Childs Gallery in Boston is presenting a career-defining retrospective of works by Ben Norris to celebrate the recent publication of Ben Norris: American Modernist, 1910-2006, distributed by University of Hawai‘i Press for Copley Square Press. The exhibit runs to November 14, 2009. For more information, contact Childs Gallery, 169 Newbury Street, Boston, MA, 02116, 617-266-1108, email: info@childsgallery.com.
Work from the retrospective can be viewed here.
Available for the first time in English, The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan, translated by Maki Hirano Hubbard, is Lee Yeounsuk’s award-winning look at the history and ideology behind the construction of kokugo (national language). Prior to the Meiji Period (1868–1912), the idea of a single, unified Japanese language did not exist. Only as Japan was establishing itself as a modern nation-state and an empire with expanding colonies did there arise the need for a national language to construct and sustain its national identity.
Re-examining debates and controversies over genbun itchi (unification of written and spoken languages) and other language reform movements, Lee discusses the contributions of Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937) and Hoshina Koichi (1872–1955) in the creation of kokugo and moves us one step closer to understanding how the ideology of kokugo cast a spell over linguistic identity in modern Japan. She examines the notion of the unshakable homogeneity of the Japanese language—a belief born of the political climate of early-twentieth-century Japan and its colonization of other East Asian countries—urging us to pay attention to the linguistic consciousness that underlies “scientific” scholarship and language policies. Her critical discussion of the construction of kokugo uncovers a strain of cultural nationalism that has been long nurtured in Japan’s education system and academic traditions. The ideology of kokugo, argues Lee, must be recognized both as an academic apparatus and a political concept
October 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3305-3 / $58.00 (CLOTH)
The UH Press 2010 Hawai‘i and the Pacific catalog is now available! To download the 5.6M PDF, go to https://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/catalogs/HP2010.pdf.
Christine Yano and George Tanabe, Jr., are the hosts of Thinking Out Loud, a weekly radio program presented by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i (JCCH). Thinking Out Loud airs every Monday, 6:30-7:30 pm, on KZOO-AM 1210, Hawai‘i’s only Japanese-language radio station.
Each week Yano and Tanabe explore an issue of concern to the Japanese American and broader community in Hawai’i. Listeners are encouraged to call in or email questions and comments. Past guests have included Warren Nishimoto on oral history and UH Press’ very own Norman Kaneshiro on Okinawan performing arts. Once a month Thinking Out Loud presents the JCCH Book Club, hosted by Willa Jane Tanabe, who leads a lively discussion with a special guest and the audience on a book of the month.
Future UH Press guest authors and featured books on Thinking Out Loud:
Ann Bayer: Public Education in Hawai’i (September 14)
Tom Coffman: JCCH Book Club featuring The Island Edge of America (September 28)
Craig Howes & Vicky Kneubuhl: Koji Ariyoshi and the Invention of Local Identity (October 12)
Herbert Tanaka: JCCH Book Club featuring California Hotel and Casino: Hawai‘i’s Home Away from Home by Dennis Ogawa (November 30)
For show details, schedule, and downloadable archive: http://jcch.com/thinking-out-loud.asp.
Read the Honolulu Star-Bulletin article: http://www.starbulletin.com/features/20090817_Keep_talking_keep_thinking.html.
Photo by Jamm Aquino/Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion, an enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism, makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing.
“Laurel Kendall has written a study of contemporary Korean shamans that is both entertaining and enlightening. Most studies of the topic treat shamans as an anachronistic remnant of the past. Kendall challenges that approach, drawing on several decades of close observation of shamans in action to reveal how shamanism is constantly evolving. It is an important work that will appeal to a wide audience.” —Don Baker, University of British Columbia
September 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3343-5 / $49.00 (CLOTH)
Among the most exciting developments in the study of Japanese religion over the past two decades has been the discovery of tens of thousands of ritual vessels, implements, and scapegoat dolls (hitogata) from the Nara (710-784) and early Heian (794-1185) periods. Because inscriptions on many of the items are clearly derived from Chinese rites of spirit pacification, it is now evident that previous scholarship has mischaracterized the role of Buddhism in early Japanese religion. Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan, by Michael Como, makes a compelling argument that both the Japanese royal system and the Japanese Buddhist tradition owe much to continental rituals centered on the manipulation of yin and yang, animal sacrifice, and spirit quelling. Building on these recent archaeological discoveries, Como charts an epochal transformation in the religious culture of the Japanese islands, tracing the transmission and development of fundamental paradigms of religious practice to immigrant lineages and deities from the Korean peninsula.
