The WWII Internment Memoirs of a Hawaii Issei

Yasutaro Soga’s Life behind Barbed Wire (Tessaku seikatsu) is an exceptional firsthand account of the incarceration of a Hawai‘i Japanese during World War II. On the evening of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Soga, the editor of a Japanese-language newspaper, was arrested along with several hundred other prominent Issei (Japanese immigrants) in Hawai‘i. After being held for six months on Sand Island, Soga was transferred to an Army camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and later to a Justice Department camp in Santa Fe. He would spend just under four years in custody before returning to Hawai‘i in the months following the end of the war.

Most of what has been written about the detention of Japanese Americans focuses on the Nisei experience of mass internment on the West Coast—largely because of the language barrier immigrant writers faced. This translation, therefore, presents us with a rare Issei voice on internment, and Soga’s opinions challenge many commonly held assumptions about Japanese Americans during the war regarding race relations, patriotism, and loyalty.

October 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-2033-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Visual Modernity in China

The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China, by Laikwan Pang, analyzes the multiple and complex ways in which urban Chinese subjects saw themselves interacting with the new visual culture that emerged during the turbulent period between the 1880s and the 1930s. The media and visual forms examined include lithography, photography, advertising, film, and theatrical performances. Urbanites actively engaged with and enjoyed this visual culture, which was largely driven by the subjective desire for the empty promises of modernity—promises comprised of such abstract and fleeting concepts as new, exciting, and fashionable.

October 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3093-9 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

“This book presents a careful historicization of the ‘visual.’ Rather than take the act of seeing as natural, Pang brilliantly argues that the visual is a modern phenomenon, linked to but extending and transforming indigenous cultural forms of seeing and looking. Equally meticulous in its theoretical and empirical coordinates, this book is eminently readable and consistently insightful. A wonderful look at how modern Chinese came to see.” —Rebecca E. Karl, New York University

Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan Now in Paperback

Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan, by Richard Rubinger, is now available in paperback. The focus of Rubinger’s study of Japanese literacy is the least-studied (yet overwhelming majority) of the premodern population: the rural farming class. In this book-length historical exploration of the topic, the first in any language, Rubinger dispels the misconception that there are few materials available for the study of popular literacy in Japan. He analyzes a rich variety of untapped sources from the sixteenth century onward, drawing for the first time on material that allows him to measure literacy: signatures on apostasy oaths, diaries, agricultural manuals, home encyclopedias, rural poetry-contest entries, village election ballots, literacy surveys, and family account books.

August 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3124-0 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Jizo in Hawaii

Jizo, one of the most beloved Buddhist deities in Japan, is known primarily as the guardian of children and travelers. In coastal areas, fishermen and swimmers also look to him for protection. Soon after their arrival in the late 1800s, issei (first-generation Japanese) shoreline fishermen began casting for ulua on Hawai‘i’s treacherous sea cliffs, where they risked being swept off the rocky ledges. In response to numerous drownings, Jizo statues were erected near dangerous fishing and swimming sites. Guardian of the Sea: Jizo in Hawai‘i, by John R. K. Clark, tells the story of a compassionate group of men who raised these statues as a service to their communities.

August 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3158-5 / $19.95 (PAPER)

“John Clark has written a remarkable book about shoreline statues of Jizo, a Buddhist figure dedicated to our protection and enlightenment. . . . John draws on interviews with more than three hundred individuals to document the location of these statues and in the process offers us a glimpse of the daily lives and spirituality of early Japanese Americans. We are indebted to him for making us aware of these Jizo monuments and their role in shaping Hawai‘i’s multicultural heritage.” —Dennis Ogawa, chair, American Studies Department, University of Hawai‘i

John R. K. Clark is the author of numerous best-selling books on Hawai‘i’s beaches— most recently Beaches of Oahu (revised edition); Hawai‘i Place Names: Shores, Beaches, and Surf Sites; and Hawai‘i’s Best Beaches—all published by University of Hawai‘i Press.

Broken Trust Authors to Participate in ABA Teleconference

Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth will take part in “Bad Times for Nonprofits,” a course offered in the the American Bar Association (ABA) Connection TeleConference Series and scheduled for August 15, 2007. The course is available to ABA members only and is sponsored by the ABA Center for Continuing Legal Education. Visit the ABA website here for registration, course information, and teleconference times.

King and Roth are the authors of Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, and Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust, published in 2006 by University of Hawai‘i Press. Broken Trust is the latest recipient of the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association’s Samuel M. Kamakau Award for Hawai‘i Book of the Year.

Economic and Social Development in East and Southeast Asia

It is well known that Taiwan and South Korea, both former Japanese colonies, achieved rapid growth and industrialization after 1960. The performance of former European and American colonies (Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines) has been less impressive. Some scholars have attributed the difference to better infrastructure and greater access to education in Japan’s colonies. Colonial Legacies: Economic and Social Development in East and Southeast Asia, by Anne E. Booth, examines and critiques such arguments in this ambitious comparative study of economic development in East and Southeast Asia from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s.

