This month John Clark, author of Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past, was at Turtle Bay Resorts’s Surfer, The Bar, as part of the TalkStorySeries with Jodi Wilmott.
Author: stephchun
Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi
While confessing his love to fellow writer Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) had a child (future sculptor Isamu Noguchi) with his editor, Léonie Gilmour; became engaged to Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes; and upon his return to Japan married Matsu Takeda—all within a span of seven years. According to Amy Sueyoshi’s Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi, Noguchi was not a dedicated polyamorist: He deliberately deceived the three women, to whom he either pretended or promised marriage while already married. Sueyoshi argues further that Noguchi’s intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated America’s literary and arts community. As Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences, his affairs additionally assert how Japanese in America could forge romantic fulfillment during a period historians describe as one of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California.
“There is no question that Amy Sueyoshi is a very gifted historian who has mined every available source on Yone Noguchi. Her work is as exhaustive and deep in its interrogation of the extant literature as one could possibly hope for. Moreover, it has placed the life history of Yone Noguchi in a broad sweep of various fields of academic inquiry that gives his particular experiences relevance well beyond the field of Asian American history. The story of this rather unknown and unremarkable poet is rife with intellectual and academic meaning well beyond the significance of a late nineteenth-century historical biography.” —Tomas Almaguer, San Francisco State University
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3497-5 / $40.00 (CLOTH)
A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan
Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan, by Martin Dusinberre, tells the story of Kaminoseki, a small town on Japan’s Inland Sea. Once one of the most prosperous ports in the country, Kaminoseki fell into profound economic decline following Japan’s reengagement with the West in the late nineteenth century. Using a recently discovered archive and oral histories collected during his years of research in Kaminoseki, Martin Dusinberre reconstructs the lives of households and townspeople as they tried to make sense of their changing place in the world. In challenging the familiar story of modern Japanese growth, Dusinberre provides important new insights into how ordinary people shaped the development of the modern state.
“This is superb historical writing with a purpose and I expect Hard Times in the Hometown to become not only required reading in economic and social history classes but essential for scholars who have been grappling with issues of understanding the historical weaknesses of Japanese civil society. In short, I am so bold as to claim that Dusinberre’s book will become an instant classic in Japanese history and essential reading for anthropologists and political scientists.” —Harald Fuess, professor for cultural economic history, Heidelberg University
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3524-8 / $55.00 (CLOTH)
New Religions, Media, and Authority in Occupied Japan
Celebrity Gods: New Religions, Media, and Authority in Occupied Japan, by Benjamin Dorman, focuses on the leaders and founders (kyōsō) of Jiu and Tenshō Kōtai Jingū Kyō, two new religions of Japan’s immediate postwar period that received substantial press attention.
Looking back for precursors to the postwar relationship of new religions and media, Benjamin Dorman explores the significant role that the Japanese media traditionally played in defining appropriate and acceptable social behavior, acting at times as mouthpieces for government and religious authorities. Using the cases of Renmonkyō in the Meiji era and Ōmotokyō in the Taishō and Shōwa eras, Dorman shows how accumulated images of new religions in pre-1945 Japan became absorbed into those of the immediate postwar period. Given the lack of formal religious education in Japan, the media played an important role in transmitting notions of acceptable behavior to the public. He goes on to characterize the leaders of these groups as “celebrity gods,” demonstrating that the media, which were generally untrained in religious history or ideas, chose to fashion them as “celebrities” whose antics deserved derision.
Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3621-4 / $42.00 (CLOTH)
Published in association with the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University
Ethnoburb Now Available in Paperback
Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies’ Book Award in Social Sciences, Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America, by Wei Li, provides a new model for the analysis of ethnic and racial settlement patterns in the United States and Canada. Ethnoburbs—suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas—are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual, and often multinational communities in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration but does not necessarily constitute a majority. Li documents the processes that have evolved with the spatial transformation of the Chinese American community of Los Angeles and that have converted the San Gabriel Valley into ethnoburbs in the latter half of the twentieth century, and she examines the opportunities and challenges that occurred as a result of these changes.
“A thought-provoking and well-executed book. The built environment is among the most reliable indicators of who people are and what they want, and Li has persuasively demonstrated key aspects of some dramatic transformations.” —The Geographical Review
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3671-9 / $25.00 (PAPER)
Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan
Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan, by Luke S. Roberts, offers a cultural approach to understanding the politics of the Tokugawa period, at the same time deconstructing some of the assumptions of modern national historiographies. Deploying the political terms uchi (inside), omote (ritual interface), and naisho (informal negotiation)—all commonly used in the Tokugawa period—the author explores how daimyo and the Tokugawa government understood political relations and managed politics in terms of spatial autonomy, ritual submission, and informal negotiation.
