Category: Asia

Learning Japanese for Real

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Learning Japanese for RealConcise descriptions of grammar, use, and genres make Learning Japanese for Real: A Guide to Grammar, Use, and Genres of the Nihongo World, by Senko K. Maynard, indispensable for adult learners of the language. The volume presents a holistic view of the knowledge required for proficiency in Japanese. Following introductory chapters on the language’s background, sound system and scripts, word types, and grammatical categories, it introduces readers to simple then complex sentences. A chapter on emotive expressions contains highly useful entries on attitudinal adverbs, exclamatory phrases, interjections, and rhetorical questions—all of which carry emotive meanings. Learning Japanese for Real then goes beyond grammar to discuss how the language is used in interaction.

February 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3540-8 / $30.00 (PAPER)

New Look for KLEAR Web Site

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The KLEAR (Korean Language Education and Research) Center web site has been completely redesigned and updated to include the latest information on the entire Integrated Korean series of textbooks, workbooks, and accompanying audio, including the new (2nd) editions of Integrated Korean Beginning 1 and Beginning 2.

The KLEAR series is published by University of Hawaii Press with the support of the Korea Foundation. Schools currently using Integrated Korean texts in their classrooms include: University of California, Los Angeles; University of Maryland, Baltimore; Columbia University; De Anza College; Troy University; New York University; Arizona State University; University of Minnesota; University of California, Riverside; University of Hawai‘i; Georgia State University; University of California, San Diego.

New in Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Vernacular Architecture

Posted on by stephchun

Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-ArtsIn the early twentieth century, Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École des Beaux-Arts converged in the United States when Chinese students were given scholarships to train as architects at American universities whose design curricula were dominated by Beaux-Arts methods. Upon their return home in the 1920s and 1930s, these graduates began to practice architecture and create China’s first architectural schools, often transferring a version of what they had learned in the U.S. to Chinese situations.

Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts, edited by Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, examines the coalescing of the two major architectural systems, placing significant shifts in architectural theory and practice in China within relevant, contemporary, cultural, and educational contexts. Fifteen major scholars from around the world analyze and synthesize these crucial events to shed light on the dramatic architectural and urban changes occurring in China today—many of which have global ramifications.

Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Vernacular Architecture
Published in association with Hong Kong University Press
January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3456-2 / $52.00 (CLOTH)
208 illus., 60 in color

New in Writing Past Colonialism

Posted on by stephchun

Mediating Across Difference Mediating Across Difference: Oceanic and Asian Approaches to Conflict Resolution, edited by Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker, is based on a fundamental premise: to deal adequately with conflict—and particularly with conflict stemming from cultural and other differences—requires genuine openness to different cultural practices and dialogue between different ways of knowing and being. Equally essential is a shift away from understanding cultural difference as an inevitable source of conflict, and the development of a more critical attitude toward previously under-examined Western assumptions about conflict and its resolution.

To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania.

Writing Past Colonialism
January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3519-4 / $28.00 (PAPER)

Liu Zhi’s Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law

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Rectifying God's NameIslam first arrived in China over 1,200 years ago, but for more than a millennium it was perceived as a foreign presence. The restoration of native Chinese rule by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), after nearly a century of Mongol domination, helped transform Chinese intellectual discourse on ideological, social, political, religious, and ethnic identity. This led to the creation of a burgeoning network of Sinicized Muslim scholars who wrote about Islam in classical Chinese and developed a body of literature known as the Han Kitab. Rectifying God’s Name: Liu Zhi’s Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law, by James D. Frankel, examines the life and work of one of the most important of the Qing Chinese Muslim literati, Liu Zhi (ca. 1660–ca. 1730), and places his writings in their historical, cultural, social, and religio-philosophical contexts. His Tianfang dianli (Ritual law of Islam) represents the most systematic and sophisticated attempt within the Han Kitab corpus to harmonize Islam with Chinese thought.

January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3474-6 / $48.00 (CLOTH)

New in Pureland Buddhist Studies

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Immigrants to the Pure LandReligious acculturation is typically seen as a one-way process: The dominant religious culture imposes certain behavioral patterns, ethical standards, social values, and organizational and legal requirements onto the immigrant religious tradition. In this view, American society is the active partner in the relationship, while the newly introduced tradition is the passive recipient being changed. Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898-1941, by Michihiro Ama, investigates the early period of Jodo Shinshu in Hawai‘i and the United States. It sets a new standard for investigating the processes of religious acculturation and a radically new way of thinking about these processes.

