Category: History

Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World

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Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) has been the subject of numerous studies that focus on his importance to nationalist politics and Japanese intellectual and social history. Although well known as an ideologue of Japanese National Learning (Kokugaku), Atsutane’s significance as a religious thinker has been largely overlooked. His prolific writings on supernatural subjects have never been thoroughly analyzed in English until now. In When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World, Wilburn Hansen focuses on Senkyo ibun (1822), a voluminous work centering on Atsutane’s interviews with a fourteen-year-old Edo street urchin named Kozo Torakichi who claimed to be an apprentice tengu, a supernatural creature of Japanese folklore. Hansen uncovers in detail how Atsutane employed a deliberate method of ethnographic inquiry that worked to manipulate and stimulate Torakichi’s surreal descriptions of everyday existence in a supernatural realm, what Atsutane termed the Other World. Hansen’s investigation and analysis of the process begins with the hypothesis that Atsutane’s project was an early attempt at ethnographic research, a new methodological approach in nineteenth-century Japan. Hansen posits that this “scientific” analysis was tainted by Atsutane’s desire to establish a discourse on Japan not limited by what he considered to be the unsatisfactory results of established Japanese philological methods.

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3209-4 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China

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Between 1044 and 1104, ideological disputes divided China’s sociopolitical elite, who organized into factions battling for control of the imperial government. Advocates and adversaries of state reform forged bureaucratic coalitions to implement their policy agendas and to promote like-minded colleagues. During this period, three emperors and two regents in turn patronized a new bureaucratic coalition that overturned the preceding ministerial regime and its policies. This ideological and political conflict escalated with every monarchical transition in a widening circle of retribution that began with limited purges and ended with extensive blacklists of the opposition. Divided by a Common Language: Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China, by Ari Daniel Levine, is the first English-language study to approach the political history of the late Northern Song in its entirety and the first to engage the issue of factionalism in Song political culture.

“This study is important for the clarity with which it presents a critical period in the development of Chinese imperial history and government. It is entirely original, well written, and the scholarship is very sound. Levine is deeply grounded in the texts and debates he is examining, and his command of the language of the sources, both primary and secondary, is excellent. Divided by a Common Language provides a significant contribution to Chinese, and especially Song, historiography.” —Hugh P. Clark, Ursinus College

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3266-7 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Asian Settler Colonialism

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Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i, edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawai‘i. Contributors from various fields and disciplines investigate aspects of Asian settler colonialism to illustrate its diverse operations and impact on Native Hawaiians. Essays range from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers’ claims to Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts.

“When Native Hawaiian activists lash out against Asian settler colonialism, we must remember what Malcolm X said: ‘The conditions that our people suffer are extreme, and an extreme illness cannot be cured with moderate medicine.’ This book takes a candid and necessary look at indigenous views of Asian settlement in Hawai‘i over the past century.” —Yuri Kochiyama, civil rights activist

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3300-8 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Hawaii at the Crossroads

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Hawai‘i at the Crossroads of the U.S. and Japan before the Pacific War, edited by Jon Thares Davidann, tells the story of Hawai‘i’s role in the emergence of Japanese cultural and political internationalism during the interwar period. Following World War I, Japan became an important global power and Hawai‘i Japanese represented its largest and most significant emigrant group. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hawai‘i’s Japanese American population provided Japan with a welcome opportunity to expand its international and intercultural contacts. This volume, based on papers presented at the 2001 Crossroads Conference by scholars from the U.S., Japan, and Australia, explores U.S.–Japanese conflict and cooperation in Hawai‘i—truly the crossroads of relations between the two countries prior to the Pacific War.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3225-4 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan

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Alternate attendance (sankin kotai) was one of the central institutions of Edo-period (1603–1868) Japan and one of the most unusual examples of a system of enforced elite mobility in world history. It required the daimyo to divide their time between their domains and the city of Edo, where they waited upon the Tokugawa shogun. Based on a prodigious amount of research in both published and archival primary sources, Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan, by Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, renders alternate attendance as a lived experience, for not only the daimyo but also the samurai retainers who accompanied them. Beyond exploring the nature of travel to and from the capital as well as the period of enforced bachelorhood there, Vaporis elucidates—for the first time—the significance of alternate attendance as an engine of cultural, intellectual, material, and technological exchange.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3205-6 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

A Distinctive History of Haena

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Ha‘ena is a land steeped in antiquity yet vibrantly beautiful today as any Hollywood fantasy of a tropical paradise. He ‘aina momona, a rich and fertile land linked to the sea and the rising and setting sun, is a place of gods and goddesses: Pele and her sister, Hi‘iaka, and Laka, patron of hula. It epitomizes the best that can be found in the district of northwestern Kaua‘i, known to aboriginal Hawaiians as Hale Le‘a (House of Pleasure and Delight). Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of Ancestors, by Carlos Andrade, is an ambitious attempt to provide a unique perspective in the complex story of the ahupua‘a of Ha‘ena.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3119-6 / $30.00 (CLOTH)

Our Great Qing Now Available in Paperback

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Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China, by Johan Elverskog, is now available in paperback.

