Category: Asia

Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook Now Available in Paperback

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Japanese Philosophy
Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo, is now available in paperback.

From a July 2011 blog post: In 1980 Thomas Kasulis (then assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i) dreamed of putting together an anthology focused directly on Japanese philosophical thought. Thirty-one years later, Kasulis and fellow editors James Heisig and John Maraldo have produced what will be an essential reference for English readers interested in traditional or contemporary Japanese culture and the way it has shaped and been shaped by its great thinkers over the centuries. The story behind the Sourcebook’s development, which involved dozens of scholars from around the world, can be found in the Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture Bulletin 35 (2011).

August 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3618-4 / $35.00 (PAPER)

Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa

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Living SpiritThroughout its difficult history, Okinawa has remained strong, and today its spirit is more vibrant and dynamic than ever. Celebrating the cultural resurgence that began in the 1960s, Living Spirit: Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa, edited by Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato, presents acclaimed contemporary fiction and poetry, as well as drama, song, and essay. Also included are Higa Yasuo’s remarkable photographs capturing the timeless world of the islands’ maternal deities.

Manoa 23:1
July 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3617-7 / $20.00 (PAPER)

Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China

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Women of the Conquest DynastiesChina’s historical women warriors hailed from the northeast (Manchuria) during the Liao (907–1125) and Jin (1115–1234) dynasties. Celebrated in the Liao History, they were “unprecedented.” They rode horseback astride, were good at hunting and shooting, and took part in military battles. Several empresses—and one famous bandit chief—led armies against the enemy Song state. Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China, by Linda Cooke Johnson, represents a groundbreaking effort to survey the customs and lives of these women from the Kitan and Jurchen tribes who maintained their native traditions of horsemanship, militancy, and sexual independence while excelling in writing poetry and prose and earning praise for their Buddhist piety and Confucian ethics. Although much work has been devoted in the last few years to Chinese women of various periods, this is the first volume to incorporate recent archaeological discoveries and information drawn from Liao and Jin paintings as well as literary sources and standard historical accounts.

July 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3404-3 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Posted on by stephchun

Japanese Philosophy
The idea for Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook can be traced back to 1980, when Thomas Kasulis (then assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i) dreamed of putting together an anthology focused directly on Japanese philosophical thought. Thirty-one years later, Kasulis and his fellow editors James Heisig and John Maraldo have produced what will be an essential reference for English readers interested in traditional or contemporary Japanese culture and the way it has shaped and been shaped by its great thinkers over the centuries. The story behind the Sourcebook’s development, which involved dozens of scholars from around the world, can be found in the Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture Bulletin 35 (2011).

July 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3552-1 / $70.00 (CLOTH)

Nuclear Power in Japan

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In recent months UH Press author Martin Dusinberre has written online editorial pieces on the history and future of Japan’s nuclear program for Reuters, the History Workshop, and The Guardian.

Dusinberre is lecturer in modern Japanese history at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of the forthcoming Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan, available March 2012.

Hard Times in the Hometown 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. His account comes to a climax when, in the 1980s, the town’s councillors request the construction of a nuclear power station, unleashing a storm of protests from within the community. This ongoing nuclear dispute has particular resonance in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis.

June Sale on Cornell East Asia Series Titles

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Cornell logoUniversity of Hawai‘i Press is a worldwide distributor of the Cornell East Asia Series (CEAS), published by the Cornell East Asia Program. For the entire month of June, order a CEAS book at full price and receive a second CEAS book (excluding series volumes 144-158) of equal or lesser value free!

Click here to view all CEAS titles distributed by UH Press.

**We are not accepting CEAS sale orders at our website, so please email, call (toll-free 1-888-847-7377), or fax (toll-free 1-800-650-7811) the UH Press Business Department with your order.

E-Books from Three Pines Press

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Three Pines Press logoUniversity of Hawai‘i Press is a worldwide distributor for Three Pines Press, a publisher of Daoist studies headed by Dr. Livia Kohn. Digital editions of select Three Pines Press titles are now available for purchase through Tao Library: http://tao-library.com/store/

The site is currently offering visitors a free e-book valued at $12.00; go to Tao Library to claim your gift.

