Asia – Page 27 – UH Press

Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan

Posted on March 24, 2008 by stephchun

Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would readily associate Japan’s film industry with either imperialism or the domination of world markets, the country’s film culture developed in lock step with its empire, which, at its peak in 1943, included territories from the Aleutians to Australia and from Midway Island to India. With each military victory, Japanese film culture’s sphere of influence expanded deeper into Asia, first clashing with and ultimately replacing Hollywood as the main source of news, education, and entertainment for millions. The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan, by Michael Baskett, is the first comprehensive examination of the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as represented in its film culture.

“Because imperialism has had such an appalling ideological reputation, we’ve lost sight of its excitement, the breathless anticipation of adventures in far-off lands. The Attractive Empire is a tour de force of enthralling historical scholarship that puts the appeal, and seductions, of imperialism on display, without underestimating its ugly consequences. Like its chosen subject, the book covers an astonishing array of texts, events, people, and issues. The clarity and vividness of the writing make it work effortlessly. Baskett’s organizational skills, narrative, and rhetoric deftly orchestrate a complex subject.” —Darrell William Davis, University of New South Wales

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3163-9 / $48.00 (CLOTH)

New in Paperback in March

Posted on March 24, 2008 by stephchun

The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia, by Barbara Watson Andaya

“The definitive volume on women in Southeast Asia history. . . . [Anadaya’s] book is encyclopedic in its inclusiveness yet it does not force a homogenizing or uniform interpretation upon the material. Instead, Andaya brings symphonic order to the cacophony of beliefs and practices. . . . The examples are detailed, specific, precise and attentive. This is the hallmark of her work. . . . Masterfully composed.” —Pacific Affairs

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3288-9 / $21.00 (PAPER)

Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema, by Shuqin Cui

“Stands out for its ambition and breadth. . . . Women Through the Lens not only lays a foundation and road map for other scholars but it should be used as a reference book by anyone interested in Chinese film.” —Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3296-4 / $28.00 (PAPER)

Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice, by Ian Harris

“A fascinating book that contains a wealth of material that would require a series of reviews to discuss fully. It is a resource on Cambodia that adds enormously to the literature of Southeast Asian Buddhism. . . . It will become a pivotal work on the subject.” —Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3298-8 / $25.00 (PAPER)

The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania, by Paul D’Arcy

“This well-researched and beautifully written monograph opens a window in time and space. Its emphasis on the dynamics [of marine ecosystems] is convincing and serves to falsify the notion of a frozen ‘tradition’ as well as of a predictable maritime environment.” —Anthropological Quarterly

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3297-1 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her Acolytes

Posted on March 5, 2008 by stephchun

The Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara was a handsome prince when he entered China. As Guanyin, the bodhisattva was venerated from the eleventh century onward in the shape of a beautiful woman who became a universal savior. Throughout the last millennium, the female Guanyin has enjoyed wide and fervid veneration throughout East Asia and has appeared as a major character in literature and legend. In one tale, Guanyin (as the princess Miaoshan) returns from the dead after being executed by the king, her father, for refusing to marry. The most popular version of this legend is The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain (Xiangshan baojuan). In Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her Acolytes, Wilt L. Idema offers a complete and fully annotated translation of The Precious Scroll, based on a nineteenth-century edition.

This is the latest volume in the series Classics in East Asian Buddhism, published in association with the Kuroda Institute.

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3215-5 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity

Posted on March 5, 2008 by stephchun

The Chinese essay is arguably China’s most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity—the mid-1930s—is the central concern of this book. What Charles A. Laughlin terms “the literature of leisure” is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informal essay writing (xiaopin wen). In The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity, Laughlin examines the essay both as a widely practiced and influential genre of literary expression and as an important counter-discourse to the revolutionary tradition of New Literature (especially realistic fiction), often viewed as the dominant mode of literature at the time.

