Author: stephchun

Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty

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One of the most influential artists working in the genre of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) in late-eighteenth-century Japan, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?–1806) was widely appreciated for his prints of beautiful women. In images showing courtesans, geisha, housewives, and others, Utamaro made the practice of distinguishing social types into a connoisseurial art. In Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty, Julie Nelson Davis makes a close study of selected print sets, and by drawing on a wide range of period sources reinterprets Utamaro in the context of his times.

February 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3199-8 / $65.00 (CLOTH)

Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka

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Despite the existence of about a thousand ethnolinguistic groups in Southeast Asia, very few historians of the region have engaged the complex issue of ethnicity. Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka, by Leonard Y. Andaya, takes on this concept and illustrates how historians can use it both as an analytical tool and as a subject of analysis to add further depth to our understanding of Southeast Asian pasts. Following a synthesis of some of the major issues in the complex world of ethnic theory, the author identifies two general principles of particular value for this study: the ideas that ethnic identity is an ongoing process and that the boundaries of a group undergo continual—if at times imperceptible—change based on perceived advantage.

“This is a marvelous book. In the widest sense it is a history not merely of ethnicity, but of economy, politics, and culture—as close to a total history of the western (and central) archipelago during two millennia as we are likely to have for some time. Andaya’s mastery of local geography, economic rhythms, commercial organization, political culture, elite family networks, literary production, and religious currents is apparent throughout the text and, together with his control of the diverse secondary literature and expertise in Dutch and Malay primary materials, gives his work a unique authority.” —Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3189-9 / $58.00 (CLOTH)

Selected Works by Epeli Hauofa

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We Are Ocean, is a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry by Epeli Hau‘ofa, whose writing over the past three decades has consistently challenged prevailing notions about Oceania and prescriptions for its development. He highlights major problems confronted by the region and suggests alternative perspectives and ways in which its people might reorganize to relate effectively to the changing world.

Hau‘ofa’s essays criss-cross Oceania, creating a navigator’s star chart of discussion and debate. Spurning the arcana of the intellectual establishments where he was schooled, Hau‘ofa has crafted a distinctive—often lyrical, at times angry—voice that speaks directly to the people of the region and the general reader. He conveys his thoughts from diverse standpoints: university-based analyst, essayist, satirist and humorist, and practical catalyst for creativity. According to Hau‘ofa, only through creative originality in all fields of endeavor can the people of Oceania hope to strengthen their capacity to engage the forces of globalization.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3173-8 / $22.00 (PAPER)

Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s

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Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, is the first intensive study of Japanese cinema at a time when the country’s film industry was at its most prolific and when cinema played a singular role in shaping Japanese modernity. During the interwar period, the signs of modernity were ubiquitous in Japan’s urban architecture, literature, fashion, advertising, popular music, and cinema. The reconstruction of Tokyo following the disastrous earthquake of 1923 high lighted the extent of this cultural transformation, and the film industry embraced the reconfigured space as an expression of the modern. Shochiku Kamata Film Studios (1920–1936), the focus of this study, was the only studio that continued filmmaking in Tokyo following the city’s complete destruction. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points to the influence of the new urban culture in Shochiku’s interwar films, acclaimed as modan na eiga, or modern films, by and for Japanese.

“Devastated by the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo re-built itself in symbiosis with an image of modernity concocted by its own film studios. Nippon Modern renders that image, aspect after fascinating aspect, in sharp detail. Scores of films make up that image, a few resurrected in this volume for intense and delightful analysis. A sensitive viewer and an honest resourceful historian, Wada-Marciano lays out what she’s found in relation to other studies of this precious period, and she does so without hyperbole and without a glaring agenda. She makes you understand how, after Tokyo would again be devastated in 1945, these ‘modern’ films could become objects of nostalgia. Such is the care she gives her subject and such the fragility of that subject.” —Dudley Andrew, Yale University

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3182-0 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

Stephanie Feeney Book Signings in February

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Popular Hawai‘i children’s author Stephanie Feeney will be signing copies of her recently published book, Sun and Rain: Exploring Seasons in Hawai‘i, at:

Borders Waikele, Sunday, February 10, 12:00 noon
Borders Pearlridge, Sunday, February 10, 2:00 pm
Barnes & Noble Kahala Mall, Sunday, February 17, 12:00 noon

In addition to Sun and Rain, Dr. Feeney is the author of best sellers A Is for Aloha, Hawaii Is a Rainbow, and Sand to Sea: Marine Life in Hawaii. To order all of these titles and other selected children’s books at 20% off in January and February, please visit the University of Hawai‘i Press website by clicking here.

Jon Van Dyke Discussion and Book Signing

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University of Hawai‘i law professor Jon Van Dyke will be discussing his recently published book, Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i?, at the Ward Warehouse Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i on Sunday, January 27, 2008, from 3 to 5 pm. This free, public event will bring together interested persons in the community to focus on the complex legal history of Hawai‘i public lands and the questions raised by the book, such as: Could the Crown Lands form the core of a land base for an emerging Native Hawaiian nation? What about the lands in the private Ali‘i trusts? A book signing, light refreshments, and informal discussion will follow.