Confucian Role Ethics

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Confucian Role Ethics
Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, is an exploration of what constitutes and how one becomes an authentic, moral human being as conceived in the Confucian tradition. The book establishes an interpretive context by exploring some of the cosmological foundations of Confucian philosophy through discussion of commentary on the Yijing (The Book of Changes), Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Chinese cosmology. The author proceeds to delineate the morals and ideals of a Confucian life and its foundation in feelings of familial intimacy and its human-centered religiousness. These ideas are contrasted with the principle and virtue based traditions of the Abrahamic religions as well as of the individualistic tradition beginning in ancient Greece. Lastly, Ames attempts to critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of Confucian role ethics as articulated in the early canonical texts, discussing both its return to prominence and feasibility as a system of ethical conduct for the present day.

April 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3576-7 / $31.00 (PAPER)

New in the Dimensions of Asian Spirituality Series

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Neo-Confucian Self-CultivationApproximately fifteen hundred years after Confucius, his ideas reasserted themselves in the formulation of a sophisticated program of personal self-cultivation. Neo-Confucians argued that humans are endowed with empathy and goodness at birth, an assumption now confirmed by evolutionary biologists. By following the Great Learning—eight steps in the process of personal development—Neo-Confucians showed how this innate endowment could provide the foundation for living morally. Neo-Confucian students did not follow a single manual elaborating each step of the Great Learning; instead they were exposed to age-appropriate texts, commentaries, and anthologies of Neo-Confucian thinkers, which gradually made clear the sequential process of personal development and its connection to social order. Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation, by Barry C. Keenan, opens up in accessible prose the content of the eight-step process for today’s reader as it examines the source of mainstream Neo-Confucian self-cultivation and its major crosscurrents from 1000 to 1900.

Dimensions of Asian Spirituality
May 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3548-4 / $17.00 (PAPER)

English Translation of Landmark Zen Text

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Purifying Zen
In 1223 the monk Dogen Kigen (1200–1253) came to the audacious conclusion that Japanese Buddhism had become hopelessly corrupt. He undertook a dangerous pilgrimage to China to bring back a purer form of Buddhism and went on to become one of the founders of Soto Zen, still the largest Zen sect in Japan. Seven hundred years later, the philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960) also saw corruption in the Buddhism of his day. Watsuji’s efforts to purify the religion sent him not across the seas but searching Japan’s intellectual past, where he discovered writings by Dogen that had been hidden away by the monk’s own sect. Watsuji later penned Shamon Dogen (Dogen the monk), which single-handedly rescued Dogen from the brink of obscurity, reintroducing Japan to its first great philosophical mind. Purifying Zen, a translation of the Shamon Dogen by Steve Bein, makes this work available in English for the first time.

“Purifying Zen: Watsuji Tetsuro’s Shamon Dogen makes available in a clear and fluid translation an early classic in modern Japanese philosophy. Steve Bein’s annotations, footnotes, introduction, and commentary bridge the gap separating not only the languages but also the cultures of its original readers and its new Western audience.” —from the Foreword by Thomas P. Kasulis

May 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3556-9 / $24.00 (PAPER)

The Buddhist Dead Now in Paperback

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The Buddhist Dead

“[The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, edited by Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone, is] the first full-length volume to investigate the place of death in Buddhism in a pan-Asian context. For that reason alone, it is a much-needed and welcome addition to the scholarly literature. That it is such a well-integrated, tightly argued, and beautifully crafted volume should make it the standard bearer for some time to come. . . . A thought-provoking and sophisticated volume, which challenges and advances the ways we think about death in Buddhism, and should serve as the foundation for future inquiries. The Buddhist Dead should be read by all Buddhist specialists and graduate students, and those interested in conceptions of and practices related to death and the afterlife. I moreover can recommend assigning select chapters for use in the undergraduate classroom, having successfully done so.” —Journal of the American Academy of Religion

“This volume presents research of the highest class by a set of the best scholars working in English in Buddhist studies. . . . Scholars of both Buddhism in general and of regional/national practices will need to turn to this collection for its up-to-date findings about the variety and importance of this fatally essential dimension of the religion.” —Japanese Religions

Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No. 19
May 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3599-6 / $28.00 (PAPER)
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute

Updated Edition of Popular Japanese Language Text Now Available

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Remembering Kanji 1
Updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the Japanese government in 2010 as “general-use” kanji, the sixth edition of Remembering the Kanji 1, by James W. Heisig, aims to provide students 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 forgetting how to write the kanji, or for a way to systematize what he or she already knows.

April 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3592-7 / $44.00 (PAPER)

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