Author: UH Press

Christianity in Korea Now in Paperback

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Christianity in Korea, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Timothy S. Lee, is now available in paperback.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3206-3 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Here’s what reviewers said about the cloth edition.

“An impressively comprehensive overview of Korean Christianity. . . . An excellent guide—probably one of the best resources available in English—for the study of Korean Christianity.” —International Bulletin of Missionary Research

“This book’s collection of remarkable essays takes an interdisciplinary approach to clarifying the growth and development of Korean Christianity and the importance of this development for Korean politics, religion, gender issues, social issues, and interreligious dialogue. Since Western scholarship has mostly ignored this aspect of Korean history and the history of Christianity, this book makes an important contribution toward filling a void.” —Choice

Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey

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For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century.

Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson, is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3174-5 / $19.00 (PAPER)

The Thought War Now in Paperback

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The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, by Barak Kushner, is now available in paperback.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3208-7 / $18.00 (PAPER)

Here’s what reviewers had to say about the cloth edition.

“Completely individual and very interesting. . . . Kushner’s book is, I think, the first to treat propaganda as a profession in wartime Japan. He follows it through its various stages and is particularly interested in its popular acceptance—wartime comedy, variety shows, how entertainers sought to bolster their careers by adopting the prewar message, which then filtered down into society and took hold. Using almost entirely primary materials, which have not before been translated, Barak re-creates the wartime world in which propaganda was the truth. In so doing, he has given us an eminently readable account of an unknown aspect of the war and has defined our understanding of it.” —Donald Richie, Japan Times (Read full review)

“[The Thought War] reveals a good deal more about Japan at war than has been available heretofore in Western languages. If propaganda is understood in its classic sense of truth or falsehood deliberately spread to promote a cause, [it] detects wide evidence of it in political ideology, public relations, advertising, hortatory admonitions to citizens, and even in the coercive tactics of the thought police. This soundly researched book highlights the multiple, often ill-coordinated sources of Japan’s wartime propaganda. . . . [It] should help considerably in advancing the urgent project of defining and assessing responsibility, not only for Japan but for all combatants, and not only for World War II but for all conflicts and modes of political violence.” —Journal of Japanese Studies

“Kushner discovers that, contrary to what is usually believed, Japan’s wartime propaganda was rational, depicting Japan as a modern state. It was effective because it appealed to reason rather than to mystical nationalism or to the cult of the emperor. It presented Japan as a progressive, scientific, and hygienic country, ‘the harbinger of civilization that Asia should strive to emulate’ (p. 11). As such, Japan shouldered the obligation to liberate and lead its less fortunate neighbors. This message had a great appeal to intellectuals, who supported the war as a campaign to liberate Asia.” —Monumenta Nipponica (Access full review at Project Muse)

“The emperor figured little, Kushner notes, in Japanese propaganda. What did figure, first and foremost, was ‘modernization.’ This was the overall theme, and it was intellectually respectable. Japan was a demonstrably ‘modern’ country, the only one in Asia. It was a ‘civilizing force,’ the natural leader of a pan-Asian modernity drive. Stalinist, Nazi and fascist propaganda depended upon dictatorial force on the one hand and, in the sense that its messages could scarcely withstand intelligent scrutiny, mass intellectual self-suppression on the other. Japanese propaganda was different. It was credible. Japan had modernized; Japan was more advanced than its Asian neighbors.” —International Herald Tribune

Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture

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Due to high demand for the cloth edition, Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture, by Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor has now been made available in paperback.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3212-4 / $20.00 (PAPER)

“A bold intervention in modern Hawaiian politics, a summoning to the barricades that by its end will have you cheering. Na Kua‘aina is the inspiring story of a culture that refuses to die, of a resurgent nation poised to reclaim its embattled heritage. . . . This is no dry-as-dust tome destined for library basements, but a solidly grounded set of political demands cast in historical mode. It is good research leading to intellectually honest conclusions with real-world applications.” —Honolulu Star-Bulletin

China Review International, vol. 13, no. 1 (2006)

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CRI initialFEATURES

Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China; and Liu Haifeng, Kejuxue daolun
Reviewed by Thomas H. C. Lee, 1

Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek, editors, Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China; Myron L. Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China; and Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt, editors, Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries, and Human Geographies in Chinese History
Reviewed by Howard Giskin, 13

Inoue Hiromasa, Shindai ahen seisaku shi no kenkyū (Studies in the History of Qing Policy toward Opium)
Reviewed by Joshua A. Fogel, 43

