Category: Asia

Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan

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Obtaining ImagesThe Edo period (1603–1868) witnessed one of the great flowerings of Japanese art. Towards the mid-seventeenth century, the Japanese states were largely at peace, and rapid urbanization, a rise in literacy and an increase in international contact ensued. The number of those able to purchase luxury goods, or who felt their social position necessitated owning them, soared. Painters and artists flourished and the late seventeenth century also saw a rise in the importance of printmaking. Obtaining Images: Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan, by Timon Screech, introduces the reader to important artists and their work, but also to the intellectual issues and concepts surrounding the production, consumption and display of art in Japan in the Edo period.

April 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3613-9 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

New Edition of Remembering the Kanji 2 Now Available

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Remembering the Kanji 2Following the first volume of James W. Heisig’s popular series of textbooks Remembering the Kanji, this new edition of Volume 2 provides students with helpful tools for learning the pronunciation of the kanji. 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.

The 4th edition has been updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010 as “general-use” kanji. A new edition of Remembering the Kanji 3, which completes the series, will be available in Fall 2012.

April 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3669-6 / $32.00 (PAPER)

Hokkeiji Wins the John Whitney Hall Prize

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Hokkeji
Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan, by Lori Meeks, has been awarded the Association for Asian Studies’ (AAS) 2012 John Whitney Hall Prize. The award was announced at this month’s AAS annual meeting in Toronto.

Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan is a volume in the Kuroda Institute’s Studies in East Asian Buddhism series.

UH Press at Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting This Month

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Holiday Web Sale 2011

The Association for Asian Studies annual meeting is UH Press’ biggest scholarly exhibit/conference: 300 new and recent Asia books and journals will be on display and editorial and marketing staff will be attending. The Press’ publishing partners Ateneo de Manila University Press, Cornell University East Asia Program, KITLV Press, NIAS Press, NUS Press (Singapore), and University of the Philippines Press will be exhibiting in neighboring booths, in addition to newcomer MerwinAsia. See you in Toronto!

The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan

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Passionate FriendshipShōjo manga are romance comics for teenage girls. Characterized by a very dense visual style, featuring flowery backgrounds and big-eyed, androgynous boys and girls, it is an extremely popular and prominent genre in Japan. Why is this genre so appealing? Where did it come from? Why do so many of the stories feature androgynous characters and homosexual romance? Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girl’s Culture in Japan, by Deborah Shamoon, answers these questions by reviewing Japanese girls’ print culture from its origins in 1920s and 1930s girls’ literary magazines to the 1970s “revolution” shōjo manga, when young women artists took over the genre. It looks at the narrative and aesthetic features of girls’ literature and illustration across the twentieth century, both pre- and postwar, and discusses how these texts addressed and formed a reading community of girls, even as they were informed by competing political and social ideologies.

“In this engaging account, Deborah Shamoon forwards an innovative argument for taking the long view of girls’ culture. Rather than focusing narrowly on prewar or postwar production, she convincingly demonstrates the connections in theme, image, and tone that produce a genealogy of the Japanese girl (shōjo). With a keen eye to the visual representations of the shōjo, she points to the ways graphic artists express interiority, affection, and a frankly charming girlishness. She at the same time guides readers through the debates over readers’ and writers’ intentions, alleged subtexts of repression, and disparities in Western and Japanese critics’ approaches to shōjo display and fandom. Passionate Friendship is a remarkable contribution to the growing field of Girl Studies.”—Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina

March 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3542-2 / $27.00 (PAPER)

New in the Kuroda Classics in East Asian Buddhism Series

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Signs from the Unseen RealmIn early medieval China hundreds of Buddhist miracle texts were circulated, inaugurating a trend that would continue for centuries. Each tale recounted extraordinary events involving Chinese persons and places—events seen as verifying claims made in Buddhist scriptures, demonstrating the reality of karmic retribution, or confirming the efficacy of Buddhist devotional practices. Robert Ford Campany, one of North America’s preeminent scholars of Chinese religion, presents Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China, the first complete, annotated translation, with in-depth commentary, of the largest extant collection of miracle tales from the early medieval period, Wang Yan’s Records of Signs from the Unseen Realm, compiled around 490 C.E.

Classics in East Asian Buddhism
March 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3602-3 / $65.00 (CLOTH)
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute

New Catalog: Asian Studies 2012

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Asian Studies 2012 catalog
The UH Press Asian Studies 2012 catalog is now available online. To view the 3.8M PDF, click on the cover image to the left.

Highlights include:

* A pioneering study of the fate of Buddhism during the communist period in Cambodia (Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot)

* The first major work of Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), “Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe” (Strange Tale of Panorama Island)

* The first definitive chronicle of a remarkable phenomenon in Chinese architecture (Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China)

* A new volume in the Dimensions of Asian Spirituality series (Theravada Buddhism: The View of the Elders)

* A study of Buddhist miracle texts by one of the preeminent scholars of Chinese religion (Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China)

* Two new volumes in a series designed to help students learn the most frequently used Chinese characters (Remembering Traditional Hanzi 2; Remembering Simplified Hanzi 2)

* Innovative studies on Japanese popular and visual culture (Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girl Culture in Japan; Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan; The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan; Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age)

* A colorful, comprehensive guide to Hawai‘i’s Japanese Buddhist temples (Japanese Buddhist Temples of Hawai‘i: An Illustrated Guide)

* The latest books in a popular Korean language textbook series (Integrated Korean: Intermediate 1, Second Edition, Textbook, Workbook)

* A richly illustrated look at the artisans of Himachal Pradesh and their work (Making Faces: Self and Image Creation in a Himalayan Valley)

* An insider’s view of the sex trade on the Lao-Thai border (The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong)

Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi

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Queer CompulsionsWhile 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

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Hard Times in the HometownHard 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

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Celebrity GodsCelebrity 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

Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan

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Performing the Great PeacePerforming 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)

Second Volume of Remembering Simplified Hanzi Now Available

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Remembering Simplified Hanzi 2Remembering 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)

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