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3513-2 / $49.00 (CLOTH)
Women’s Movements and the Filipina
Women’s Movements and the Filipina: 1986–2008, by Mina Roces, is about a fundamental aspect of the feminist project in the Philippines: rethinking the Filipino woman. It focuses on how contemporary women’s organizations have represented and refashioned the Filipina in their campaigns to improve women’s status by locating her in history, society and politics; imagining her past, present and future; representing her in advocacy; and identifying strategies to transform her. The drive to alter the situation of women included a political aspect (lobbying and changing legislation) and a cultural one (modifying social attitudes and women’s own assessments of themselves). In this work the author examines the cultural side of the feminist agenda: how activists have critiqued Filipino womanhood and engaged in fashioning an alternative woman.
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3499-9 / $55.00 (CLOTH)
Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War
Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945-1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach, by Christopher E. Goscha, is the first in English to provide a comprehensive account to date of one of the most important conflicts of the twentieth century. Over 1,600 entries offer in-depth, expert coverage of the war in all its dimensions.
“This is the first dictionary about Vietnam in any language to mine French and Vietnamese sources in equal measure. It ranges beyond Vietnamese and French participants to provide equally incisive entries on British, Chinese, Lao, Cambodian, American, and Soviet actors in a war that took on important international dimensions. The prodigious amount of research that Goscha has put into this dictionary makes it a milestone in the field, a reference work that will be consulted for decades.” —David G. Marr, Australian National University
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3604-7 / $175.00 (CLOTH)
UH Press Authors Presenting at ASAO Annual Meeting
UH Press authors Elfriede Hermann, Niko Besnier, Margeret Jolly, Susanne Kuehling, Glenn Petersen, Julianna Flinn, and Jan Rensel, among others, will be among the scholars presenting at this year’s ASAO (Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania) meeting in Portland, February 7–11. The Press will have on display about two dozen titles, order forms, book flyers, and a new PIMS (Pacific Islands Monograph Series) brochure.
Mahalo to Jan Rensel, shown here at last year’s meeting, for lending a hand at the book exhibit.
Second Volume of Remembering Simplified Hanzi Now Available
Remembering Simplified Hanzi 2, by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson, is the second of two volumes designed to help students learn the meaning and writing of the 3,000 most frequently used simplified Chinese characters. (A parallel set of volumes has been prepared for traditional characters.) The 1,500 characters introduced in Book 1 include the top 1,000 by frequency, plus another 500 best learned at an early stage. Book 2 adds the remaining 1,500 characters to complete the set.
January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3655-9 / $29.00 (PAPER)
New Edition of Integrated Korean: Intermediate 1 Available
This is a thoroughly revised edition of Integrated Korean: Intermediate 1, the third volume of the best-selling series developed collaboratively by leading classroom teachers and linguists of Korean. All series’ volumes have been developed in accordance with performance-based principles and methodology—contextualization, learner-centeredness, use of authentic materials, usage-orientedness, balance between skill getting and skill using, and integration of speaking, listening, reading, writing, and culture. Grammar points are systematically introduced in simple but adequate explanations and abundant examples and exercises.
An accompanying workbook (forthcoming, April 2012), newly written, provides students with extensive skill-using activities based on the skills learned in the main text.
KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language
January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3650-4 / $31.00 (PAPER)
Published with the support of the Korea Foundation
Distributed for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii
Family Torn Apart: The Internment Story of the Otokichi Muin Ozaki Family, edited by Gail Honda, is the gripping story of one Hawai‘i family’s World War II odyssey. Otokichi Ozaki, a Japanese immigrant, was a Japanese language school teacher, tanka poet, and anthurium grower and also a leader of the Japanese community in the city of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Based on letters, poetry, and radio scripts in the collection of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i, and translated here for the first time, this work traces Ozaki’s incarceration at eight different detention camps, his family’s life in Hawai‘i without him, their decision to ‘voluntarily’ enter Mainland detention camps in the hope of reuniting, and their subsequent frustration as that reunion bogged down in red tape and government apathy.
January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-9761493-1-6 / $26.00 (PAPER)
Distributed for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i
