Category: History

Oe Kenzaburo’s Tribute to Oishi Matashichi

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A few days before last month’s tsunami hit northeastern Japan, Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo wrote a brief essay for the Asahi newspaper, which appeared on March 15: a tribute to anti-nuclear activist Oishi Matashichi, a fisherman who experienced firsthand the effects of the U.S.’ nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1950s. Read the essay here, translated by Richard H. Minear.

Professor Minear’s translation of Oishi’s autobiography, The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon, and I, will be published by UH Press this August.

“The Human Fallout for Japan” and “Godzilla: Symbol of Japan’s Post WWII Nuclear Anxiety”

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The nuclear crisis has rallied a weary Japan, but also risks spurring discrimination against the contaminated. Read Peter Wynn Kirby, author of the recently published Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan, on the test the disaster poses for Japanese society at The Daily Beast.

Professor Kirby was also recently interviewed at WBUR, Boston’s NPR affiliate, on the changes to the Godzilla movies over the years and corresponding Japanese attitudes toward nuclear energy. Listen to the interview here.

“How Japan’s Nuclear Industry Got Here”

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In today’s “Breakingviews,” hosted by Reuters, Martin Dusinberre, author of the forthcoming UH Press title Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan, addresses the question of how Japan, a country “that experienced the horrors of nuclear weapons in 1945[,] came to embrace nuclear power so expansively in the postwar decades.” The Reuters column may be viewed here; and also at a TD Waterhouse site.

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 of Kaminoseki comes to a climax when, in the 1980s, the town’s councilors agree to the construction of a nuclear power station, unleashing a storm of protests from the community.

Martin Dusinberre is lecturer in modern Japanese history at Newcastle University, UK.

“Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film”

Posted on by stephchun

Peter Wynn Kirby, author of Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan, recently contributed to the New York Times’ Opinionator blog. His March 14 post, “Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film,” looks at the original 1954 Gojira (Godzilla) and other kaiju (monster) films that followed to provide some cultural background on Japan’s reaction to the ongoing crisis in Fukushima.

Kirby points out a little-known fact about the first Godzilla: The film was inspired by the events following the U.S.’ March 1954 “Bravo” nuclear test near Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. A distant Japanese tuna trawler, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, was outside the official no-sail zone but was nevertheless showered with radioactive ash. A translation of crew member Oishi Matashichi’s memoir, The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon, and I, will be published by UH Press in September 2011.

Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawaii

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Waves of ResistanceSurfing has been a significant sport and cultural practice in Hawai‘i for more than 1,500 years. In the last century, facing increased marginalization on land, many Native Hawaiians have found refuge, autonomy, and identity in the waves. In Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawaii, Isaiah Walker argues that throughout the twentieth century Hawaiian surfers have successfully resisted colonial encroachment in the po‘ina nalu (surf zone).

“The po‘ina nalu is a significant space where Hawaiian men exercised their cultural, territorial, social, and political prerogatives. The story of their resistance to the inundation of Hawai‘i by European, American, and other invasions is one that has long awaited a good telling. This work provides context and details underlying a theater of contestation not previously addressed by scholars, giving voice to an aspect of Hawaiian resistance deserving attention.” —Carlos Andrade, associate professor and director, Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, Hawai‘inuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, University of Hawai‘i

February 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3547-7 / $24.99 (PAPER),

John Layard, Fieldwork, and Photography on Malakula

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Moving ImagesIn 1914–1915, Cambridge anthropologist John Layard worked in Malakula, New Hebrides (Vanuatu). This was one of the earliest periods of solitary, intensive fieldwork within the developing discipline of British social anthropology. Layard worked enthusiastically with his local assistants to document and understand the customary lives of the people, taking copious notes and over 450 photographs. His collection of objects and glass plate negatives are housed in the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork, and Photography on Malakula since 1914, by Haidy Geismar and Anita Herle, contains over 300 of these evocative images, most previously unpublished, united for the first time with Layard’s field notes and captions. They provide an extraordinary record of the elaborate ritual and culture of Small Islanders and reveal photography’s role as an evidential and subjective medium vital to the practice of social anthropology.