Pureland Buddhist Studies
Published in association with the Institute of Buddhist Studies at the Graduate Theological Union
January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3438-8 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga

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Straight from the HeartManga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shojo manga (girls’ comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls’ culture throughout the postwar era. In Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga, Jennifer S. Prough examines the shojo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shojo manga.

“Straight from the Heart is a wonderful book, one that is timely and important in terms of academic interest in the anthropology of popular culture. Its originality lies in the author’s solid ethnographic approach to the topic and in her detailed description of the interactions between editors, artists, and consumers. Certainly it is time for such an in-depth English-language study of shojo manga. Prough’s work makes an important contribution to a number of fields—anthropology, Japan studies, gender/women’s studies, and cultural studies—and the writing style, organization, and length all make it an extremely attractive book for undergraduate course adoption.” —Laura Miller, Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Missouri-St. Louis

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3528-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Green Spaces in Modern Japan

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ParkscapesJapan today protects one-seventh of its land surface in parks, which are visited by well over a billion people each year. Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan, by Thomas R. H. Havens, analyzes the origins, development, and distinctive features of these public spaces. Havens shows how revolutionary officials in the 1870s seized private properties and converted them into public parks for educating and managing citizens in the new emperor-sanctioned state. Rebuilding Tokyo and Yokohama after the earthquake and fires of 1923 spurred the spread of urban parklands both in the capital and other cities. According to Havens, the growth of suburbs, the national mobilization of World War II, and the post-1945 American occupation helped speed the creation of more urban parks, setting the stage for vast increases in public green spaces during Japan’s golden age of affluence from the 1960s through the 1980s.

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3477-7 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

The Life and Times of Shimazaki Toson

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The Kiso RoadWilliam E. Naff, the distinguished scholar of Japanese literature widely known and highly regarded for his eloquent translations of the writings of Shimazaki Toson (1872–1943), spent the last years of his life writing a full-length biography of Toson. Virtually completed at the time of his death, The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Toson provides a rich and colorful account of this canonic novelist who, along with Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai, formed the triumvirate of writers regarded as giants in Meiji Japan, all three of whom helped establish the parameters of modern Japanese literature. Professor Naff’s biography skillfully places Toson in the context of his times and discusses every aspect of his career and personal life, as well as introducing in detail a number of his important but as yet untranslated works.

“The Kiso Road sets Toson’s long and eventful life in the context of its historical and cultural moment, providing a depth of coverage that cannot be matched by any of the existing English-language books on Toson. As Naff argues, Toson is simultaneously an extraordinary and an ordinary figure, and tracing through his career provides a useful window onto an entire era of Japanese history. This is an important and authoritative book, an original contribution, and the culmination of a life’s work.” —Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3218-6 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Also available: William Naff’s award-winning translation of Toson’s classic novel of Meiji Japan, Before the Dawn

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF Wins Yim Suk Jay Prize

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Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMFShamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion, by Laurel Kendall, has been awarded the Yim Suk Jay Prize.

The prize is awarded by the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology to a Korean or foreign scholar who has contributed to the development of Korean cultural anthropology by authoring a book-length scholarly work of high quality and originality.

Waste, Environment, Japan

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Troubled NaturesWhat does “environment” really mean in the complex, non-Western milieu of present-day Tokyo? How can anthropology contribute to the technical discussions and quantitative measures typically found in environmental studies? Author Peter Wynn Kirby explores these questions through a deep cultural analysis of waste in contemporary Japan. His parameters are intentionally broad—encompassing ideas of “nature,” attitudes toward hygiene, notions of health and illness, problems with vermin and toxic waste, processes of social exclusion, and reproductive threats. Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan concludes that how surroundings are conceived, invoked, and enacted is subjective, highly contextual, and under continual negotiation—with suggestive implications for anthropology, social science, and environmental studies generally.

“Kirby’s long-term ethnographic study takes the unlikely-sounding subject of waste (in all its forms) to a fascinating depth, demonstrating the sociocultural complexity of environmental issues, and the crucial contribution that an anthropological study such as this can make to the broader field. Here is a novel way to understand the changing nature of contemporary Japan, through insights into the lives of residents of its enormous capital city and their struggle to eliminate environmental pollution and maintain the purity on which Japan has long prided itself.” —Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3428-9 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

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