Harvard University Asia Center

In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues that South Korea’s contemporary urban middle class not only exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition of Koreans to seek high status. Lett shows that Koreans have adapted traditional ways of asserting high status to modern life, and analyzes strategies for claiming high status in terms of occupation, family, lifestyle, education, and marriage.

“This book analyzes the unprecedented diversity and the new literary forms that burst forth in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The interdisciplinary approach of these studies reveals much about the society, politics, and popular culture of the post-Mao era.”—Merle Goldman

What do the Chinese literature and film inspired by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) have in common with the Chinese literature and film of the May Fourth movement (1918-1930)? This new book demonstrates that these two periods share several aims: to liberate these narrative arts from previous aesthetic orthodoxies, to draw on foreign sources for inspiration, and to free individuals from social conformity.

Zouping offers important general lessons for the study of China’s rural transformation. The authors in this volume, all participants in a unique field research project undertaken from 1988 to 1992, address questions concerning the role of local governments as economic actors, market reform, and inequality.

China’s bold program of reforms launched in the late 1970s--the move to a market economy and the opening to the outside world--ended the political chaos and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution and sparked China’s unprecedented economic boom. Yet, while the reforms made possible a rising standard of living for the majority of China’s population, they came at the cost of a weakening central government, increasing inequalities, and fragmenting society. These essays analyze the contradictory impact of China’s economic reforms on its political system and social structure.

This collection of essays addresses the meaning and practice of political citizenship in China over the past century, raising the question of whether reform initiatives in citizenship imply movement toward increased democratization. Valuable for its century-long perspective and for placing the historical patterns of Chinese citizenship within the context of European and American experiences, Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China investigates a critical issue for contemporary Chinese society.

Observers often note the glaring contrast between China’s economic progress and its stalled political reforms. This volume, written by experienced scholars, explores a range of grassroots efforts--initiated by the state and society alike--to restrain corrupt behavior and enhance the accountability of local authorities. While the authors offer varying views on the larger significance of these developments, their case studies point to a more dynamic Chinese political system than is often acknowledged.

Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.

The compilation of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Ssu-k’u ch’üan-shu) was one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of the Ch’ing dynasty. Initiated by imperial command in 1772, the project sought to evaluate, edit, and reproduce the finest Chinese writings in the four traditional categories: Confucian classics, histories, philosophy, and belles lettres. Guy’s study gives a balanced account of the project and its significance.

As a scholar, William Hung was instrumental in opening China’s rich documentary past to modern scrutiny. As an educator, he helped shape one of twentieth-century China’s most remarkable institutions, Yenching University. In 1978, he began recalling his colorful life to Susan Chan Egan in weekly taping sessions. His reminiscences encompass the issues and dilemmas faced by Chinese intellectuals of his period.

Fogel tells the strange story of this cocky, indolent carouser who became a disciplined scholar and passionate advocate of the worth of all humanity. Fogel examines Nakae’s Sinological work in the context of his wide reading in German philosophy, Western historiography, and classical Chinese sources. He also translates Nakae’s wartime diary.

Here is the first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis. Mr. Woodside examines in detail the surviving statutes of both societies in his political and cultural study, a pioneering venture in East Asian comparative history.

This account of efforts to build a domestic Japanese computer industry is enlivened with quotations from industrial leaders commenting on the stages through which Japan has emerged as a world-class competitor.

The heir of a samurai family, an acknowledged authority on economics, a professor at one of Japan’s leading universities, an early popularizer of Marxism in Japan, a Japanese Communist on his own unique terms, and, finally, the author of an autobiography that is a classic of modern Japanese literature, Kawakami Hajime is an important figure in the history of modern Japan. Bernstein provides a portrait of Kawakami’s complex personality as well as a narrative of the context and content of Japanese left-wing politics in the 1920s.

The essays in this book are by scholars who have studied with Benjamin Schwartz. Benjamin Schwartz taught at Harvard from 1950 until his retirement in 1987. Through his teaching and writing, he became a major force in the field of Chinese studies, setting standards--above all in the area of intellectual history--that have been a source of inspiration to students and scholars worldwide. His influence extends well beyond the China field, cutting across conventional disciplinary boundaries, touching political science, religion, philosophy, and literature as well as history.

These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China’s Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch’ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. They culminate in Hart’s return visit to Europe with the Pinch’un Mission and his marriage in Northern Ireland.

Palais theorizes in his important book on Korea that the remarkable longevity of the Yi dynasty (1392-1910) was related to the difficulties the country experienced in adapting to the modern world. He suggests that the aristocratic and hierarchical social system, which was the source of stability of the dynasty, was also the cause of its weakness.

Why did defeat in the Opium War not lead Ch’ing China to a more realistic appreciation of Western might and Chinese weakness? Linking political intrigue, scholarly debates, and foreign affairs, local notables in Canton and literati lobbyists in Perking, this book sets the Opium War for the first times in its "inner," domestic political context.

Drawing on rich historical materials from both sides of the Pacific, including corporate records and government documents never before made public, Mason examines the development of both Japanese policy towards foreign investment and the strategic responses of American corporations.

The interrelated Seibu and Saison enterprise groups have shaped Japanese consumer culture and made the Tsutsumi family fabulously rich. Beginning with the colorful founder, Yasujiro Tsutsumi, Thomas Havens traces the family’s fortunes through the rise of its various companies.

Credit for the swift unification of Japan following the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate is usually given to the national leaders. In this book, James Baxter argues that brilliant leadership at the top is not sufficient to explain how regional separatist tendencies and loyalties to the old lords were overcome in the formation of a nationally unified state.

Through a historical and comparative analysis of modern Japan’s epidemic of tuberculosis, William Johnston illuminates a major but relatively unexamined facet of Japanese social and cultural history.

In this detailed study of the development of the Japanese railroad industry during the Meiji period, Steven Ericson explores the economic role of government and the nature of state-business relations during Japan’s modern transformation.

Hijiya-Kirschnereit brings a sophisticated and graceful method of analysis to this English translation of her book on the shishosetsu, one of the most important yet misunderstood genres in Japanese literature.

This second edition of Dru Gladney’s critically acclaimed study of the Muslim population in China includes a new preface by the author, as well as a valuable addendum to the bibliography, already hailed as one of the most extensive listing of modern sources on the Sino-Muslims.

The short-lived Kenmu regime (1333–1336) of Japanese Emperor Go-Daigo is often seen as an inevitably doomed, revanchist attempt to shore up the old aristocratic order. But far from resisting change, Andrew Edmund Goble here forcefully argues, the flamboyant Go-Daigo and his associates sought to overcome the old order and renegotiate its structure and ethos.

In the twelfth century, along the borders of the Japanese state in northern Honshu, three generations of local rulers built a capital city at Hiraizumi that became a major military and commercial center. Known as the Hiraizumi Fujiwara, these rulers created a city filled with art, in an attempt to use the power of art and architecture to claim a religious and political mandate. In the first book-length study of Hiraizumi in English, the author studies the rise of the Hiraizumi Fujiwara and analyzes their remarkable construction program.

This study links two sets of concerns--the focus of recent studies of the nation on language, culture, education, and race; and the emphasis of diplomatic history on international developments--to show how political, diplomatic, and cultural concerns work together to shape national identity.

This book is a study of labor relations and the first generation of skilled workers in colonial Korea, a subject crucial to the understanding of modernization in twentieth-century Korea. Born in rural Korea, these workers confronted both the colonial experience and the modern workplace as they interacted with Japanese managers and workers. Based on the archives of the Onoda Cement Factory and interviews with surviving workers, this work analyzes the complex relationship between colonialism and modernization.

Through a close examination of economic trends and case studies of particular families, this study demonstrates that Japan’s protoindustrial economy was far more volatile than portrayed in most studies to date. Few rural elites survived the competitive and unstable climate of this era. Onerous exactions, interregional competition, market volatility, and succession problems propelled many wealthy families into steep decline and others into drastic shifts in the focus of their businesses.

Since it opened in 1983, Tokyo Disneyland has been analyzed mainly as an example of the globalization of the American leisure industry and its organizational culture, particularly the "company manual." By looking at how Tokyo Disneyland is experienced by employees, management, and visitors, Aviad Raz shows that rather than being an agent of Americanization, Tokyo Disneyland is a simulated "America" showcased by and for the Japanese. It is an "America" with a Japanese meaning.

offering the first systematic examination of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro and The Three-Cornered World; Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain; Mori Ogai’s Wild Geese; and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Quicksand.

Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. In his long career, Kitasono was instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by futurism, dadaism, and surrealism before World War II and in contributing a Japanese voice to the international avant-garde movement after the war. This critical biography of Kitasono examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and flamboyant figure.

Most existing scholarship on Japan’s cultural policy toward modern China reflects the paradigm of cultural imperialism. In contrast, this study demonstrates that Japan was mindful of Chinese opinion and sought the cooperation of the Chinese government. China, however, was not a passive recipient and actively sought to redirect this policy to serve its national interests and aspirations. The author argues that it is time to move away from the framework of cultural imperialism toward one that recognizes the importance of cultural autonomy, internationalism, and transculturation.

By the end of the Sung dynasty (960-1279), known descendants of the three Chao brothers who had founded the dynasty numbered over 20,000. Unlike the rulers of many other Chinese dynasties, however, the Sung emperors were not plagued by challenges to their rule from their relatives. How the Sung created a social and political asset in the imperial clan while neutralizing it as a potential threat is the story of this book. In this, the first full-length study of the imperial clan as an institution, John Chaffee analyzes its history, its political role, and the lifestyle of its members, focussing on their residence patterns, marriages, and occupations.

This book explores the issues of nation and modernity in China by focusing on the work of Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), one of the most controversial of modern Chinese intellectuals and brother of the writer Lu Xun. Zhou was radically at odds with many of his contemporaries and opposed their nation-building and modernization projects. Through his literary and aesthetic practice as an essayist, Zhou espoused a way of constructing the individual and affirming the individual’s importance in opposition to the normative national subject of most May Fourth reformers.

The unique amalgam of prayer and play at the Sensoji temple in Edo is often cited as proof of the "degenerate Buddhism" of the Tokugawa period. This investigation of the economy and cultural politics of Sensoji, however, shows that its culture of prayer and play reflected changes taking place in Tokugawa Japan, particularly in the city of Edo. Hur’s reappraisal of prayer and play and their inherent connectedness provides a cultural critique of conventional scholarship on Tokugawa religion and shows how Edo commoners incorporated cultural politics into their daily lives through the pursuit of prayer and play.

Focusing on the marginal region of Toyama, on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the Meiji Restoration. Lewis argues that in response to the demands of the centralizing state, local elites and leaders in Toyama developed a repertoire of supple responses that varied with the political or economic issue at stake.

Focusing on the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, this study analyzes the ways in which relics functioned as material media for the interactions of Buddhist clerics, the imperial family, lay aristocrats, and warrior society and explores the multivocality of relics by dealing with specific historical examples. Brian Ruppert argues that relics offered means for reinforcing or subverting hierarchical relations.

Nearly forty years after the outbreak of the "Minamata Disease," it remains one of the most horrific examples of environmental poisoning. Based on primary documents and interviews, this book describes three rounds of responses to this incidence of mercury poisoning, focusing on the efforts of its victims and their supporters, particularly the activities of grassroots movements and popular campaigns, to secure redress.

This manual for students focuses on archival research in the economic and business history of the Republican era (1911-1949). Following a general discussion of archival research and research aids for the Republican period, the handbook introduces the collections of archives in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan that contain materials in the areas of economics and business, with data on the history of the archives, descriptions of their holdings, and publications on their collections.

In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan’s military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book.

This study of Japan’s transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and policymakers in Tokyo. The reactions of inhabitants of rural areas to the depression shed new light on how average Japanese responded to the problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.

Prosperity signifies success in economic performance. Economic performance always takes place in a spatial context. And institutions matter in economic performance. These three interwoven themes underlie this inquiry into the regional economy of southern Fukien province during the Sung and Yuan dynasties, when the area was one of the most prosperous regions in China.

The enormous changes in twentieth-century Chinese higher education up to the Sino-Japanese War are detailed in this pioneering work. Yeh examines the impact of instruction in English and of the introduction of science and engineering into the curriculum. Such innovations spurred the movement of higher education away from the gentry academies focused on classical studies and propelled it toward modern middle-class colleges with diverse programs.

In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming-Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives.

In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire.

Ayukawa Yoshisuke (1880-1967) was the founder of the Nissan conglomerate and the leader of the Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation, one of the linchpins of Imperial Japan’s efforts to economically exploit its overseas dependencies. He was also a proponent of free trade and global economic interdependence. In Unfinished Business, through exploring the reasons for Ayukawa’s failure, Iguchi illuminates many of the economic problems of today’s Japan.

The period between the fall of the Han in 220 and the reunification of the Chinese realm in the late sixth century receives short shrift in most accounts of Chinese history. The period is usually characterized as one of disorder and dislocation, ethnic strife, and bloody court struggles. In the eight essays of Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200-600, the authors seek to chart the actual changes occurring in this period of disunion, and to show its relationship to what preceded and followed it.

The twelve essays in this volume underscore the similarities between Chinese and American approaches to bilateral diplomacy and between their perceptions of each other’s policy-making motivations.

By exhaustively analyzing Lao She’s literary writings, Vohra traces the development of his political consciousness and convictions. Besides being an introduction to the life and works of Lao She, this book contributes to a greater understanding of the nature of the social and political change in twentieth-century China.

This well-documented study discusses the social and economic changes in Shandong province before the influence of the West was felt at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors show that by the sixteenth century, commercial and handicraft towns linked to national and local markets had already begun to emerge. Case studies of managerial landlords, who form the main focus of this study, are included as well as generalizations drawn from questionnaire materials.

Few institutions are as well suited as the monarchy to provide a window on postwar Japan. The monarchy, which is also a family, has been significant both as a political and as a cultural institution. Ruoff analyzes numerous issues, stressing the monarchy’s "postwarness" rather than its traditionality.

An institution in decline, possessing little power or authority in a warrior-dominated age, or a still potent symbol of social and political legitimacy? Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan traces the fate of the imperial Japanese court from the lowest point in terms of influence and prosperity in the turbulent sengoku period to its more stable position in the Tokugawa period. In showing how the court adapted and survived, the author examines internal court politics and protocols, external court relations, court finances, court structure, and ceremonial observances. Emperor and courtiers, he concludes, adjusted to the warrior elite, while retaining the ideological advantage bestowed by culture, tradition, and birth.

In the history of traditional Japanese waka poetry, Shinkokinshu of 1205 is generally regarded as one of the three most important anthologies. The collection--the "New Kokinshu"--is in many ways a neo-classical effort. Reading history backward, scholars have often taken this to be a nostalgia for greatness presumed to have been lost in the wars of the late 1100s. In this detailed study of the origins of Shinkokinshu, the author argues that the compilers of Shinkokinshu instead saw their collection as a "new" beginning, a revitalization and affirmation of courtly traditions, and not a reaction to loss. It is a dynamic collection, full of innovative, challenging poetry--not an elegy for a lost age.

The nine essays in this volume reexamine the "hundred days" in 1898 and focus particularly on the aftermath of this reform movement. Their collective goal is to rethink the reforms not as a failed attempt at modernizing China but as a period in which many of the institutions that have since structured China began.

Since 1979 China’s leaders have introduced reforms that have lessened the state’s hold over the lives of ordinary citizens. By examining the growth in individual rights, the public sphere, democratic processes, and pluralization, Ogden seeks to answer questions concerning the relevance of liberal democratic ideas for China and the relationship between a democratic political culture and a democratic political system.

Rather than focusing on the psychology of personal emotions at work, this study concentrates on emotions as role requirements, on workplace emotions that combine the private with the public, the personal with the social, and the authentic with the masked. In this cross-cultural study of "emotion management," the author argues that even though the goals of normative control in factories, offices, and shops may be similar across cultures, organizational structure and the surrounding culture affect how that control is discussed and conceived.

"China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"--these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.

In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the fourth century BCE among the followers of Confucius.

A collaborative effort by scholars from the United States, China, and Japan, this volume focuses on the period 1972–1989, during which all three countries, brought together by a shared geopolitical strategy, established mutual relations with one another despite differences in their histories, values, and perceptions of their own national interest. Although each initially conceived of its political and security relations with the others in bilateral terms, the three in fact came to form an economic and political triangle during the 1970s and 1980s. But this triangle is a strange one whose dynamics are constantly changing. Its corners (the three countries) and its sides (the three bilateral relationships) are unequal, while its overall nature (the capacity of the three to work together) has varied considerably as the economic and strategic positions of the three have changed and post-Cold War tensions and uncertainties have emerged.

