Author: stephchun

On the Kiso Road with Toson

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Kiso RoadThis month’s issue of Smithsonian magazine features an article by Thomas Swick on exploring Japan’s historic Kiso Road on foot. Swick is advised by his travel companion, Japan scholar Bill Wilson, to do some preliminary reading and he suggests Before the Dawn, Shimazaki Toson’s classic novel of life on the Kiso Road in the years following Perry’s arrival in 1853. Read the article and view the accompanying photos (including the one shown here) by Chiara Goia.

Before the DawnBefore the Dawn, translated by William Naff, was awarded the 1987 Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Through the life of the novel’s protagonist, Aoyama Hanzo (based on Toson’s father), a Kiso post official and rural intellectual, the novel depicts the political and social upheavals of mid-19th-century Japan.

“No other book known to me captures the feel of the Meiji period even nearly so well.” —Washington Post

“A vivid demonstration of the richness and ferment of Japan’s intellectual life.” —The New Yorker

“In Toson’s earnest and ambitious attempt to tell the story of one man’s tragedy set against the huge backdrop of the Meiji Restoration, there is an element of nobility and grandeur. And in Naff’s translation . . . this comes through.” —New York Times Book Review

“An impressive revelation of Japanese history and culture from a Japanese perspective.” —Asiaweek

UH Press will publish the definitive English-language biography of Toson, William Naff’s The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Toson, in January 2011.

Livia Kohn to Lead Daoist Workshops in May 2011

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Dr. Livia Kohn will lead two workshops in northern California in May 2011: Her popular “Daoist Immersion,” a week-long event, and “Daoist Basics” a three-day exploration of fundamental forms of Daoism. For more information and to register email liviakohn@gmail.com or call 727-501-6915.

Textbooks for both workshops include:
Daoism and Chinese Culture
Health and Long Life: The Chinese Way
Daoist Body Cultivation

Dr. Kohn is the author of many books on Taoism and Chinese religion and philosophy published by Three Pines Press, which is distributed by University of Hawai‘i Press.

Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan

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Into the LightInto the Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan, edited by Melissa L. Wender, is the first anthology to introduce the fiction of Japan’s Korean community (Zainichi Koreans) to the English-speaking world. The collection brings together works by many of the most important Zainichi Korean writers of the twentieth century, from the colonial-era “Into the Light” (1939) by Kim Sa-ryang to “Full House” (1997) by Yu Miri, one of contemporary Japan’s most acclaimed and popular authors.

“This groundbreaking anthology is urgently needed. It will be of particular interest to the growing numbers of English-language readers wanting to know about the experiences of migrants and minorities. The high-quality translations will also be useful in the classroom in a number of fields including Japanese literature and history, comparative literature, gender studies, and diaspora studies.” —Steve Rabson, professor emeritus, Brown University

October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3490-6 / $22.00 (PAPER)

Short Stories by Wakako Yamauchi

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RosebudSecret desires, unfulfilled longing, and irrepressible humor flow through the stories of Wakako Yamauchi, writings that depict the lives of Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans. Through the medium of Yamauchi’s storytelling, readers of Rosebud and Other Stories enter the world of desert farmers, factory workers, gamblers, housewives, con artists, and dreamers. Elegantly simple in words and complex in resonance, her stories reveal hidden strength, resilience, and the persistence of hope.

“Wakako Yamauchi is one of the foremothers of Asian American writing. Her prose is sharp, her voice strong, her dialogue true. Each story in Rosebud is a little gem that the reader turns slowly, sending glints of light off in unexpected directions. It is not often we get to hear the voice of an older Asian American woman in fiction, and that voice is richly present here in stories that celebrate change, memory, relationships, things that are lost . . . and kept.” —Paul Spickard, University of California, Santa Barbara

Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Intercultural Studies
October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3260-5 / $19.00 (PAPER)

A Memoir of World War II Interment in the Philippines

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Child of WarHours after attacking Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers stormed across the Philippine city of Baguio, where seven-year-old Curt Tong, the son of American missionaries, hid with his classmates in the woods near his school. Three weeks later, Curt, his mother, and two sisters were among the nearly five hundred Americans who surrendered to the Japanese army in Baguio. Child of War: A Memoir of World War II Internment in the Philippines is Tong’s touching story of the next three years of his childhood as he endured fear, starvation, sickness, and separation from his father while interned in three different Japanese prison camps on the island of Luzon. Written by the adult Tong looking back on his wartime ordeal, it offers a rich trove of memories about internment life and camp experiences.

“This unique work, a memoir written in a retrospective fashion through the eyes of a child, offers an alternate view of events surrounding the World War II internment of American civilian families by the Japanese. A pre-teen sees different aspects of life in an internment camp which adults may not notice or attach significance to, and yet they tell volumes about camp conditions, the tenor of Japanese treatment, and the nature of the various Japanese commandants. Anyone interested in issues of internment would find this rich and unusual cache of memories eye-opening.” —Frances B. Cogan, author of Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941–1945

October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3539-2 / $27.00 (PAPER)

Korean Adoptees and Their Journey toward Empowerment

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The Dance of IdentitiesKorean adoptees have a difficult time relating to any of the racial identity models because they are people of color who often grew up in white homes and communities. Biracial and nonadopted people of color typically have at least one parent whom they can racially identify with, which may also allow them access to certain racialized groups. When Korean adoptees attempt to immerse into the Korean community, they feel uncomfortable and unwelcome because they are unfamiliar with Korean customs and language. The Dance of Identities, by John D. Palmer, looks at how Korean adoptees “dance,” or engage, with their various identities (white, Korean, Korean adoptee, and those in between and beyond) and begin the journey toward self-discovery and empowerment.

Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Intercultural Studies
October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3371-8 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Latest in the ABC Chinese Dictionary Series

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ABC English-ChineseThe ABC English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary (ECCE), edited by John DeFrancis and Zhang Yanyin, is a student-oriented bilingual dictionary that, like other dictionaries in the ABC series, organizes Chinese words by their pronunciation as written in pinyin. This innovative, straightforward alphabetical organization allows the user to find most words more quickly and easily. It also facilitates the comparison of words that are pronounced similarly or identically, which is not possible in traditionally-ordered dictionaries. The series’ alphabetical ordering has been imitated in other dictionaries, but ECCE is still unique in that it offers detailed and authoritative coverage of grammar (parts of speech, constructions, and examples) and orthography (both simplified and complex characters as well as pinyin). The ECCE contains 67,633 entries: 29,670 in the English-Chinese section, 37,963 in the Chinese-English section.

The dictionary is a handy 4.5 x 7.5 inches with a plastic flexcover.

ABC Chinese Dictionary Series
October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3485-2 / $20.00 (PAPER)

Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China Now in Paperback

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Cinema, Space, and Polylocality
Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, by Yingjin Zhang, is now available in paperback. In this milestone work, Zhang, a prominent China film scholar, proposes “polylocality” as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism.

Critical Interventions
October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3408-1 / $26.00 (CLOTH)

New Catalog Available: Hawaii & the Pacific 2011

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Hawai‘i & the Pacific 2011
The UH Press Hawai‘i & the Pacific 2011 catalog is now available! To view the 3.4M PDF, click on the catalog cover image to the left. To view and print a 10.2M version, go to our catalogs page: http://uhpress.wordpress.com/latest-catalogs/.

Highlights include:
* A history of surfing compiled by John R. K. Clark and narrated primarily by native Hawaiians who wrote for the Hawaiian-language newspapers of the 1800s (Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past)
* A illustrated review of environmental concerns in Hawai‘i with an eye toward resolution by focusing on “place-based” management (Living on the Shores of Hawai‘i: Natural Hazards, the Environment, and Our Communities)
* The inaugural volume of the Race and Ethnicity in Hawai`i series (Haoles in Hawai`i)
* An eye-opening look at the relationship between surfing and colonialism in Hawai‘i (Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i)
* A new anthology of contemporary Polynesian poetry in English, co-edited by Albert Wendt (Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English)
* A collection of short stories by Wakako Yamauchi,“ one of the foremothers of Asian American writing” (Rosebud and Other Stories)
* A text that raises key questions about the capacity of pattern across the Pacific to bind and sustain ideas about place, body, and genealogy (Lines That Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific)

Commodification, Tourism, and Performance

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Consuming KoreanContributors to Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance, edited by Laurel Kendall, explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional “us.” They describe the multifaceted ways “tradition” is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditized goods and services first appeared in the colonial period in such spectacular and spectacularly foreign forms as department stores, restaurants, exhibitions, and staged performances. Today, these same forms have become the media through which many Koreans consume “tradition” in multiple forms.

September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3393-0 / $46.00 (CLOTH)

Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War

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In Buddha's CompanyIn Buddha’s Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, by Richard A. Ruth, explores a previously neglected aspect of the Vietnam War: the experiences of the Thai troops who served there and the attitudes and beliefs that motivated them to volunteer. Thailand sent nearly 40,000 volunteer soldiers to South Vietnam to serve alongside the Free World Forces in the conflict, but unlike the other foreign participants, the Thais came armed with historical and cultural knowledge of the region. Blending the methodologies of cultural and military history, Ruth examines the individual experiences of Thai volunteers in their wartime encounters with American allies, South Vietnamese civilians, and Viet Cong enemies. Ruth shows how the Thais were transformed by living amongst the modern goods and war machinery of the Americans and by traversing the jungles and plantations haunted by indigenous spirits. At the same time, Ruth argues, Thailand’s ruling institutions used the image of volunteers to advance their respective agendas, especially those related to anticommunist authoritarianism.

“From 1965 to 1972 Thailand sent nearly 38,000 military personnel to fight in the Vietnam War. Based on interviews with rank and file volunteers, who saw themselves as Buddhist warriors, this book is the first serious study of Thailand’s involvement in the war. Richard Ruth challenges the stereotypes and lazy generalizations about this forgotten episode of the war, and he offers fresh and compelling arguments to explain how this episode has contributed to the militarism in Thailand’s modern history.” —Craig J. Reynolds, Australian National University

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3489-0 / $24.00 (PAPER)

The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand

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Bounding the MekongTransnational economic integration has been described by globalization boosters as a rising tide that will lift all boats, an opportunity for all participants to achieve greater prosperity through a combination of political cooperation and capitalist economic competition. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has championed such rhetoric in promoting the integration of China, Southeast Asia’s formerly socialist states, and Thailand into a regional project called the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). But while the GMS project is in fact hastening regional economic integration, Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand, by Jim Glassman, shows that the approach belies the ADB’s idealized description of “win-win” outcomes. The process of “actually existing globalization” in the GMS does provide varied opportunities for different actors, but it is less a rising tide that lifts all boats than an uneven flood of transnational capitalist development whose outcomes are determined by intense class struggles, market competition, and regulatory battles.

“This book provides a powerful expose of the hollowness of much of the mainstream institutional discourse on free markets and region-making, as well as the ideological underpinnings of the agendas of the Asian Development Bank and the naturalizing discourse that sees states and regulation as somehow an aberration. Glassman’s analysis is highly original and brings a fresh approach to a region about which a lot has been written in recent years. The theoretical underpinning of the scholarship is more than just sound—it is a tour de force. The book fills an important niche in bringing well theorized analysis to a specifically contextualized region.” —Philip Hirsch, University of Sydney

September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3444-9 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

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