reimagined.
We respect, work with, document and report individuals and communities that lead or engage with the struggles to redress social injustice, ecological ravage, colonial, political, and military violence at the grassroots level across Asia, ranging from West to East Asias.
We deem imperialism and colonialism not just a bygone historical event or moment. It is a coercive and rampant force that exerts its intrusive power, rooted in the historical expansion of modern empires at the planetary scale, shaping political, economic, cultural and social life of all who inhabit respective places. In other words, all the contributed pieces to this platform are enablers, and in the same token, reflections of different forces that compel us to reflect, profoundly, on the modern imperialism and colonialism that changed “territories of the world into useful new versions of the (European) metropolitan society”. (Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 78)
Counterwinds features essays, reviews, creative writing and artistic works. We retell and rearticulate the lives of struggling individuals and communities through literary, visual, and other cultural expressions for the anti-imperial/colonial cause. We strive to recuperate the meaning of the anti-imperial/anti-colonial cause in the period when the notion of ‘grassroots’ is increasingly encroached and appropriated by the imperial powers.
December 6, 2025
Reference
Said, Edward W. (1979). The Question of Palestine (New York, Vintage, 1992).