The sacred landscape of imperial China was dotted with Buddhist monasteries, Daoist temples, shrines to local deities, and the altars of the mandarinate. Prominent among the official shrines were the temples in every capital throughout the empire devoted to the veneration of Confucius. Twice a year members of the educated elite and officials in each area gathered to offer sacrifices to Confucius, his disciples, and the major scholars of the Confucian tradition.

This volume seeks to study the connections between two well-studied epochs in Chinese history: the mid-imperial era of the Tang and Song (ca. 800-1270) and the late imperial era of the late Ming and Qing (1550-1900). Both eras are seen as periods of explosive change, particularly in economic activity, characterized by the emergence of new forms of social organization and a dramatic expansion in knowledge and culture. The task of establishing links between these two periods has been impeded by a lack of knowledge of the intervening Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). This historiographical "black hole" has artificially interrupted the narrative of Chinese history and bifurcated it into two distinct epochs. This volume aims to restore continuity to that historical narrative by filling the gap between mid-imperial and late imperial China.

Despite Taiwan’s rise as an economic force in the world, modernity has not led to a Weberian process of disenchantment or curbed religiosity. To the contrary, other factors--social, economic, political--have stimulated religion. How and why this has happened are central issues in this book. One part of Taiwan’s flourishing religious culture is the elaborate and colorful procession of local gods accompanied by troupes of musicians and dancers. Concentrating on the stylistic variations in performances, the author describes the troupes as organizations shaped by the "market forces" of supply and demand in the culture of religious festivals. By focusing on performances as the nexus of market and art, he shows how bodily performance is the site where religious statements are made and the power of the gods made visible.

For 1,300 years, Chinese calligraphy was based on the elegant art of Wang Xizhi (A.D. 303-361). But the seventeenth-century emergence of a style modeled on the rough, broken epigraphs of ancient bronzes and stone artifacts brought a revolution in calligraphic taste. By the eighteenth century, this led to the formation of the stele school of calligraphy, which continues to shape Chinese calligraphy today. A dominant force in this school was the eminent calligrapher and art theorist Fu Shan (1607-1685). Because his work spans the late Ming-early Qing divide, it is an ideal prism through which to view the transformation in calligraphy.

To discuss the supernatural in China is "to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts." Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time.

In the early twentieth century, China began to import and then to manufacture thousands of consumer goods. These commodities changed the life of millions of Chinese, but the influx of imports and the desires they created threatened many in China. Politicians worried about trade deficits and new consumer lifestyles. Intellectuals, inspired by Western political economy, feared the loss of national sovereignty. And manufacturers wondered how they could survive the flood of inexpensive imports. This book argues that the responses of these groups to the emerging consumer culture helped define and spread modern Chinese nationalism.

In 1908, a very public crusade against opium was in full swing throughout China, and the provincial capital and treaty port of Fuzhou was a central stage for the campaign. This, the most successful attempt undertaken by the Chinese state before 1949 to eliminate opium, came at a time when, according to many historians, China’s central state was virtually powerless. This volume attempts to reconcile that apparent contradiction.

The Analects (Lunyu) is one of the most influential texts in human history. As a foundational text in scriptural Confucianism, it was instrumental in shaping intellectual traditions in China and East Asia. But no premodern reader read only the text of the Analects itself. Rather, the Analects was embedded in a web of interpretation that mediated its meaning. Modern interpreters of the Analects only rarely acknowledge this legacy of two thousand years of commentaries. This book attempts to redress our neglect of commentaries by analyzing four key works dating from the late second century to the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1872 in the treaty port of Shanghai, British merchant Ernest Major founded one of the longest-lived and most successful of modern Chinese-language newspapers, the Shenbao. This book sets out to analyze how the managers of the Shenbao made their alien product acceptable to Chinese readers and how foreign-style newspapers became alternative modes of communication acknowledged as a powerful part of the Chinese public sphere within a few years.

A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants’ lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era.

This book deals with the poetic configurations of the private garden in cities from the ninth to the eleventh century in relation to the development of the private sphere in Chinese literati culture. It focuses on the ways in which the new values and rhetoric associated with gardens and the objects found in them helped shape the processes of self-cultivation and self-imaging among the literati, as they searched for alternatives to conventional values at a time when traditional political, moral, and aesthetic norms were increasingly judged inapplicable or inadequate.

This book is in some ways a biography of a city that acquired a personality, even a gender, and became an actor in its own history. Yangzhou invites attention because its place in China’s cultural iconography tells us not only of one city’s vicissitudes and fortunes but also of changes in the geography of the Chinese imagination. The author examines the city’s place in the history of the late imperial era and of the meanings that accrued to Yangzhou over time.

One of the most exciting recent developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of an extremely rich and diverse tradition of women’s writing of the imperial period. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women’s writings not only in poetry but in other genres as well, including essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.

The concepts, definitions, and interpretations of property rights, corporate structures, and business practices in contemporary China have historical, institutional, and cultural roots. In tracing the development under founder Zhang Jian (1853-1926) and his successors of the Dasheng Cotton Mill in Nantong, the author documents the growth of regional enterprises as local business empires from the 1890s until the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Although located far from the populated centers of traditional Japan, the three Kumano shrines occupied a central position in the Japanese religious landscape. This book encompasses both the historical and the ideological Kumano--not only a stage for the performance of asceticism and pilgrimage, but also a place of the imagination, a topic of literary and artistic representation. By studying Kumano’s particular religious landscape, we can better understand the larger, common religious landscape of premodern Japan.

Among the earliest and most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralized, compulsory educational system modeled after those in Europe and America. But commoners throughout Japan had established 50,000 schools with almost no guidance or support from the government. Consequently, the plan met with resistance, as local officials, teachers, and citizens pursued alternative educational visions. Their efforts ultimately led to the growth and consolidation of a new educational system, one with the imprint of local demands and expectations.

This book explores how memories of the past become traditions, and the role of these traditions in the institutional development of the noh theater from its beginnings in the fourteenth century through the late twentieth century. It focuses on the development of the key traditions that constitute the "ethos of noh," the ideology that empowered certain groups of actors at the expense of others, and how this ethos fostered noh’s professionalization. The author argues that the traditions that form the ethos of noh, such as those surrounding masks and manuscripts, are the key traits that define it as an art.

This book examines two eras of Chinese history that have commonly been viewed as periods of state disintegration or retreat. And they were--at the central level. When re-examined at the local level, however, both are revealed as periods of state building. In both the Nanjing decade of Guomindang rule (1927-1937) and the early post-Mao reform era (1980-1992), both national and local factors shaped local state building and created variations in local state structures and practices.

For many years, the Ming and Qing dynasties have been grouped as "late imperial China," a temporal framework that asserts the autonomous character of social change in China and has allowed historians to create a "China-centered history." In contrast to the late imperial paradigm, the new ways of configuring the Qing in historical time assert the singular qualities of the Qing formation.

Until 300 years ago, the Chinese considered Taiwan a "land beyond the seas," a "ball of mud" inhabited by "naked and tattooed savages." The incorporation of this island into the Qing empire in the seventeenth century and its evolution into a province by the late nineteenth century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualization of the Chinese domain. By viewing Taiwan-China relations as a product of the history of Qing expansionism, the author contributes to our understanding of current political events in the region.

This book examines the Chinese opium crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators. The study of prohibition also permits a more comprehensive and accurate observation of the economics and criminology of opium.

The eleven chapters in this volume explore the process of carving out, in discourse and in practice, the boundaries delineating the state, the civil sphere, and the family in Japan from 1600 to 1950. One of the central themes in the volume is the demarcation of relations between the central political authorities and local communities.

This book examines the development of Japanese literature depicting the native place (furusato) from the mid-Meiji period through the late 1930s as a way of articulating the uprootedness and sense of loss many experienced as Japan modernized. The book concentrates on four authors who typify this trend: Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki T’son, Sat’ Haruo, and Shiga Naoya.

Mount Tai in northeastern China has long been a sacred site. Throughout history, it has been a magnet for both women and men from all classes--emperors, aristocrats, officials, literati, and villagers. This book examines the behavior of those who made the pilgrimage to Mount Tai and their interpretations of its sacrality and history, as a means of better understanding their identities and mentalities.

