This guide, part of a new series from ReligionLink focusing on different regions in global religion reporting, provides background, resources, relevant stories and sources to help journalists understand East Asia’s religious institutions, communities, histories and political contexts.

Chün-fang Yü is professor emerita of Chinese Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, whose work includes Guanyin, Buddhist women, ritual and the historical development of Chinese Buddhist traditions.

Ian Reader is a scholar of contemporary Japanese religion at Lancaster University whose work includes pilgrimage, Japanese Buddhism, new religious movements and religious practice in Asia.

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is a religion professor Williams College, who is particularly useful for reporters who need to understand why Western assumptions about “religion” can be misleading in Japan. His research examines how categories such as religion, science and superstition were constructed in modern Japan and how those categories shaped Shinto and Buddhist traditions […]

Philip Almond is emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of Queensland and is deputy director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses. He has written on religious reactions to natural disasters in European history.

Manuel Lopez Zafra is an associate professor of religion at the New College of Florida in Sarasota. He is an expert on Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Alka Arora is an assistant professor in women’s spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. She is an expert on women and spiritual-based activism and Buddhism.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo is a lecturer in the department of religion and ancient civilizations at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research interests include women in Buddhism, death and identity, Buddhist feminist ethics, Buddhism and bioethics, Buddhist social ethics and Buddhist transnationalism.