February 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3503-3 / $90.00 (CLOTH)
254 duotones

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

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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 Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory

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Refiguring Women Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, by Chie Ikeya, presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the woman of the khit kala—“the woman of the times”—who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicized, earner and consumer, “Burmese” and “Westernized,” she embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. In Refiguring Women, Ikeya interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. She marshals a wide range of hitherto unexamined Burmese language sources to analyze both the discursive figurations of the woman of the khit kala and the choices and actions of actual women who—whether pursuing higher education, becoming political, or adopting new clothes and hairstyles—unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernization, and nationalism.

“Refiguring Women not only marks a milestone in Burmese historiography but makes a significant contribution to our appreciation of how ‘being modern‘ was understood in colonized societies. Deftly integrating visual and literary representations of Burmese women with the experiences of a people living under colonial control, this pioneering study explores previously untapped sources to provide new insights on the entangled relations between gender, colonialism, and modernity.” —Barbara Andaya, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3461-6 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Book Signings Scheduled for Author of Regulating Paradise

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David CalliesUniversity of Hawai‘i law professor David L. Callies will sign copies of his recent book, Regulating Paradise: Land Use Controls in Hawaii, at two bookstore appearances during January. The public is invited to meet and speak to Professor Callies at these events:

Saturday, January 15, 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Barnes & Noble, Kahala Mall, phone: 737-3323

Saturday, January 29, 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Barnes & Noble, Ala Moana Center, phone: 949-7307

Talks Scheduled for Author of Haoles in Hawaii

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Haoles in HawaiiJudy Rohrer, author of Haoles in Hawai‘i, is scheduled to present her book at the following free events and the public is invited to attend:

Book signing
Saturday, January 8, 12:00-1:00 p.m.
Basically Books – Hilo
160 Kamehameha Avenue, phone: 808-961-0144

Author talk and book signing party (refreshments will be provided)
Sunday, January 9, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai‘i, Ward Warehouse
1050 Ala Moana Blvd., phone 596-8885

Author presentation
Thursday, January 13, 5:00-6:30 p.m.
Windward Community College, Hale Alaka‘i, Room 102

Friday, January 14, 12:30-2:00 p.m.
Author talk and discussion
Sponsored by the Center for Biographical Research
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Kuykendall 410

Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi

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Luc XiWhat does it mean when a city of 180,000 people has more than 5,000 women working as prostitutes? This question frames Vu Trong Phung’s 1937 classic reportage Luc Xi. In the late 1930s, Hanoi had a burgeoning commercial sex industry that involved thousands of people and hundreds of businesses. It was the center of the city’s nightlife and the source of suffering, violence, exploitation, and a venereal disease epidemic. For Phung, a popular writer and intellectual, it also raised disturbing questions about the state of Vietnamese society and culture and whether his country really was “progressing” under French colonial rule. Translator Shaun Kingsley Malarney’s thoughtful and multifaceted introduction provides historical background on colonialism, prostitution, and venereal disease in Vietnam and discusses reportage as a literary genre, political tool, and historical source. A fully annotated translation of Luc Xi follows, in which Phung takes readers into the heart of colonial Hanoi’s sex industry, portraying its female workers, the officials who attempted to regulate it, the doctors who treated its victims, and the secretive medical facility known as the Nha Luc Xi (“The Dispensary”), which examined prostitutes for venereal diseases and held them for treatment.

“Among the most celebrated works of Vietnamese non-fiction reportage, Vu Trọng Phụng’s Luc Xi illuminates the culture of prostitution and the politics of venereal disease prevention in colonial Hanoi. Shaun Malarney’s translation of the text is both elegant and accurate and his detailed introduction provides useful historical context while advancing an important argument about social imbalances embedded within the institutions of colonial medicine. This is an exceptional work of historical scholarship.” —Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

Southeast Asia: Politics Meaning and Memory
November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3467-8 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

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)

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