If the postmodernist ethical onslaught has led to the demise of literature by exposing its political agenda, if all literature is compromised by its entanglement with power, why does literature’s subterranean voice still seduce us into reading? And what is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? In a series of essays on the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, Hosea Hirata visits the primal force of the scandalous to confront the questions raised.

The social structure of contemporary Korea contains strong echoes of the hierarchical principles and patterns governing stratification in the Choson dynasty (1392-1910): namely, birth and one’s position in the bureaucracy. As the author shows, the political disruptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, rewarded talent instead of birth. In turn, these groups’ newfound standing as part of the governing elite allowed them to break into, and often dominate, the cultural, literary, and artistic spheres as well as politics, education, and business.

Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity. This book describes a more complex picture of how the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the conceptualization of selfhood among adolescents in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. Ultimately, Aoyagi argues, idol performances substantiate capitalist values in the urban consumer society of contemporary Japan and East Asia.

The collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China were traumatic experiences for Chinese intellectuals, not only because of the many decades of destructive warfare but also because of the adjustments necessary to life under a foreign regime. The twelve chapters in this volume and the introductory essays on early Qing poetry, prose, and drama understand the writings of this era wholly or in part as attempts to recover from or transcend the trauma of the transition years.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism--the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government--Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era than is usually given.

The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text’s formation.

Kokugaku, or nativism, was one of the most important intellectual movements from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century in Japan, and its worldview continues to be influential today. The primary goal of this book is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane’s role in the creation and perpetuation of an intellectual tradition that remains a significant part of Japanese history and culture.

The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. Together, these essays construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

Focusing on the twin themes of crisis and innovation, the seventeen chapters in this book aim to illuminate the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; to analyze linkages between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and to rethink the "premodernity" of the late Ming and late Qing in the context of the end of the age of modernism.

Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.

This book argues that the study of Western medicine was a dynamic activity that brought together doctors from all over the country in efforts to effect social change. By examining the social impact of Western learning at the level of everyday life rather than simply its impact at the theoretical level, the book offers a broad picture of the way in which Western medicine, and Western knowledge, was absorbed and adapted in Japan.

This study focuses on postwar Japan’s foreign policy making in the political and security areas, the core UN missions. The intent is to illustrate how policy goals forged by national security concerns, domestic politics, and psychological needs gave shape to Japan’s complicated and sometimes incongruous policy toward the UN since World War II.

Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that characterized traditional China and worked against the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, the native-place lodges generated a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms undertaken in the early twentieth century.

This volume presents two histories of the early Korean kingdom of Paekche (trad. 18 BCE-660 CE). The first, written by Jonathan Best, is based largely on primary sources, both written and archaeological. This initial history of Paekche serves, in part, to introduce the second, an extensively annotated translation of the oldest history of the kingdom, the Paekche Annals (Paekche pon’gi).

Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. During the quarter century Huizong ruled, the greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.

Distinctive female dress styles, gender divisions of labor, and powerful same-sex networks have long distinguished villages in this coastal region of southeastern China from other rural Han communities. Intimate Politics explores these practices that have constituted eastern Hui’an residents, women in particular, as an anomaly among rural Han. This book asks what such practices have come to mean in a post-1949 socialist order that has incorporated forms of marriage, labor, and dress into a developmental scale extending from the primitive to the civilized.

The activities of Japanese advertisers helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s. This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the twentieth century. William Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of individual subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of "mass media."

Underlying all of Nanjing’s 1930s policies was a concern for the capital’s image and looks--offensive people were allowed to exist as long as they remained invisible. Zwia Lipkin exposes both the process of social engineering and the ways in which the suppressed reacted to their abuse. This book puts the poor at the center of the picture, defying efforts to make them invisible.

This study adopts a double approach to the poetry composed between the end of the first century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. It examines extant material from this period synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged. It also considers how the scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.

In Classical China, crafted artifacts offered a material substrate for abstract thought as graphic paradigms for social relationships. Focusing on the fifth to second centuries B.C., Martin Powers explores how these paradigms continued to inform social thought long after the material substrate had been abandoned. Historically, Pattern and Person traces the evolution of personhood in China from a condition of hereditary status to one of achieved social role and greater personal choice.

Compiled in 940 at the court of the kingdom of Shu, the Huajian ji is the earliest extant collection of song lyrics by literati poets. In this book, Anna Shields examines the influence of court culture on the creation of the anthology and the significance of imitation and convention in its lyrics. By illuminating the historical and literary contexts of the anthology, the author aims to situate the Huajian ji within larger questions of Chinese literary history.

This study of Chinese women in the book trade begins with three case studies, each of which probes one facet of the relationship between women and fiction in the early nineteenth century. Building on these case studies, the second half of the book focuses on the many sequels to the Dream of the Red Chamber and the significance of this novel for women. As Ellen Widmer shows, by the end of the century, women became increasingly involved in the novel as critical readers, writers, and editors.

In this continuation of the literary history of the Tang, Stephen Owen analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of styles, genres, and the voices of past poets--a repertoire that would endure.

Founded in the 1820s, the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) was one of the premier academies of the nineteenth century. In The Sea of Learning, Steven Miles examines the construction of the celebratory discourse that portrayed the Xuehaitang as having radically altered literati culture in Guangzhou. Arguing that the academy did not exist in a scholarly vacuum, Miles contends that its location embedded it in social settings and networks that determined who utilized its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.

Many scholars have noted the role of China’s demand for silver in the emergence of the modern world. This book discusses the interaction of this demand and the early-nineteenth-century Latin American independence movements, changes in the world economy, the resulting disruptions in the Qing dynasty, and the transformation from the High Qing to modern China.

During the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126), new ground was broken in aesthetic thought, particularly in the fields of art collecting, poetry criticism, connoisseurship of flowers, and the song lyric. These subjects were unprecedented when they appeared; consequently, bold exploration was coupled with anxiety about the worth of these interests, especially given the Confucian biases against these pursuits. By focusing on the “problem of beauty,” Ronald Egan calls attention to the difficulties that Northern Song innovators faced in justifying these new interests.

This book demonstrates that representations of Buddhism by lay people underwent a major change during the T’ang-Sung transition. These changes built on basic transformations within the Buddhist and classicist traditions and sometimes resulted in the use of Buddhism and Buddhist temples as frames of reference to evaluate aspects of lay society. Buddhism, far from being pushed to the margins of Chinese culture, became even more a part of everyday elite Chinese life.

As a study of Confucian government in action, State or Merchant describes a mode of public policy discussion far less dominated by the Confucian scriptures than one might expect. As a contribution to intellectual history, the work offers a detailed view of members of an ostensibly Confucian government pursuing divergent agendas around the question of "state or merchant?"

By examining how narrative strategies reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms, this work describes modern Chinese fiction’s unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the twentieth century.

Japan has long wrestled with the memories of World War II. Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts--over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea--is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory.

Forty lessons designed to introduce beginning students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.

The writer Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) has been described as a consummate stylist of classical prose, whose command of the linguistic and rhetorical riches of the premodern tradition might suggest that her writings are relics of the past with no concern for the problems of modern life. Timothy Van Compernolle investigates the social dimensions of Ichiyo’s imagination and argues that she reworked the Japanese literary tradition in order to understand and critique the emerging modernity of the Meiji period.

The history of the book in nineteenth-century Japan follows a course that resists the simple chronology often used to mark the divide between premodern and modern literary history. By examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Jonathan Zwicker traces a genealogy of the literary field across a long nineteenth century: one that stresses continuities between the generic conventions of early modern fiction and the modern novel.

During the traumatic opening decades of the Southern Sung, Emperor Kao-tsung’s unspoken determination to win imperial safety at any cost shaped not only court policy but Confucian intellectual developments. Liu explores how Kao-tsung used ideological window-dressing to consolidate extraordinary state power in the emperor’s hands.

Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. But from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry supplying much of south China through itinerant booksellers. Brokaw describes this rural, low-level operation at the end of the imperial period, tracing how Sibao’s socio-geographical character shaped and affected its progress.

From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Korean men trained for the state military examination, or mukwa. But few were actually appointed as military officials after passing the test. In this comprehensive history, Park argues that the mukwa was not only the state’s primary means of recruiting aristocrats as new members of the military bureaucracy, but also a way for the ruling elite to partially satisfy the status aspirations of marginalized regional elites, secondary status groups, commoners, and manumitted slaves.