“More than any scholar in the field, Charles Laughlin has placed the prose essay at the heart of modern Chinese literary production and reception—where it rightly belongs. As a whole, his work demonstrates both the variety of approaches modern Chinese writers have taken to the prose genre and the essential interconnectedness of political literature and the literature of leisure. With this volume, the field seems to have matured to the point that we no longer need to obsess about ‘alternative modernities’ as counterweights to the ‘hegemony’ of the May Fourth mainstream. Since xiaopin wen (little prose pieces) were explicitly associated with the prose writing of late imperial China, Laughlin’s book also shows us how the rigid dichotomy between tradition and modernity has been a false construct in the scholarship on modern Chinese literature. Finally, organized around schools of prose—Yusi, White Horse Lake, Analects, and Crescent Moon—the book contributes greatly to our understanding of prose’s critical place in the shaping of a Republican-era literary field. Important on so many levels, The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity is a must-read.” —Kirk A. Denton, The Ohio State University

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3125-7 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty

Posted on February 19, 2008 by stephchun

One of the most influential artists working in the genre of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) in late-eighteenth-century Japan, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?–1806) was widely appreciated for his prints of beautiful women. In images showing courtesans, geisha, housewives, and others, Utamaro made the practice of distinguishing social types into a connoisseurial art. In Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty, Julie Nelson Davis makes a close study of selected print sets, and by drawing on a wide range of period sources reinterprets Utamaro in the context of his times.

February 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3199-8 / $65.00 (CLOTH)

Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s

Posted on January 29, 2008 by stephchun

Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, is the first intensive study of Japanese cinema at a time when the country’s film industry was at its most prolific and when cinema played a singular role in shaping Japanese modernity. During the interwar period, the signs of modernity were ubiquitous in Japan’s urban architecture, literature, fashion, advertising, popular music, and cinema. The reconstruction of Tokyo following the disastrous earthquake of 1923 high lighted the extent of this cultural transformation, and the film industry embraced the reconfigured space as an expression of the modern. Shochiku Kamata Film Studios (1920–1936), the focus of this study, was the only studio that continued filmmaking in Tokyo following the city’s complete destruction. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points to the influence of the new urban culture in Shochiku’s interwar films, acclaimed as modan na eiga, or modern films, by and for Japanese.

“Devastated by the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo re-built itself in symbiosis with an image of modernity concocted by its own film studios. Nippon Modern renders that image, aspect after fascinating aspect, in sharp detail. Scores of films make up that image, a few resurrected in this volume for intense and delightful analysis. A sensitive viewer and an honest resourceful historian, Wada-Marciano lays out what she’s found in relation to other studies of this precious period, and she does so without hyperbole and without a glaring agenda. She makes you understand how, after Tokyo would again be devastated in 1945, these ‘modern’ films could become objects of nostalgia. Such is the care she gives her subject and such the fragility of that subject.” —Dudley Andrew, Yale University

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3182-0 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

Remembering the Kanji 2 and 3 Now Available

Posted on January 15, 2008 by stephchun

Following James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1, the second volume,
Remembering the Kanji 2: A Systematic Guide to Reading the Japanese Characters, takes up the pronunciation of characters and provides students with helpful tools for memorizing them. 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.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3166-0 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Students who have learned to read and write the basic 2,000 characters run into the same difficulty that university students in Japan face: The government-approved list of basic educational kanji is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialization requires supplementary kanji of its own, a large number of these kanji overlap. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 have been applied to 1,000 additional characters determined as useful for upper-level proficiency, and the results published as the third volume in the series, Remembering the Kanji 3: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency, by James W. Heisig and Tanya Sienko.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3167-7 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Also available from University of Hawai‘i Press: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each.

The Shaolin Monastery

Posted on January 15, 2008 by stephchun

The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts, by Meir Shahar, charts, for the first time in any language, the history of the Shaolin Temple and the evolution of its world-renowned martial arts. In this meticulously researched and eminently readable study, Shahar considers the economic, political, and religious factors that led Shaolin monks to disregard the Buddhist prohibition against violence and instead create fighting techniques that by the twenty-first century have spread throughout the world. He examines the monks’ relations with successive Chinese regimes, beginning with the assistance they lent to the seventh-century Emperor Li Shimin and culminating more than a millennium later with their complex relations with Qing rulers, who suspected them of rebellion. He reveals the intimate connection between monastic violence and the veneration of the violent divinities of Buddhism and analyzes the Shaolin association of martial discipline and the search for spiritual enlightenment.