François Jullien, Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, Translated by Sophie Hawkes
Reviewed by James D. Sellmann, 52

Hong Liu and Sin-Kiong Wong, Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics, and Socio-Economic Change, 1945–1965; Jonathan Chua with Ellen H. Palanca and Clinton Palanca, editors, Chinese Filipinos; Teresita Ang See, Go Bon Juan, Doreen Go Yu, and Yvonne Chua, editors, Tsinoy: The Story of the Chinese in Philippine Life; and Andrew R. Wilson, editor, The Chinese in the Caribbean
Reviewed by Richard T. Chu, 63

Continue reading “China Review International, vol. 13, no. 1 (2006)”

Perspectives on the Global Past

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Perspectives on the Global Past logoPerspectives on the Global Past

Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities, Yinghong Cheng (2007)

Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. by Jerry H. Bentley; Renate Bridenthal; Kären Wigen (2007)

Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World, ed. by Victor H. Mair (2005)

Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, ed. by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang (2005)

Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges

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The latest title in the series Perspectives on the Global Past looks at:

Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Karen Wigen

Book coverThe world’s seas and oceans have played roles of great significance in world history, serving variously as highways of trade, routes of migrations, lifelines of empires, spawning grounds of creole cultures, and venues of opportunity for pirates and smugglers. Yet historians have only recently begun to chart the experiences of maritime regions in rich detail and penetrate the historical processes at work there. Seascapes makes a major contribution to these efforts by bringing together original scholarship on historical issues arising from maritime regions around the world.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3027-4 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination

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The enduring popularity of Polynesia in western literature, art, and film attests to the pleasures that Pacific islands have, over the centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west—connoting solitude, release from cares, and, more recently, self-renewal away from urbanized modern life.

Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination, by Jeffrey Geiger, is the first study to offer a detailed look at the United States’ intense engagement with the myth of the South Seas just after the First World War, when, at home, a popular vogue for all things Polynesian seemed to echo the expansion of U.S. imperialist activities abroad.

“An elegant, incisive account of the early 20th century fascination with ‘Polynesianess.’ Through readings of the lives, interactions, and cultural productions of a group of influential ‘ethnographic’ writers and film makers—whose refiguring of South Seas myths registered anxieties about modernity—Geiger appreciates complexities within an emergent, distinctively modernist, U.S. imperial imagination. Meticulously researched, and lucid in its applications of film, postcolonial, and gender theories, Geiger’s book is at once the most thorough account of its subject to date and the most theoretically rewarding.” —Paul Lyons, author of American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3066-3 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

Remembering the Kana

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Following on the phenomenal success of Remembering the Kanji, James W. Heisig has prepared a companion volume for learning the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of modern Japanese: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each. In six short lessons of about twenty minutes, each of the two systems of “kana” writing are introduced in such a way that the absolute beginner can acquire fluency in writing in a fraction of the time normally devoted to the task.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3164-6 / $15.00 (PAPER)

Remembering the Kanji

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Anyone who has tried to learn to read and write Chinese characters ends up using a variety of ways to remember the component parts. Several books propose different kinds of memory aids to help kanji learners. In Remembering the Kanji 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters, James W. Heisig offers his own bag of effective tricks.

The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in such a way as to make them both easy to remember. It is intended not only for the beginner, but also for the more advanced student looking for some relief from the constant frustration of how to write the kanji and some way to systematize what he or she already knows. The author begins with writing because–contrary to first impressions–it is in fact the simpler of the two. He abandons the traditional method of ordering the kanji according to their frequency of use and organizes them according to their component parts or “primitive elements.” Assigning each of these parts a distinct meaning with its own distinct image, the student is led to harness the powers of “imaginative memory” to learn the various combinations that result. In addition, each kanji is given its own key word to represent the meaning, or one of the principal meanings, of that character. These key words provide the setting for a particular kanji’s “story,” whose protagonists are the primitive elements.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3165-3 / $32.00 (PAPER)

The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga

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One of Japan’s most renowned intellectuals, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) is perhaps best known for his notion of mono no aware, a detailed description of the workings of emotions as the precondition for the poetic act. As a poet and a theoretician of poetry, Norinaga had a keen eye for etymologies and other archaeological practices aimed at recovering the depth and richness of the Japanese language.

The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, translated and edited by Michael F. Marra, contains his major works on the Yamato region—the heartland of Japanese culture—including one of his most famous poetic diaries, The Sedge Hat Diary (Sugagasa no Nikki), translated into English here for the first time.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3078-6 / $57.00 (CLOTH)

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