During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) every household was expected to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and every citizen had to be given a Buddhist funeral. These customs gave rise to the danka system of funerary patronage, which became a public institution when the shogunate adopted it as an effective means of controlling the populace. In this study, Hur follows the historical development of the danka system and details the social forces, political concerns, and religious beliefs that drove this "economy of death."

Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power. Thornton maps these complex processes during three critical reform periods, and offers a historical reading of state-making as a contest between central and local regimes.

Looking at the activities of Taoist clerics in Peking, this book explores the workings of religion as a profession in one Chinese city during a period of dramatic modernization. The author focuses on ordinary religious professionals, most of whom remained obscure temple employees, showing that these Taoists were neither the socially despised illiterates dismissed in so many studies, nor otherworldly ascetics, but active participants in the religious economy of the city.

The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji has become the definitive expression of the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of life in the Heian court. But its brilliance has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to critical obscurity. D’Etcheverry calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light upon this undervalued body of work and examining three representative texts as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji.

During the sengoku era in Japan, warlords and religious institutions vied for supremacy, with powerhouses such as The Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism fanning violent uprisings of ikko ikki, bands of commoners fighting for various causes. Tsang delves into the complex relationship between these ikko leagues and the Honganji institution, arguing for a fuller picture of ikko ikki as a force in medieval Japanese history.

Between 1751 and 1784, the Qianlong emperor embarked upon six southern tours, traveling from Beijing to Jiangnan and back. These tours were exercises in political theater that took the Manchu emperor through one of the Qing empire’s most prosperous regions. This study elucidates the tensions and the constant negotiations characterizing the relationship between the imperial center and Jiangnan, which straddled the two key provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era. It also analyzes how students used the tools of civic education introduced in their schools to make themselves into young citizens, and explores the complex social and political effects of educated youths’ civic action.

Analyzing textbooks, examination questions and essays, and official and private commentary, De Weerdt examines how occupational, political, and intellectual groups shaped curricular standards and examination criteria during the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), and how examination standards in turn shaped political and intellectual agendas. These questions reframe the debate about the civil service examinations and their place in the imperial order.

In 1200, what is now southwest China--Guizhou, Yunnan, and the southern portion of Sichuan--was home to an assortment of strikingly diverse cultures and ruled by a multitude of political entities. One purpose of this book is to examine how China’s three late imperial dynasties--the Yuan, Ming, and Qing--conquered, colonized, and assumed control of the southwest. Another objective is to highlight the indigenous response to China’s colonization of the southwest, particularly that of the Nasu Yi people of western Guizhou and eastern Yunnan, the only group to leave an extensive written record.

From his birth into the lowest stratum of the samurai class to his assassination at the hands of right-wing militarists, Takahashi Korekiyo (1854-1936) lived through tumultuous times that shaped the course of modern Japan. This engaging biography underscores the profound influence of the charismatic seven-time finance minister on the political and economic development of Japan by casting new light on his unusual background, unique talents, and singular experiences.

In this critical study of Nakagami’s life and oeuvre, Zimmerman delves into the writer’s literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.

One linchpin of China’s expansion has been township and village enterprises (TVEs), a vast group of firms with diverse modes of ownership and structure. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Zhejiang, this book explores the emergence and success of rural enterprises. This study also examines how ordinary rural residents have made sense of and participated in the industrialization engulfing them in recent decades.

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon: every economy linked to international financial and commodity markets suffered. The aim of this book is not merely to show that China could not escape the consequences of drastic declines in financial flows and trade but also to offer a new perspective for understanding modern Chinese history.

This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged.

Relations between the Chosŏn and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the “traditional” Chinese “tribute system.” In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Chosŏn Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists.

Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific.

As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.

The sacred mountain oyama (literally, “Big Mountain”) has loomed over the religious landscape of early modern Japan.Ambros provides a narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the oyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts.

This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)—commonly called the Tokyo trial—established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Since Japanese sovereignty from American occupation in 1972, these islands have become the site of a complex colonial and postcolonial relationship of resistance and dependence between Okinawa, Japan, and the United States. Angst looks behind this historical and geopolitical experience by drawing upon diverse perspectives of Okinawa women from different generational and economic backgrounds.

South Korea is home to some of the largest evangelical Protestant congregations in the world. This book investigates the meaning of—and the reasons behind—a particular aspect of contemporary South Korean evangelicalism: the intense involvement of middle-class women. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul that explores the relevance of women’s experiences to Korean evangelicalism, Kelly H. Chong not only helps provide a broader picture of the evangelical movement’s success in South Korea, but addresses the global question of contemporary women’s attraction to religious traditionalism.

The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres. This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time.

Writers of late imperial fiction and drama were, Lu argues, deeply engaged with questions about the nature of the Chinese empire and of the human community. This book traces how these political questions were addressed in fiction through extreme situations: husbands and wives torn apart in periods of political upheaval, families so disrupted that incestuous encounters become inevitable, times so desperate that people have to sell themselves to be eaten.

The main theme of this book is the interaction between two “places,” China and Guanzhong, the capital area of several dynasties. This work examines how Guanzhong literati conceptualized three sets of relations: central/regional, “official”/“unofficial,” and national/local. It further traces the formation over the last millennium of the imperial state of a critical communal self-consciousness.

This volume focuses on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively.

Tao Yuanming (365?–427), although dismissed as a poet following his death, is now considered one of China’s greatest writers. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history, the mechanisms at work in the reception of his works, and the canonization of Tao himself and of particular readings of his works sheds light on the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.

Buddhism in medieval Korea is characterized as “State Protection Buddhism,” a religion whose primary purpose was to rally support (supernatural and popular) for and legitimate the state. This study is an attempt to specify Buddhism’s place in Koryo and to ascertain to what extent and in what areas Buddhism functioned as a state religion.

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924–1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of avant-garde literature. Christopher Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves—a search for identity that must take place at the level of the self and society at large.

This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control.

Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin. Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan.

Chinese officials put considerable effort into managing the fiscal and legal affairs of their jurisdictions, but they also devoted significant time and energy to performing religious rituals on behalf of the state. This groundbreaking study explores this underappreciated aspect of Chinese political life by investigating rainmaking activities organized or conducted by local officials in the Qing dynasty.

The Uyghurs, a Turkic group, account for half the population of the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture. The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, Yining’s Uyghurs express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice.

Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow author David Johnston to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival.

Throughout Chinese history mountains have been integral components of the religious landscape. Early in Chinese history a set of five mountains were co-opted into the imperial cult and declared sacred peaks, yue, demarcating and protecting the boundaries of the Chinese imperium. James Robson’s analysis of these topics demonstrates the value of local studies and the emerging field of Buddho-Daoist studies in research on Chinese religion.

This book, a condensed translation of the prize- winning Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle, focuses on “spontaneous” rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. The author shows that the predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against agents of the state, and suggests that twentieth-century Chinese peasants were less different from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French peasants than might be imagined and points to continuities between pre- and post-1949 rural protest.

How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how ­Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. Various stories about sovereignty and Chineseness and their interrelationship were told in Macau in the 1990s--this book is about those stories and how they informed the lives of Macau residents in ways that allowed different relationships among sovereignty, subjectivity, and culture to become thinkable.

Urbanization was central to development in late imperial China. Yet its impact is heatedly debated, although scholars agree that it triggered neither Weberian urban autonomy nor Habermasian civil society. Using Nanjing—a metropolis along the Yangzi River and onetime capital of the Ming—as a central case, the author demonstrates that, prompted by this unique form of urban-rural contradiction, the actions and creations of urban residents transformed the city on multiple levels: as an urban community, as a metropolitan region, as an imagined space, and, finally, as a discursive subject.

This work explores interactions between society and environment in China’s most important marine fishery, the Zhoushan Archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, from its nineteenth-century expansion to the exhaustion of the most important fish species in the 1970s. Author Micah S. Muscolino gives us a better understanding of the relationship between past ecological changes and present environmental challenges.

We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities.

In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers. Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades.

Presenting fresh insights on the internal dynamics and global contexts that shaped foreign relations in early modern Japan, Robert I. Hellyer challenges the still largely accepted wisdom that the Tokugawa shogunate, guided by an ideology of seclusion, stifled intercourse with the outside world, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This volume explores commercial relations between the United States and China from the eighteenth century until 1949, fleshing out with facts the romantic and shadowy image of "the China trade." These nine chapters by specialists in the field have developed from papers they presented at a conference supported by the national Committee on American-East Asian Relations.