This month order a copy of Professor Van Dyke’s book at 20% off from the University of Hawai‘i Press website by clicking here.

Remembering the Kanji 2 and 3 Now Available

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Following James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1, the second volume,
Remembering the Kanji 2: A Systematic Guide to Reading the Japanese Characters, takes up the pronunciation of characters and provides students with helpful tools for memorizing them. Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3166-0 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Students who have learned to read and write the basic 2,000 characters run into the same difficulty that university students in Japan face: The government-approved list of basic educational kanji is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialization requires supplementary kanji of its own, a large number of these kanji overlap. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 have been applied to 1,000 additional characters determined as useful for upper-level proficiency, and the results published as the third volume in the series, Remembering the Kanji 3: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency, by James W. Heisig and Tanya Sienko.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3167-7 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Also available from University of Hawai‘i Press: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each.

The Shaolin Monastery

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The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts, by Meir Shahar, charts, for the first time in any language, the history of the Shaolin Temple and the evolution of its world-renowned martial arts. In this meticulously researched and eminently readable study, Shahar considers the economic, political, and religious factors that led Shaolin monks to disregard the Buddhist prohibition against violence and instead create fighting techniques that by the twenty-first century have spread throughout the world. He examines the monks’ relations with successive Chinese regimes, beginning with the assistance they lent to the seventh-century Emperor Li Shimin and culminating more than a millennium later with their complex relations with Qing rulers, who suspected them of rebellion. He reveals the intimate connection between monastic violence and the veneration of the violent divinities of Buddhism and analyzes the Shaolin association of martial discipline and the search for spiritual enlightenment.

“Written in clear and lucid style and ambitious both in scope and methodology, this book offers a fascinating window into Chinese culture, religion, and history. Ranging from historical and ethnographic documents to a wide variety of literary sources, it weaves them all into a compelling narrative. In this fashion, Shahar is uniquely able to bring together social, historical, and mythological elements, providing a demythologized account of martial Chinese traditions such as Shaolin Boxing. This is sinology at its best.”—Bernard Faure, Columbia University

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3110-3 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face

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In Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China, Christine Mollier reveals previously unexplored dimensions of the interaction between Buddhism and Taoism in medieval China. While scholars of Chinese religions have long recognized the mutual influences linking the two traditions, Mollier here brings to light their intense contest for hegemony in the domains of scripture and ritual. Drawing on a far-reaching investigation of canonical texts, together with manuscript sources from Dunhuang and the monastic libraries of Japan—many of them studied here for the first time—she demonstrates the competition and complementarity of the two great Chinese religions in their quest to address personal and collective fears of diverse ills, including sorcery, famine, and untimely death.

“This book exemplifies the best sort of work being done on Chinese religions today. Christine Mollier expertly draws not only on published canonical sources but also on manuscript and visual material, as well as worldwide modern scholarship, to give us the most sophisticated book-length study yet produced on the textual relations between the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. She pushes past the tired, vague, and rather innocent-sounding trope of ‘influence’ to pinpoint much more complex—and fascinating—processes of textual repackaging, hybridization, adaptation, appropriation, reframing, pirating, remodeling, and transposing. Throughout, the urgent concerns of medieval Chinese people—life, health, protection, salvation—are sensitively and elegantly evoked. Anyone interested in Chinese religions, in the ways in which religious texts are formed, and in cross-religious interactions should want to read this book.”—Robert Ford Campany, University of Southern California

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3169-1 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Modernist Fiction from Japan

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Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms “modernism” and “modernist” become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro­. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938, compiled and edited by William J. Tyler, addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938.

“Be prepared to rethink the nature of modern Japanese literature; or better still, simply read these often wondrous tales, some tall, some short, one after the other, and enjoy a remarkable, liberating moment in Japanese literary history.” —J. Thomas Rimer, professor emeritus of Japanese literature, University of Pittsburgh

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3242-1 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar

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Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar: Comprehensive Acquisition, by Yuki Johnson, is an extensive and thorough explanation of crucial Japanese grammar in English and the culmination of years of teaching and research. Informed by the work of eminent linguist Susumu Kuno, it is designed for students who have studied basic Japanese grammar and wish to better organize their knowledge and expand it in greater depth and at a higher level. Its organization presents a holistic picture of Japanese grammar for the benefit of learners and is distinctive in that grammar items are reorganized in terms of specific grammatical categories, such as particles, te-form compounds, dictionary-form compounds, stem-form compounds, passive constructions, conditional sentences, and so forth. The author offers a thorough discussion of various pragmatic constraints illustrated with sample sentences, dialogues, and essays that aid in understanding the structure and use of the language from a cultural perspective.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3176-9 / $32.00 (PAPER)

The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies Now in Paperback

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The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives, edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu, is now available in paperback.

“This collection is a seminal contribution to the longstanding concern with demographic levels and change before and following European contacts with Pacific Island societies. . . . The essays represent exemplary interdisciplinary meshings and, in developing a new level of technique for this research, remind readers of the excellence of the earlier work as well. . . . Undoubtably, this will be a basic reference in Pacific Islands scholarship. Highly recommended.” —Choice

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3148-6 / $35.00 (PAPER)

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