Asia – Page 21 – UH Press

Koreo-Japonica

Posted on November 2, 2009 by stephchun

The Japonic (Japanese and Ryukyuan) portmanteau language family and the Korean language have long been considered isolates on the fringe of northeast Asia. Although in the last fifty years many specialists in Japonic and Korean historical linguistics have voiced their support for a genetic relationship between the two, this concept has not been endorsed by general historical linguists and no significant attempts have been made to advance beyond the status quo. Alexander Vovin, a longtime advocate of the genetic relationship view, engaged in a reanalysis of the known data in the hope of finding evidence in support of this position. In the process of his work, however, he became convinced that the multiple similarities between Japonic and Korean are the result of several centuries of contact and do not descend from a hypothetical common ancestor.

Hawai‘i Studies on Korea
November 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3278-0 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Polylocality in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Posted on October 20, 2009 by stephchun

In Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, prominent China film scholar Yingjin Zhang proposes “polylocality” as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism.

This book is the inaugural volume in the Critical Interventions series.

October 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3337-4 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Imperial-Way Zen Talk and Book Signing

Posted on October 19, 2009 by stephchun

Christopher Ives, author of Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics, will give a talk and sign copies of his book at the Brookline Booksmith (279 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA; 617-566-6660) on Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7:00 p.m.

Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan

Posted on October 6, 2009 by stephchun

Available for the first time in English, The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan, translated by Maki Hirano Hubbard, is Lee Yeounsuk’s award-winning look at the history and ideology behind the construction of kokugo (national language). Prior to the Meiji Period (1868–1912), the idea of a single, unified Japanese language did not exist. Only as Japan was establishing itself as a modern nation-state and an empire with expanding colonies did there arise the need for a national language to construct and sustain its national identity.

Re-examining debates and controversies over genbun itchi (unification of written and spoken languages) and other language reform movements, Lee discusses the contributions of Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937) and Hoshina Koichi (1872–1955) in the creation of kokugo and moves us one step closer to understanding how the ideology of kokugo cast a spell over linguistic identity in modern Japan. She examines the notion of the unshakable homogeneity of the Japanese language—a belief born of the political climate of early-twentieth-century Japan and its colonization of other East Asian countries—urging us to pay attention to the linguistic consciousness that underlies “scientific” scholarship and language policies. Her critical discussion of the construction of kokugo uncovers a strain of cultural nationalism that has been long nurtured in Japan’s education system and academic traditions. The ideology of kokugo, argues Lee, must be recognized both as an academic apparatus and a political concept

October 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3305-3 / $58.00 (CLOTH)

South Korean Popular Religion in Motion

Posted on September 10, 2009 by stephchun

Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion, an enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism, makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing.

“Laurel Kendall has written a study of contemporary Korean shamans that is both entertaining and enlightening. Most studies of the topic treat shamans as an anachronistic remnant of the past. Kendall challenges that approach, drawing on several decades of close observation of shamans in action to reveal how shamanism is constantly evolving. It is an important work that will appeal to a wide audience.” —Don Baker, University of British Columbia

September 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3343-5 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan

Posted on September 9, 2009 by stephchun

Among the most exciting developments in the study of Japanese religion over the past two decades has been the discovery of tens of thousands of ritual vessels, implements, and scapegoat dolls (hitogata) from the Nara (710-784) and early Heian (794-1185) periods. Because inscriptions on many of the items are clearly derived from Chinese rites of spirit pacification, it is now evident that previous scholarship has mischaracterized the role of Buddhism in early Japanese religion. Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan, by Michael Como, makes a compelling argument that both the Japanese royal system and the Japanese Buddhist tradition owe much to continental rituals centered on the manipulation of yin and yang, animal sacrifice, and spirit quelling. Building on these recent archaeological discoveries, Como charts an epochal transformation in the religious culture of the Japanese islands, tracing the transmission and development of fundamental paradigms of religious practice to immigrant lineages and deities from the Korean peninsula.

September 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-2957-5 / $48.00 (CLOTH)

Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea

Posted on August 31, 2009 by stephchun

Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of witness to the historic upheavals of twentieth-century Korea. Often inspired by their own experiences, contemporary writers continue to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence—whether the uprooting of whole families from the ancestral home, life on the road as war refugees, or the violent deaths of loved ones. The Red Room: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea, translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton, brings together stories by three canonical Korean writers who examine trauma as a simple fact of life. In Pak Wan-so’s “In the Realm of the Buddha,” trauma manifests itself as an undigested lump inside the narrator, a mass needing to be purged before it consumes her. The protagonist of O Chong-hui’s “Spirit on the Wind” suffers from an incomprehensible wanderlust—the result of trauma that has escaped her conscious memory. In the title story by Im Ch’or-u, trauma is recycled from torturer to victim when a teacher is arbitrarily detained by unnamed officials. Western readers may find these stories bleak, even chilling, yet they offer restorative truths when viewed in light of the suffering experienced by all victims of war and political violence regardless of place and time.