Investigating the late sixteenth through the nineteenth century, this work looks at the shifting boundaries between the Choson state and the adherents of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and popular religions. The contributors argue that the power of each group and the space it occupied were determined by a dynamic interaction of ideology, governmental policies, and the group’s self-perceptions. Collectively, the volume counters the static view of the Korean Confucian state and elucidates its relationship to the wider Confucian community and religious groups.

In this wide-ranging study, Hyung Il Pai examines how archaeological finds from throughout Northeast Asia have been used in Korea to construct a myth of state formation. This myth emphasizes the ancient development of a pure Korean race that created a civilization rivaling those of China and Japan and a unified state controlling a wide area in Asia. Through a new analysis of the archaeological data, Pai shows that the Korean state was in fact formed much later and that it reflected diverse influences from throughout Northern Asia, particularly the material culture of Han China.

This work offers information that is useful to those interested in the literature, history, and general culture of medieval China. The translations bring to modern readers of English poetry the pleasures of becoming acquainted with a complex and innovative voice from the Chinese past.

One of the first, most widely-read and respected histories of Korea, Ki-baik Lee’s Han’guksa Sillon has been translated into English by Edward W. Wagner. A New History of Korea offers Western readers a distillation of the best scholarship on Korean history and culture from the earliest times to the student revolution of 1960. Translated twice into Japanese and into Chinese as well, this book is noteworthy for its full and integrated discussion of major currents in Korea’s cultural history.

Lurid depictions of sex and impotence, themes of emperor worship and violence, the use of realism and myth--these characterize the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Napier discovers surprising similarities as well as provocative dissimilarities in the work of two writers of radically different political orientations. Napier places Yukio’s and Kenzaburo’s fiction in the context of postwar Japanese political and social realities and, in a new preface for the paperback edition, reflects on each writer’s position in the tradition of Japanese literature.

Lurid depictions of sex and impotence, themes of emperor worship and violence, the use of realism and myth--these characterize the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Napier discovers surprising similarities as well as provocative dissimilarities in the work of two writers of radically different political orientations.

This work explores the potential of literary analysis for illuminating the People’s Republic of China’s social, intellectual, and political history, illustrating swings in the Party line with stories, articles, and cartoons from the popular press.

This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch’ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature as well as theorists and scholars of other languages.

Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.

P’ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. In the first book-length treatment in English of this remarkable art form, Pihl traces the history of p’ansori from its roots in shamanism and folktales through its nineteenth-century heyday under highly acclaimed masters and discusses its evolution in the twentieth century. After examining the place of p’ansori in popular entertainment and its textual tradition, he analyzes the nature of texts in the repertoire and explains the vocal and rhythmic techniques required to perform them.

W. Wayne Farris has developed the first systematic analysis of early Japanese population, the role of disease in economic development, and the impact of agricultural technology and practices. In doing so, he reinterprets the nature of ritsuryō institutions.

Richard Davis has expertly crafted a stirring narrative of the last years of Song, focusing on loyalist resistance to Mongol domination as more than just a political event. Seen from the perspective of the conquered, the phenomenon of martyrdom reveals much about the cultural history of the Song.

The realignment of the Chinese social order that took place over the course of the Sung dynasty set the pattern for Chinese society throughout most of the later imperial era. This study examines that realignment from the perspective of specific Sung families, using data on two groups of Sung elites--the grand councilors who led the bureaucracy and locally prominent gentlemen in Wu-chou (in modern Chekiang).

Unlike traditional Japanese literature, which has a rich tradition of comedy, modern Japanese literature is commonly associated with a high seriousness of purpose. In this path-breaking study, Joel Cohn analyzes works by three writers--Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993), Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), and Inoue Hisashi (1934- )--whose works constitute a relentless assault on the notion that comedy cannot be part of serious literature.

In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged as one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth.

This translation of 65 pieces from Qian Zhongshu’s Guanzhui bian (Limited Views) makes available for the first time in English a representative selection from Qian’s massive four-volume collection of essays and reading notes on the classics of early Chinese literature.

This book, the most detailed and comprehensive study of pao-chuan in any language, studies 34 early examples of this literature in order to understand the origins and development of this textual tradition. Although the work focuses on content and structure, it also treats the social context of these works as well as their transmission and ritual use.

During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of China’s elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions--some transparent, others deliberately concealed. She argues that the capacity of painting’s systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art’s vitality and longevity.

"Other than the devil, there is no Buddha; other than the Buddha, there is no devil." The Chinese monk Siming Zhili (960-1028) uttered this remark as part of his justification for his self-immolation. An exposition of the intent, implications, and resonances of this one sentence, this book expands and unravels the context in which the seeming paradox of the ultimate identity of good and evil is to be understood. In analyzing this idea, Brook Ziporyn provides an overview of the development of Tiantai thought from the fifth through the eleventh centuries in China.

This volume analyzes the representation of gender and desire in elite, male-authored literary texts in China dating from roughly 200 B.C. until 1000 A.D.

From the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the publishers of Jianyang in Fujian province played a conspicuous role in the Chinese book trade. The broad cultural, historical, and geographical scope of the Jianyang book trade makes it an ideal subject for the study of publishing in China. Based on an extensive study of Jianyang imprints, genealogies of the leading families of printers, local histories, documents, and annotated catalogs and bibliographies, Lucille Chia has written not only a history of commercial printing but also a wide-ranging study of the culture of the book in traditional China.

One of the more intriguing developments within medieval Japanese literature is the incorporation into the teaching of waka poetry of the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism. The main figure in this development was the obscure thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, grandson of the famous poet Fujiwara Teika and a priest in a tantric Buddhist sect. Tameaki’s commentaries and teachings transformed secular texts such as the Tales of Ise and poetry anthologies such as the Kokin waka shu into complex allegories of Buddhist enlightenment. These commentaries were transmitted to his students during elaborate initiation ceremonies. In later periods, Tameaki’s specific ideas fell out of vogue, but the habit of interpreting poetry allegorically continued.

By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.

Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.

Rulin waishi (The Unofficial History of the Scholars) is more than a landmark in the history of the Chinese novel. This eighteenth-century work, which was deeply embedded in the intellectual and literary discourses of its time, challenges the reader to come to grips with the mid-Qing debates over ritual and ritualism, and the construction of history, narrative, and lyricism. Wu Jingzi’s (1701-54) ironic portrait of literati life was unprecedented in its comprehensive treatment of the degeneration of mores, the predicaments of official institutions, and the Confucian elite’s futile struggle to reassert moral and cultural authority.

As traced in Words Well Put, the vision of poetic competence evolved for over a millennium from calculated performances of inherited words to sincere passionate outbursts to displays of verbal wit combining calculation with the appearance of spontaneity. This book tells the story of the development of poetic competence to uncover the complexity of the concept and to identify the sources and exemplars of that complexity.

As direct descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) and his son Teika (1162-1244), the heirs of the noble Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage spanning over eight centuries. Carter combines strands of family history, literary criticism, and historical research in a coherent narrative tracking the evolution of the Reizei Way. The book features an extensive appendix of one hundred poems by poets affiliated with the Reizei house over the years.

Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious, social, and art historians, this book seeks to recover the motivations behind the creation of religious art, including temple buildings, sculpture, and wall paintings.

The Liang dynasty (502-557) was one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and is one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era, exploring not only the literary works themselves but also the processes of literary production and the intricate interactions of religion and literature.

Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise.

Liu Zhi (ca. 1670–1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam), the Chinese-language text translated here, focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. The copious annotations to the translation explain Liu’s text and draw attention to parallels in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Persian-language works as well as differences.

In the sixteenth century, European missionaries brought a foreign and global religion to China. Converts then transformed this new religion into a local one. Focusing on the still-active Catholic communities of Fuan county in northeast Fujian, this project’s implications extend beyond the issue of Christianity in China to the wider fields of religious and social history and the early modern history of global intercultural relations.

The rise of the Mongol empire transformed world history. Its collapse in the mid-fourteenth century had equally profound consequences. Four themes dominate this study of the late Mongol empire in Northeast Asia during this chaotic era: the need for a regional perspective encompassing all states and ethnic groups in the area; the process and consequences of pan-Asian integration under the Mongols; the tendency for individual and family interests to trump those of dynasty, country, or linguistic affiliation; and finally, the need to see Koryo Korea as part of the wider Mongol empire.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature.