“Elverskog’s book is a pleasure to read, managing as it does to weave together a detailed knowledge of modern Mongol history and the broad scope of its relevance for Asian history. His research is solidly based in the classics of Mongol history, as well as close readings of an impressive array of archive materials . . . made accessible to the non-specialist here for the first time. He frames his arguments within a wide-ranging body of theoretical work covering both religion and politics. At the same time, this book is refreshingly comparative, especially in terms of other empires (from the Roman to the British).” —Journal of Chinese Religions

“Masterful . . . represents an important contribution to the ‘new Qing history’ that is now changing the image of late imperial China by offering more nuanced interpretations of this period.” —International Journal of Asian Studies

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3330-5 / $23.00 (PAPER)

Racial Performativity and World War II

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In The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II, Emily Roxworthy contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal. Roxworthy demonstrates that this theatrical logic of segregating the real from the staged, the authentic experience from the political display, grew out of the manner in which internment was agitated for and instituted by the U.S. government and media. During the war, Japanese Americans struggled to define themselves within the web of this theatrical logic, and they continue to reenact this trauma in public and private to this day.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3220-9 / $35.00 (CLOTH)

“This is an original and well-written analysis, contributing much to the literature on internment and, thereby, re-energizing the ideological stages of internment discourse.” —Caroline Chung Simpson, University of Washington

A Positivist Approach to Reading Sources on Modern Japan

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Evaluating Evidence: A Positivist Approach to Reading Sources on Modern Japan by George Akita, is based on the grueling lessons learned by a senior scholar during three decades of tutoring by, and collaboration with, Japanese historians. George Akita persisted in the difficult task of reading documentary sources in Japanese, most written in calligraphic style (sosho), out of the conviction of their centrality to the historian’s craft and his commitment to a positivist methodology to research and scholarship. He argues forcefully in this volume for an inductive process in which the scholar seeks out facts on a subject and, through observation and examination of an extensive body of data, is able to discern patterns until it is possible to formulate certain propositions. ,

“In Evaluating Evidence, George Akita reasserts unabashedly the centrality of the written document in the work of the historian. At a time when postmodernism and deconstructionism have come to occupy the summit of methodological fashion in many disciplines, this distinguished chronicler of modern Japanese history insists that the positivistic tradition of research and scholarship remains crucial to any meaningful rendition of the past.” —Gordon Berger, University of Southern California

May 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-2560-7 / $58.00 (CLOTH)

Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China

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Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China, by Grace S. Fong, addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of women’s writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the life-long poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai.

“Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers’ participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong’s recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study.” —Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

May 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3186-8 / $32.00 (PAPER)

An Anthology of Surf Writing

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A thousand years after Hawaiians first paddled long wooden boards into the ocean, modern surfers have continued this practice, which has recently been transformed into a global industry. Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing, edited by Patrick Moser, brings together four centuries of writing about surfing, the most comprehensive collection of Polynesian and Western perspectives on the history and culture of a sport currently enjoyed by millions of people around the world. The stories begin with Hawaiian legends and chants and are followed by the journals of explorers; the travel narratives of missionaries and luminaries such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Jack London; and the contemporary observations of Tom Wolfe, William Finnegan, Susan Orlean, and Bob Shacochis.

May 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3155-4 / $32.00 (PAPER)

Nippon Modern Now Available in Paperback

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Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, is now available in paperback.

“Nippon Modern will be recognized as one of the core books of Japanese film studies, a must-read for anyone interested in Japanese cinema. Because it brings Japanese cinema study into dialogue with important debates in history, area studies, and post colonial studies, it should have a wide and heterogeneous readership that will be attracted to its compelling analysis of important films and straightforward narration of biographies and studio history.” —Abé Mark Nornes, University of Michigan

April 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3240-7 / $27.00 (PAPER)

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