“Written in clear and lucid style and ambitious both in scope and methodology, this book offers a fascinating window into Chinese culture, religion, and history. Ranging from historical and ethnographic documents to a wide variety of literary sources, it weaves them all into a compelling narrative. In this fashion, Shahar is uniquely able to bring together social, historical, and mythological elements, providing a demythologized account of martial Chinese traditions such as Shaolin Boxing. This is sinology at its best.”—Bernard Faure, Columbia University

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3110-3 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face

Posted on January 9, 2008 by stephchun

In Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China, Christine Mollier reveals previously unexplored dimensions of the interaction between Buddhism and Taoism in medieval China. While scholars of Chinese religions have long recognized the mutual influences linking the two traditions, Mollier here brings to light their intense contest for hegemony in the domains of scripture and ritual. Drawing on a far-reaching investigation of canonical texts, together with manuscript sources from Dunhuang and the monastic libraries of Japan—many of them studied here for the first time—she demonstrates the competition and complementarity of the two great Chinese religions in their quest to address personal and collective fears of diverse ills, including sorcery, famine, and untimely death.

“This book exemplifies the best sort of work being done on Chinese religions today. Christine Mollier expertly draws not only on published canonical sources but also on manuscript and visual material, as well as worldwide modern scholarship, to give us the most sophisticated book-length study yet produced on the textual relations between the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. She pushes past the tired, vague, and rather innocent-sounding trope of ‘influence’ to pinpoint much more complex—and fascinating—processes of textual repackaging, hybridization, adaptation, appropriation, reframing, pirating, remodeling, and transposing. Throughout, the urgent concerns of medieval Chinese people—life, health, protection, salvation—are sensitively and elegantly evoked. Anyone interested in Chinese religions, in the ways in which religious texts are formed, and in cross-religious interactions should want to read this book.”—Robert Ford Campany, University of Southern California

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3169-1 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Modernist Fiction from Japan

Posted on January 9, 2008 by stephchun

Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms “modernism” and “modernist” become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938, compiled and edited by William J. Tyler, addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938.

“Be prepared to rethink the nature of modern Japanese literature; or better still, simply read these often wondrous tales, some tall, some short, one after the other, and enjoy a remarkable, liberating moment in Japanese literary history.” —J. Thomas Rimer, professor emeritus of Japanese literature, University of Pittsburgh

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3242-1 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar

Posted on January 3, 2008 by stephchun

Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar: Comprehensive Acquisition, by Yuki Johnson, is an extensive and thorough explanation of crucial Japanese grammar in English and the culmination of years of teaching and research. Informed by the work of eminent linguist Susumu Kuno, it is designed for students who have studied basic Japanese grammar and wish to better organize their knowledge and expand it in greater depth and at a higher level. Its organization presents a holistic picture of Japanese grammar for the benefit of learners and is distinctive in that grammar items are reorganized in terms of specific grammatical categories, such as particles, te-form compounds, dictionary-form compounds, stem-form compounds, passive constructions, conditional sentences, and so forth. The author offers a thorough discussion of various pragmatic constraints illustrated with sample sentences, dialogues, and essays that aid in understanding the structure and use of the language from a cultural perspective.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3176-9 / $32.00 (PAPER)

Critical Approaches to Korean Geography

Posted on December 5, 2007 by stephchun

Arranged around a set of provocative themes, the essays in Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography, edited by Timothy R. Tangherlini and Sallie Yea, engage in the discussion from various critical perspectives on Korean geography. Part One, “Geographies of the (Colonial) City,” focuses on Seoul during the Japanese colonial occupation from 1910–1945 and the lasting impact of that period on the construction of specific places in Seoul. In Part Two, “Geographies of the (Imagined) Village,” the authors delve into the implications for the conceptions of the village of recent economic and industrial development. In this context, they examine both constructed space, such as the Korean Folk Village, and rural villages that were physically transformed through the processes of rapid modernization. The essays in “Geographies of Religion” (Part Three) reveal how religious sites are historically and environmentally contested as well as the high degree of mobility exhibited by sites themselves. Similarly, places that exist at the margins are powerful loci for the negotiation of identity and aspects of cultural ideology. The final section, “Geographies of the Margin,” focuses on places that exist at the margins of Korean society.