This timely and important collection of original essays analyzes China’s foremost social cleavage: the rural–urban gap. The contributors, many of whom conducted extensive fieldwork, examine the historical background of rural–urban relations; aspects of inequality apart from income (access to education and medical care, the digital divide, housing quality and location); experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants; and conceptual and policy debates in China regarding the status and treatment of rural residents and urban migrants.

Hideyoshi—peasant turned general, military genius, and imperial regent of Japan—is the subject of an immense legendary literature. He is best known for the conquest of Japan’s sixteenth–century warlords and the invasion of Korea. But his lasting contribution is as governor whose policies shaped the course of Japanese politics for almost three hundred years.

Constantine Vaporis challenges the notion that an elaborate and restrictive system of travel regulations in Tokugawa Japan prevented widespread travel, maintaining instead that a "culture of movement" developed in that era.

This volume seeks to shed new light on the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation that has dominated the study of Korea’s colonial period (1910-1945). The authors adopt a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. One group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class.

Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, a woodblock-printed book from 1669, re-creates a portrait gallery that memorialized 24 vassals of the early Tang court. This study examines the dialogues created among the texts and images in Lingyan ge from multiple perspectives. Anne Burkus-Chasson argues that despite a general epistemological shift toward visual forms of knowledge in the seventeenth century, looking and reading were still seen as being in conflict. This conflict plays out among the leaves of Liu Yuan’s book.

In 736, a Japanese diplomatic mission set out for Silla, on the Korean peninsula. The envoys met with adverse events and returned empty-handed. The futile journey proved fruitful in one respect: a collection of 145 Japanese poems and their Sino-Japanese headnotes and footnotes made its way into the eighth-century poetic anthology Man’yōshū, becoming one of the earliest Japanese literary travel narratives. Featuring deft translations and incisive analysis, this study investigates the poetics and thematics of the Silla sequence, uncovering what is known about the actual historical event and the assumptions and concerns that guided its re-creation as a literary artifact and then helped shape its reception among contemporary readers.

Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organization, and tactics from Japan’s early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai.

Informed by theories of nostalgia, collective memory, cultural nationalism, and gender, this book draws on the author’s extensive fieldwork in probing the practice of identity-making and the processes at work when Japan becomes "Japan."

This important new study explores the impact of Neo-Confucianism on Korean society and politics between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This study evaluates Darwin’s theory of evolution as a stimulus to Chinese political changes and philosophic challenge to traditional Chinese beliefs. Pusey bases his analysis on a survey of journals issued from 1896 to 1910 and, after a break for revolutionary action, from 1915 to 1926, with emphasis on the era between the Sino-Japanese War and the Republician Revolution.

In this anthology of translations of 612 shijo, O’Rourke introduces the English reader to this venerable and witty style of verse. The anthology covers the entire range of shijo production from the tenth century to the modern era.

This work examines the history of urban planning and administration during modern China’s first age of city-centered politics, focusing on the New Policies of the late Qing and the city administration movement of the 1920s. Through a detailed case study, based on newly available archival sources, of the process of urban reform in Chengdu, Kristin Stapleton shows how urban reformers permanently changed urban administration, the urban landscape, and urban life by promoting a new type of orderly and productive community in population centers.

Based on unpublished as well as published Chinese and British archival materials, this book focuses on the negotiations for the implementation of the commercial provision of the Treaty of Tientsin.

Imperialism, pernicious as it was in most respects, served as the prime catalyst for social change in China throughout the turbulent period from 1895 to 1913. Starting with this premise, Rhoads traces the social, political, and economic history of the republican revolution. In his view, after the Boxer uprising, the Manchu court, usually called supine and reactionary, instituted a program of reform that was a serious, comprehensive, and often successful attempt at radical social transformation.

This book documents an Islamic-Confucian school of scholarship that flourished, mostly in the Yangzi Delta, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on previously unstudied materials, it reconstructs the network of Muslim scholars responsible for the creation and circulation of a large corpus of Chinese Islamic written material--the so-called Han Kitab. Overturning the idea that participation in Confucian culture necessitated the obliteration of all other identities, this book offers insight into the world of a group of scholars who felt that their study of the Islamic classics constituted a rightful "school" within the Confucian intellectual landscape.

With references to some 50,000 articles, 17,000 books, 4,000 chapters in books, 7,000 dissertations, and 4,000 reviews, The Harvard Korean Studies Bibliography is the largest listing of Western-language publications on Korea available in CD format. The coverage spans works in all subject areas published from the eighteenth century to the present in English and other European languages using the Roman alphabet. The EndNote® software included with the CD allows searches by author, title, subject, or date of publication.

These studies examine writings by Protestant missionaries in China from 1819 to 1890. Nine historians contribute to a composite picture of the missionary pioneers, the literature they produced, the changes they sustained through immersion in Chinese culture, and their efforts to interpret that culture for their constituencies at home.

For more than a century missionaries were the main contact points between the Chinese and American peoples. Here, fourteen contributors studying both sides of the missionary effort, in China and in America, present case studies that suggest conclusions and themes for research.

Chang approaches the civilization of ancient China from the point of view of an anthropologist as well as from an archaeological perspective. This volume of nine studies deals with the Shang (1766–1122 BCE) and Chou (1122–221) civilizations and the prehistoric cultures from which they sprang.

This first comprehensive history in a Western language of the development of Japanese astronomy has interest beyond its immediate subject area, for astronomy has often been the focus of the transmission of a wide range of scientific ideas from one culture to another. Mr. Nakayama explains the historical background, with particular emphasis on the accessibility of foreign ideas at different times. The author thoroughly examines the superimposition of Western cosmology on the radically different Chinese modes of thought prevalent in Japan.

Despite the marked influence of Chinese poetry on that of the West in modem times, this book is the first full-length critical study of any major period of Chinese poetry to appear in a Western language. The period here dealt with is neither ancient China nor the medieval T’ang dynasty, from which the most numerous and most familiar previous translations have been drawn, but the era of the Sung dynasty (960-1279), of which the culture and thought were much more complex and "modern."

A common generalization about the Nationalist Government in China during the 1927-1937 decade has been that Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was closely allied with the capitalists in Shanghai. This book brings to light a different picture. The study documents major political conflicts between the capitalists and the government and demonstrates that the regime gradually suppressed the main organizations of the capitalists and gained control of many of their financial and industrial enterprises.

This study analyzes New Theses (Shinron), by Aizawa Seishisai (1781—1863), and its contribution to Japanese political thought and policy during the early– modern era. New Theses is found to be indispensable to our understanding of Japan’s transformation from a feudal to a modern state.

This is the most comprehensive introduction in English to Sinological methods and traditional Chinese historical writing. The time span ranges from earliest times to 1911, with special emphasis on the years between the third century BC and the eighteenth century.

Drawing on varied archaeological and archival sources, David B. Lurie highlights the diverse modes and uses of writing that coexisted in Japan between the first and eighth centuries. This book illuminates not only the textual practices of early Japanese civilization but also the comparative history of writing and literacy in the ancient world.

Observers have been predicting the demise of China’s Communist state since Mao’s death. Yet policymakers have managed the fastest sustained economic expansion in world history. This book shows that many contemporary techniques of governance have their roots in experimental policy generation and implementation dating to the revolution and early PRC.

The political fragmentation and constant warfare of medieval Japan did not necessarily inhibit economic growth. Rather, as this book shows, these conditions created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization, laying the groundwork for Japan’s transformation into an early modern society.

Tian, or Heaven, had been used in China since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god. Examining excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han-dynasty artisans transformed various notions of Heaven—as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky—into pictorial entities, not by what they looked at, but by what they looked into.

To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies convened a conference to consider this question: After three decades of internal strife, followed by reform, entrepreneurialism, and internationalization, is the PRC here for the dynastic long haul? This volume presents an energetic exchange of views on the topic.

In seventeenth-century China, the theater began to occupy an important ideological niche among traditional cultural elites. Notions of performance and spectatorship came to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. In Worldly Stage, Sophie Volpp sheds new light on the capacity of drama to comment on the cultural politics of the age.

Sonia Ryang casts new light on the study of North Korean culture and society by reading literary texts as sources of ethnographic data. Ryang focuses critical attention on three central themes—love, war, and self—that reflect the nearly complete overlap of the personal, social, and political realms in North Korean society.