“The characters, and the settings, in these stories are Korean. However, thanks to superb translations by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, the stories themselves are universal. They expose the devastating impact traumatic experiences have on an individual’s judgment, moral compass, and self-image long after the traumatic episodes themselves (in these stories, during the Korean War and Kwangju massacre) have faded into history. Historians often are so captivated by the Big Picture that they forget the impact of historic events on the individuals who were caught up in them. The Red Room takes us inside the heads of the traumatized, reminding us that traumatic events such as civil war damage even innocent bystanders for decades afterwards.” —Don Baker, University of British Columbia

August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3397-8 / $15.00 (PAPER)

Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan

Posted on August 31, 2009 by stephchun

Winner of the 2007–2008 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Our narratives of postwar Japan have long been cast in terms almost synonymous with the story of rapid economic growth. In The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan, by Scott O’Bryan, this seemingly familiar history is reinterpreted through an innovative exploration, not of the anatomy of growth itself, but of the history of growth as a set of discourses by which Japanese “growth performance” as “economic miracle” came to be articulated. The premise of O’Bryan‘s work is simple: To our understandings of the material changes that took place in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century we must also add perspectives that account for growth as a new idea around the world, one that emerged alongside rapid economic expansion in postwar Japan and underwrote the modes by which it was imagined, forecast, pursued, and regulated. In an accessible, lively style, O’Bryan traces the history of growth as an object of social scientific knowledge and as a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and imagined a newly materialist vision of social and individual prosperity.

“The Growth Idea represents a significant contribution to the emerging field of postwar Japanese history and an important step forward in the historicization of Japan’s high-speed growth of the 1950s and 1960s. It is the first and fullest treatment of the ideology of postwar growthism, of Keynesian thought in Japan, and of the development of postwar statistical practice. Well written, original, and based on first-rate scholarship, The Growth Idea approaches its subject in a fresh way that will interest specialists in Japanese history as well as others interested in Japan from a comparative perspective.” —Mark Metzler, University of Texas

August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3282-7 / $40.00 (CLOTH)

The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China Now Available in Paperback

Posted on August 25, 2009 by stephchun

The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Chanyuan qinggui, by Yifa, contains the first complete translation of China’s earliest and most influential monastic code. The twelfth-century text Chanyuan qinggui (Rules of Purity for the Chan Monastery) provides a wealth of detail on all aspects of life in public Buddhist monasteries during the Sung (960–1279).

“Absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to gain an accurate understanding of the actual day-to-day life of the Chan community. . . . [T]his book represents a real advance in our understanding of Chinese Chan and should be on the bookshelf of every scholar of Chinese Buddhism.” —Journal of Chinese Religions

August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3425-8 / $28.00 (PAPER)>

Japan’s Medieval Population Now Available in Paperback

Posted on August 10, 2009 by stephchun

Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age, by William Wayne Farris, charts a course through never-before-surveyed historical territory: Japan’s medieval population, a topic so challenging that neither Japanese nor foreign scholars have investigated it in a comprehensive way. And yet, demography is an invaluable approach to the past because it provides a way—often the only way—to study the mass of people who did not belong to the political or religious elite. By synthesizing a vast cache of primary and secondary sources, Farris constructs an important analysis of Japan’s population from 1150 to 1600 and considers social and economic developments that were life and death issues for ordinary Japanese.

“In Japan’s Medieval Population, Farris, true to form, asks questions that are relevant and essential for a broader understanding of Japanese society but also extremely challenging to answer. . . . There can be little doubt that [this] study fills an important void in English-language scholarship on pre-Tokugawa Japan. . . . Farris deserves accolades for taking on what is possibly the most challenging task for historians: asking the broader synthesizing questions for which the sources do not provide any readily available answers.” —Journal of Japanese Studies

August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3424-1 / $25.00 (PAPER)

The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan

Posted on August 3, 2009 by stephchun

The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan, by Karen M. Gerhart, is the first in the English language to explore the ways medieval Japanese sought to overcome their sense of powerlessness over death. By attending to both religious practice and ritual objects used in funerals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it seeks to provide a new understanding of the relationship between the two. Gerhart looks at how these special objects and rituals functioned by analyzing case studies culled from written records, diaries, and illustrated handscrolls, and by examining surviving funerary structures and painted and sculpted images.

August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3261-2 / $39.00 (CLOTH)

Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China

Posted on August 3, 2009 by stephchun

China’s century of revolutionary change has been heard as much as seen, and nowhere is this more evident than in an auditory history of the modern Chinese poem. From Lu Xun’s seminal writings on literature to a recitation renaissance in urban centers today, poetics meets politics in the sounding voice of poetry. Supported throughout by vivid narration and accessible analysis, Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China, by John A. Crespi, offers a literary history of modern China that makes the case for the importance of the auditory dimension of poetry in national, revolutionary, and postsocialist culture.

“This is an important and exciting monograph for the field of modern Chinese literature. It sheds unprecedented light on poetic composition and does much more than previous studies to flesh out the living practice of poetry circulation and reception in modern China.” —Charles Laughlin, Tsinghua University, Beijing

August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3365-7 / $47.00 (CLOTH)