September 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-2957-5 / $48.00 (CLOTH)
All UH Press titles are now available for ordering online. Thank you again for your patience. We will be extending the 62% off sale until 4:00 pm Hawai`i standard time. Mahalo!
During the sale newer titles are showing up as out of print. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working on this problem. We will be extending the sale accordingly. Thank you for your patience.
Join us in celebrating 62 years of publishing with our 62/62 special sale. We want to thank all of our loyal customers, sponsors, colleagues, and friends by offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase UH Press books online at a special discount of 62% off the retail price, including forthcoming and just-published titles.***
Here’s the deal: On Friday, September 4, 2009, from 9:00 a.m. to 3:20 p.m. Hawai`i standard time (HST) (click here for a handy time zone converter)–for just six hours and twenty minutes–all UH Press books will be available at a 62% discount. If you splurge and purchase at least $62.00 worth of books, we’ll throw in free Surface Mail shipping in the U.S. from our warehouses in Pennsylvania and Hawai`i. (Free shipping will be calculated when your order is processed–not in the shopping cart.)
So go to our web site, www.uhpress.hawaii.edu, and put together your wish list of UH Press titles. Then be sure to log in and place your order during the six-hour-and-twenty-minute sale. Only prepaid online orders will receive the 62% discount.
***Please note that books distributed for other publishers are not eligible for the special discount although they may appear discounted in the shopping cart.
All sales are final; no returns except for defective stock. Quantities are limited to stock on hand. No other discounts or sale offers apply. Bookstores, wholesalers, libraries, and other institutions may participate in this sale. If you have any questions, please contact our order department at 888-847-7377 or at uhpbooks@hawaii.edu.
Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of witness to the historic upheavals of twentieth-century Korea. Often inspired by their own experiences, contemporary writers continue to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence—whether the uprooting of whole families from the ancestral home, life on the road as war refugees, or the violent deaths of loved ones. The Red Room: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea, translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton, brings together stories by three canonical Korean writers who examine trauma as a simple fact of life. In Pak Wan-so’s “In the Realm of the Buddha,” trauma manifests itself as an undigested lump inside the narrator, a mass needing to be purged before it consumes her. The protagonist of O Chong-hui’s “Spirit on the Wind” suffers from an incomprehensible wanderlust—the result of trauma that has escaped her conscious memory. In the title story by Im Ch’or-u, trauma is recycled from torturer to victim when a teacher is arbitrarily detained by unnamed officials. Western readers may find these stories bleak, even chilling, yet they offer restorative truths when viewed in light of the suffering experienced by all victims of war and political violence regardless of place and time.
“The characters, and the settings, in these stories are Korean. However, thanks to superb translations by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, the stories themselves are universal. They expose the devastating impact traumatic experiences have on an individual’s judgment, moral compass, and self-image long after the traumatic episodes themselves (in these stories, during the Korean War and Kwangju massacre) have faded into history. Historians often are so captivated by the Big Picture that they forget the impact of historic events on the individuals who were caught up in them. The Red Room takes us inside the heads of the traumatized, reminding us that traumatic events such as civil war damage even innocent bystanders for decades afterwards.” —Don Baker, University of British Columbia
August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3397-8 / $15.00 (PAPER)
Winner of the 2007–2008 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Our narratives of postwar Japan have long been cast in terms almost synonymous with the story of rapid economic growth. In The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan, by Scott O’Bryan, this seemingly familiar history is reinterpreted through an innovative exploration, not of the anatomy of growth itself, but of the history of growth as a set of discourses by which Japanese “growth performance” as “economic miracle” came to be articulated. The premise of O’Bryan‘s work is simple: To our understandings of the material changes that took place in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century we must also add perspectives that account for growth as a new idea around the world, one that emerged alongside rapid economic expansion in postwar Japan and underwrote the modes by which it was imagined, forecast, pursued, and regulated. In an accessible, lively style, O’Bryan traces the history of growth as an object of social scientific knowledge and as a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and imagined a newly materialist vision of social and individual prosperity.
“The Growth Idea represents a significant contribution to the emerging field of postwar Japanese history and an important step forward in the historicization of Japan’s high-speed growth of the 1950s and 1960s. It is the first and fullest treatment of the ideology of postwar growthism, of Keynesian thought in Japan, and of the development of postwar statistical practice. Well written, original, and based on first-rate scholarship, The Growth Idea approaches its subject in a fresh way that will interest specialists in Japanese history as well as others interested in Japan from a comparative perspective.” —Mark Metzler, University of Texas
August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3282-7 / $40.00 (CLOTH)
University of Hawai‘i Press will celebrate its 62nd anniversary next month with a special offer for our online customers. Please check back next week for more details! (Hint: The savings will be BIG so start making a list and clearing your bookshelves!)