August 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3161-5 / $60.00 (CLOTH)

Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China

Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Culture of Ming China, 1368–1644, by Craig Clunas, is an innovative and accessible history of a high point in Chinese culture, seen through the riches of its images and objects. Not a simple emperor-by-emperor history, it instead introduces the reader to themes that provide stimulating and original points of entry to the culture of China: to ideas of motion and rest, to the position occupied by writing and objects featuring writing; to ideas about pleasure, about violence and ageing.

Craig Clunas is the author of Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China and Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, both published by University of Hawai‘i Press.

August 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3149-3 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan

Since the mid-1990s Taiwanese artists have been responsible for shaping much of the international contemporary art scene, yet studies on modern Taiwanese art published outside of Taiwan are scarce. The nine essays collected in Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, edited by Yuko Kikuchi, present different perspectives on Taiwanese visual culture and landscape during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945), focusing variously on travel writings, Western and Japanese/Oriental-style paintings, architecture, aboriginal material culture, and crafts.

August 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3050-2 / $60.00 (CLOTH)

Mediasphere Shanghai

For many in the west, “Shanghai” is the quintessence of East Asian modernity, whether imagined as glamorous and exciting, corrupt and impoverishing, or a complex synthesis of the good, the bad, and the ugly. How did “Shanghai” acquire this power? How did people across China and around the world decide that Shanghai was the place to be? Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production, by Alexander Des Forges, shows that partial answers to these questions can be found in the products of Shanghai’s media industry, particularly the Shanghai novel, a distinctive genre of installment fiction that flourished from the 1890s to the 1930s.

July 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3081-6 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

“Alexander Des Forges’ book is not just another study of late imperial Chinese fiction. It is, rather, an innovative argument about how the wide-ranging engagement with fiction was instrumental in constituting Shanghai as what he terms a mediasphere—an evolving locus and process of social interaction, sustained by the collaboration of hybrid urban forces such as industry, print culture, aesthetic and narrative conventions, a growing consumers’ market, and an active reading public. These forces led to the production not only of material goods but also of the ideological conditions under which that modern time-space known as Shanghai became possible—indeed, was repeatedly imagined and performed in literary, cultural, and sociopolitical (con)texts. An admirably learned and coherently written book; a must-read for all Shanghai lovers.” —Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University

3 UHP Titles Longlisted for the ICAS Book Prize

The International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize is a global competition that provides an international focus for publications on Asia while at the same time increasing their visibility worldwide. The coveted book prizes are awarded for best studies in the humanities and the social sciences.

Three University of Hawai‘i Press titles have been longlisted for this year’s prize: The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia, by Barbara Watson Andaya (humanities category); Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China, by Keith N. Knapp (humanities category); and Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life, by Susan Orpett Long (social sciences category). Winners will be announced at ICAS 5, which will be held in August 2007 in Kuala Lumpur.

Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937, by Christopher A. Reed, also published by University of Hawai‘i Press, won the prize in the humanities category in 2005.

The Life and Writings of One of Hawaii’s Most Distinguished Nisei

Distributed for the Department of American Studies, University of Hawai‘i, and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i, First Among Nisei: The Life and Writings of Masaji Marumoto, by Dennis M. Ogawa, is an account of the life and career of one of Hawai‘i’s most distinguished Nisei. Primarily based on oral histories, this book is an account of Marumoto’s life and career—from the time he was a child until he was well into his retirement years in the mid-1980s. Marumoto was the first person of Asian ancestry to graduate from Harvard Law School, the first Japanese American president of the Hawaii Bar Association, and the first Japanese American to serve on the Hawaii Supreme Court.

June 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3141-7 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Dennis M. Ogawa is the author of Jan Ken Po: The World of Hawaii’s Japanese Americans and co-author with Glen Grant of Kodomo no tame ni/For the Sake of the Children: The Japanese American Experience in Hawaii, both published by University of Hawai‘i Press.

Selling Songs and Smiles Now in Paperback

Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan, by Janet R. Goodwin, is now available in paperback.

June 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3097-7 / $24.00 (PAPER)

“Goodwin offers an erudite account that acknowledges all prior scholarly work on the subject. . . . The book is packed with juicy details, historically necessary and judiciously picked from sources not usually encountered. Of major interest, however, is Goodwin’s ability to see behind the self-serving screens of political history, to divine the true intentions of this demonization of one of the few professions then open to women, and to present her facts in the fairest possible manner.” —Japan Times (read the full text of Donald Richie’s review here)

Janet R. Goodwin is the author of Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan, published by University of Hawai‘i Press.