Jun Uchida draws on previously unused materials in multi-language archives to uncover the obscured history of the Japanese civilians who settled in Korea between 1876 and 1945, with particular focus on the first generation of “pioneers” between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated Japan’s colonial presence on the Korean peninsula.

Maclachlan analyzes the institutions, interest groups, and leaders involved in the evolution of Japan’s postal system from the early Meiji period until 2010. At the crux of her analysis is Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō’s crusade to privatize Japan’s postal services, one of the most astonishing political achievements in postwar Japanese history.

This study investigates the Japanese experiment with financial imperialism—or “yen diplomacy”—at several key moments between the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and how these practices impacted the development of receiving nations and defined their geopolitical position in the postcolonial world.

Originally published simultaneously in Chinese and Japanese in 2006, this volume brings to English-language readers the fruits of a critical long-term project by Chinese and Japanese historians addressing contentious issues in their shared modern histories.

This study revolves around the poet Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), who wrote at the height of one of the most transformative periods in Chinese literary history, the Northern Song (960–1126). Wang examines how the emerging print culture of the period shaped the poetic theory and practice of Huang and the Jiangxi School of Poetry he founded.

In this first systematic study in English of the highly influential yet overlooked thinker Xue Xuan (1389–1464), author Khee Heong Koh seeks to redress Xue’s marginalization while showing how a study interested mainly in “ideas” can integrate social and intellectual history to offer a broader picture of history.

This book explores two important moments of dislocation in Chinese history, the early medieval period (317–589 CE) and the nineteenth century. Tian juxtaposes a rich array of materials from these two periods in comparative study, linking these historical moments in their unprecedented interactions, and intense fascination, with foreign cultures.

This examination of the transnational film star system and the formation of historically important film stars casts new light on Japanese modernity between the 1910s and 1930s. Fujiki illustrates how film stardom emerged and evolved, looking at the production, representation, circulation, and reception of performers’ images in film and other media.

In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang investigates the visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to earlier and later times. Huang shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the usual dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design.

Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as mere propaganda, not only was liked in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. Considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art from the point of view of its longue durée, Mittler suggests that it built on a tradition of earlier art works, which allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory.

Kim explores the dynamic relationship between Korean and Japanese Buddhists in the years leading up to the Japanese annexation of Korea. Conventional narratives portray Korean Buddhists as complicit in the religious annexation of the peninsula, but this view fails to account for the diverse visions, interests, and strategies that drove both sides.

Jung-Sun N. Han examines the role of liberal intellectuals in reshaping transnational ideas and internationalist aspirations into national values and imperial ambitions in early twentieth-century Japan. Han’s focus is on the ideas and activities of Yoshino Sakuzo (1878–1933), who was a champion of prewar Japanese liberalism and Taisho democracy.

Satoru Saito examines the similarities between detective fiction and the novel in prewar Japan. Arguing that interactions between the genres were critical moments of literary engagement, Saito demonstrates how detective fiction provided a framework through which to examine and critique Japan’s literary formations and its modernizing society.

Koreans and Burakumin, two of the largest minority groups in modern Japan, share a history of discrimination that spans the decades of Japan’s modernization and imperial expansion. Jeffrey Paul Bayliss explores the historical processes that cast them as “others” on the margins of the Japanese empire and that also influenced their views of themselves.

Bossler traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries by examining three critical categories of women: courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives. Bossler illustrates how these groups intersected and interacted with men, influencing the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Strict decrees on the observance of death were part of the myriad laws enacted under the Tokugawa shogunate to control nearly every aspect of Japanese life. Hirai explores how this class of legislation played an integrative part in Japanese society by codifying religious beliefs and customs the Japanese people had cherished for generations.

Practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan’s legal modernity in ways the samurai and the state could not. Tracing law regimes from Edo to Meiji, Flaherty shows how the legal profession emerged as a force for change in modern Japan, founding private universities and political parties, and contributing to twentieth-century legal reform.

South Korea was one of the poorest economies on the planet after the Korean War; by the twenty-first century, it had become a middle-income country, home to some of the world’s leading industrial corporations. From Miracle to Maturity offers an analysis of Korea’s remarkable economic growth and considers whether its economy is now underperforming.

In the late 1800s, Japanese leaders invited Unitarian missionaries to Japan to further modernization. Mohr looks at the debates sparked by the encounter between Unitarianism and Buddhism and considers how the idea of “universal truth” was used by both missionaries and by Japanese intellectuals and religious leaders to promote their own agendas.

In Four Cries of a Gibbon by the late-Ming dynasty playwright Xu Wei, characters move between life and death, and male and female, as they seek to articulate who they truly are. In this first critical study and annotated translation, Kwa considers how Wei’s exploration of identity paved the way for further reflection in later fiction and drama.

China’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented explosion in the production of woodblock-printed books. This volume considers what a wide range of late Ming books reveal about their readers’ ideas of a pleasurable private life, as well as their orientations toward early modernity and toward traditional Chinese sources of authority.

This new edition of Wilkinson’s bestselling manual of Chinese history includes one million words of new text. Introducing students to various transmitted, excavated and artifactual sources from prehistory to the twentieth century, this new manual also examines those sources’ originating contexts, and the associated problems of interpreting them.

Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors in the early twentieth century encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by staging tensions between Japan’s newly heteronormative culture and the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse.

The earliest anthology of Chinese poetry, the Book of Poems, has served as an ideal of literary perfection and also a major subject of literary criticism since imperial times. Bruce Rusk unravels the competitive, mutually influential relationship through which classical and literary scholarship on the poems co-evolved from the Han dynasty to the Qing.

This detailed study investigates the early decades of Protestant missionary work in one of the important provincial capitals of China.

This study of World War I diplomacy concerning China covers in detail the outbreak of the war in the Far East; China’s attempt to join the allies in 1915; the secret agreements during 1917 between Japan and Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia; and later negotiations relative to China’s entry into the war.

Published in 1931 and revised in 1943, this small, but comprehensive dictionary contains 7,773 Chinese characters and 104,000 compounds taken from the classics, general literature, magazines, and newspapers. Necessary corrections in regard to pronunciation have been made; the tones of the characters have been checked; and a large number of terms have been added in order to facilitate the reading of periodicals and newspapers--whether political, economic, chemical, or military.

A reference work from one of the world’s preeminent linguists, A Comprehensive Manchu–English Dictionary substantially enlarges and revises Jerry Norman’s 1978 Concise Manchu–English Lexicon. With hundreds of new entries and a new introduction on pronunciation and script, it will become the standard English-language resource on the Manchu language.

Variously translated as customs, morals, and daily life, the Japanese term fūzoku was prominent in legal and popular discourse of the Tokugawa era (1600–1868). Customizing Daily Life explores the intense cultural struggle among government officials, journalists, historians, and activists to define and preserve fūzoku as Japan modernized after 1868.

Income Inequality in Korea explores the relationship between economic growth and social developments over the last three decades. Analyzing equalizing trends in the 1980s to early 1990s and reversals since the 1997–1998 financial crisis, the authors examine the growing gap between rich and poor in Korea and offer solutions for reducing inequality.

One of the central literary texts of the Heian period (794–1185), Tales of Ise has inspired extensive commentary. Offering a comprehensive history of the work’s reception, Jamie L. Newhard reveals the ideological and aesthetic issues shaping criticism over the centuries as the audience for classical Japanese literature expanded beyond the aristocracy.

Sho Konishi traces the emergence from 1860 to 1930 of transnational networks of Russian and Japanese “cooperatist anarchists” devoted to creating a state-free society. Arguing that this radical movement forms one of the intellectual foundations of modern Japan, Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that challenges Western narratives.

The Real Modern examines three Korean authors of the 1930s—Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun—whose works critique competing modes of literary representation in the period of Japanese colonial rule. A re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context, it sheds new light on the relationship between political discourse and aesthetics.

The dominant literary genre in Song dynasty China, shi poetry reflected profound changes occurring in Chinese culture from 960–1279. Michael A. Fuller traces the intertwining of shi poetry and Neo-Confucianism that led to the cultural synthesis of the last years of the Southern Song and set the pattern of Chinese society for the next six centuries.

David M. Robinson explores how grand displays like the royal hunt, archery contests, and the imperial menagerie were presented in literature and art in the early Ming dynasty. He argues these spectacles were highly contested sites where emperors and court ministers staked competing claims about rulership and the role of the military in the polity.