The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II, by Emily Roxworthy, garnered an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the Barnard Hewitt Award committee, American Society for Theatre Research. The award is presented each year to the best book in “theatre history or cognate disciplines” published during the previous calendar year.
Category: History
Tour of Duty Now Available in Paperback
“[Constantine] Vaporis has written a magnificent book on the sankai kotai, or alternate attendance system. . . . Long considered the central political control mechanism of the Tokugawa period, the system has received surprisingly little scholarly attention until now. Filling a major gap in the understanding of Japanese history, the author provides a detailed account of the mechanics of the system and demands placed on daimyo and retainers on tours of duty in Edo. Exploiting the latest archaeological and archival sources, Vaporis makes clear the economic burden of the system on the daimyo, as well as its role as an engine of cultural, intellectual, and material exchange, from the center in Edo and between regions. The author also provides intimate details of the lives of samurai, both on the road to and from Edo and while serving their time in Edo. For all interested in early modern history. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice
November 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3470-8 / $23.00 (PAPER)
Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan
Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan, an innovative study of ethics in Meiji Japan (1868–1912), explores the intense struggle to define a common morality for the emerging nation-state.
“Richard Reitan argues that modern Japanese ethics—and particularly the creation of an ethics of a ‘Japanese spirit’ or ‘Japanese national character’—arose in the context of the Meiji movement for civilization, as Japan attempted to become more like Europe in order to recover its sovereignty and equality with western states. His is a thoughtful and original contribution to the historiography of Japan and valuable account of the rise of ‘national morality.’ The book demonstrates an admirable command of the material, great clarity with which Japanese concepts are explained, and an argument of nuance and subtlety. Making a Moral Society will not only be of interest to scholars of Japanese history, religion, and culture, and scholars of ethics, nationalism, and modernization generally, but will also be useful in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses.” —Douglas Howland, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
November 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3294-0 / $48.00 (CLOTH)
Book Launch for New Hawaii Chinese History Center Book
Join the Hawaii Chinese History Center, the Associated Chinese University Women, and United Chinese Society of Hawaii in celebrating the publication of Chinese Pioneer Families of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai.
Sunday, November 8, 1:00-3:00 pm, Kilauea Recreation Center, 4109 Kilauea Avenue, Honolulu: Co-editor Ken Yee and several of the oral history participants will be on hand to sign books. Festivities will include a lion dance, Hawaiian music of Maui and Molokai place-name songs, and simple refreshments.
Please RSVP by email (ginny96825@yahoo.com) by October 30.
Chinese Pioneer Families of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai is distributed by University of Hawai‘i Press.
Chinese Pioneer Families of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai
During the last half of the 1800s through the early 1900s Chinese migrated from their villages in the Pearl River Delta in Kwangtung Province (Guangdong) and many found their way to the neighbor islands in Hawaii. Chinese Pioneer Families of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai, edited by Ken Yee and Nancy Wong Yee, is a fascinating collection of oral histories filled with the voices of their children and grandchildren. They tell stories that are both universal and particular about the lives of the early immigrants and their families and how they adapted to their new home in the Hawaiian islands, even as they held fast to their ties to China. These colorful, multigenerational stories paint a larger picture of the cultural traditions and social life of that time and illustrate how these immigrants became part of the fabric of Hawaii. Reference materials and maps provide useful resources for those wishing to trace their own roots.
Chinese Historic Sites and Pioneer Families Series
October 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3449-4 / $25.00 (PAPER)
Distributed for the Hawaii Chinese History Center
Book Launch and Reading for Talking Hawaii’s Story
A book launch and reading for Talking Hawai‘i’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island People, edited by Michi Kodama-Nishimoto, Warren S. Nishimoto, and Cynthia A. Oshiro, is scheduled for Sunday, October 18, 2009, 2:00-3:30 pm, at the School of Architecture Auditorium, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. The reading will be directed and produced by Aloha Shorts. Light refreshments and free on-campus parking will be available.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Oral History, the Center for Biographical Research, and the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities. For more information, contact the Center for Oral History (phone: 956-6259 or email: wnishimo@hawaii.edu) or the Center for Biographical Research (phone: 956-3774 or email: biograph@hawaii.edu).
Talking Hawai‘i’s Story is published by University of Hawai‘i Press for the Center for Oral History and Center for Biographical Research.
Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan
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)
Van Dyke receives UH Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research
University of Hawai‘i law professor Jon Van Dyke, author of Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i?, has been awarded the University of Hawai‘i Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research. The medal for research recognizes “scholarly contributions that expand the boundaries of knowledge and enrich the lives of students and the community.”
Professor Van Dyke and the two other recipients of this year’s award will be recognized at the annual convocation ceremony on September 15, 10 a.m., at UH’s Kennedy Theatre.
Japan’s Medieval Population Now Available in Paperback
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)
Hawaiian Art and National Culture of the Kalakaua Era
The Arts of Kingship: Hawaiian Art and National Culture of the Kalakaua Era, by Stacy L. Kamehiro, offers a sustained and detailed account of Hawaiian public art and architecture during the reign of David Kalakaua, the nativist and cosmopolitan ruler of the Hawaiian Kingdom from 1874 to 1891. Kamehiro provides visual and historical analysis of Kalakaua’s coronation and regalia, the King Kamehameha Statue, ‘Iolani Palace, and the Hawaiian National Museum, drawing them together in a common historical, political, and cultural frame. Each articulated Hawaiian national identities and navigated the turbulence of colonialism in distinctive ways and has endured as a key cultural symbol.
August 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3358-9 / $24.00 (PAPER)
The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion
The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion, by Yucheng Qin, is a striking, original portrait of the Chinese Six Companies (Zhonghua huiguan), or Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the most prominent support organization for Chinese immigrants in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century. As a federation of “native-place associations” (huiguan) in California, the Six Companies responded to racist acts and legislation by organizing immigrant communities and employing effective diplomatic strategies against exclusion. Yucheng Qin substantiates recent arguments that Chinese immigrants were resourceful in fighting for their rights and, more importantly, he argues that through the Six Companies they created a political rhetoric and civic agenda that were then officially adopted by Qing court officials, who at first were unprepared for modern diplomacy.
July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3274-2 / $51.00 (CLOTH)
World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific
Ambitious in its scope and scale, Natives and Exotics: World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific, by Judith A. Bennett, ranges over rear bases and operational fronts from Bora Bora to New Guinea, providing a lucid analysis of resource exploitation, entangled wartime politics, and human perceptions of the vast Oceanic environment. Although the war’s physical impact proved significant and oftentimes enduring, it shows that the tropical environment offered its own challenges: Unfamiliar tides left landing craft stranded; unseen microbes carrying endemic diseases disabled thousands of troops. Weather, terrain, plants, animals—all played an active role as enemy or ally.
July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3350-3 / $30.00 (PAPER)
