Category: History

More March Author Events

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Sunday, March 18, 2-3:30 pm, Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai‘i: Wendy Arbeit, author of Links to the Past: The Work of Early Hawaiian Artisans, will give a free talk on how she researched Links, what she discovered, and why drawings can offer more information than photographs. The discussion will be preceded by live demonstrations by cultural practitioners and followed by a book-signing by the author and light refreshments. Books will be available for purchase at the shop, located at the ‘ewa end of Ward Warehouse, 1050 Ala Moana Blvd. (phone: 596-8885).

Monday, March 19, 6:30-7:30 pm, Thinking Out Loud: Talking Issues, Taking Action (KZOO-AM 1210): Don Hibbard, coauthor of Hart Wood: Architectural Regionalism in Hawai‘i and other books on architecture, will be interviewed by radio host Willa Tanabe. The program is sponsored by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i.

UH Press Author Events on March 8

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Glenn Wharton will hold a book launch for The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i at 6:00-7:30 pm, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor. Presenters at the event will also include Mitchell Duneier (Professor of Sociology, Princeton University), John Haworth (Director, George Gustave Heye Center, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian), Harriet Senie (Professor of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center), and John Kuo Wei Tchen (Founding Director, Asian/Pacific/American Institute).

Victoria Kneubuhl will be one of the featured writers at the Friends of Waialua Library’s annual Authors Night, 6:30-8:30 pm. Her new mystery, Murder Leaves Its Mark, will be of special interest to area residents since the old Haleiwa Hotel is a setting for the novel.

A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan

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Hard Times in the HometownHard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan, by Martin Dusinberre, 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.

“This is superb historical writing with a purpose and I expect Hard Times in the Hometown to become not only required reading in economic and social history classes but essential for scholars who have been grappling with issues of understanding the historical weaknesses of Japanese civil society. In short, I am so bold as to claim that Dusinberre’s book will become an instant classic in Japanese history and essential reading for anthropologists and political scientists.” —Harald Fuess, professor for cultural economic history, Heidelberg University

February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3524-8 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

New Religions, Media, and Authority in Occupied Japan

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Celebrity GodsCelebrity Gods: New Religions, Media, and Authority in Occupied Japan, by Benjamin Dorman, focuses on the leaders and founders (kyōsō) of Jiu and Tenshō Kōtai Jingū Kyō, two new religions of Japan’s immediate postwar period that received substantial press attention.

Looking back for precursors to the postwar relationship of new religions and media, Benjamin Dorman explores the significant role that the Japanese media traditionally played in defining appropriate and acceptable social behavior, acting at times as mouthpieces for government and religious authorities. Using the cases of Renmonkyō in the Meiji era and Ōmotokyō in the Taishō and Shōwa eras, Dorman shows how accumulated images of new religions in pre-1945 Japan became absorbed into those of the immediate postwar period. Given the lack of formal religious education in Japan, the media played an important role in transmitting notions of acceptable behavior to the public. He goes on to characterize the leaders of these groups as “celebrity gods,” demonstrating that the media, which were generally untrained in religious history or ideas, chose to fashion them as “celebrities” whose antics deserved derision.

Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture
February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3621-4 / $42.00 (CLOTH)
Published in association with the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University

Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan

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Performing the Great PeacePerforming the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan, by Luke S. Roberts, offers a cultural approach to understanding the politics of the Tokugawa period, at the same time deconstructing some of the assumptions of modern national historiographies. Deploying the political terms uchi (inside), omote (ritual interface), and naisho (informal negotiation)—all commonly used in the Tokugawa period—the author explores how daimyo and the Tokugawa government understood political relations and managed politics in terms of spatial autonomy, ritual submission, and informal negotiation.

February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3513-2 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War

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Historical Dictionary of the Indochina WarHistorical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945-1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach, by Christopher E. Goscha, is the first in English to provide a comprehensive account to date of one of the most important conflicts of the twentieth century. Over 1,600 entries offer in-depth, expert coverage of the war in all its dimensions.

“This is the first dictionary about Vietnam in any language to mine French and Vietnamese sources in equal measure. It ranges beyond Vietnamese and French participants to provide equally incisive entries on British, Chinese, Lao, Cambodian, American, and Soviet actors in a war that took on important international dimensions. The prodigious amount of research that Goscha has put into this dictionary makes it a milestone in the field, a reference work that will be consulted for decades.” —David G. Marr, Australian National University

February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3604-7 / $175.00 (CLOTH)

Distributed for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii

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Family Torn ApartFamily Torn Apart: The Internment Story of the Otokichi Muin Ozaki Family, edited by Gail Honda, is the gripping story of one Hawai‘i family’s World War II odyssey. Otokichi Ozaki, a Japanese immigrant, was a Japanese language school teacher, tanka poet, and anthurium grower and also a leader of the Japanese community in the city of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Based on letters, poetry, and radio scripts in the collection of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i, and translated here for the first time, this work traces Ozaki’s incarceration at eight different detention camps, his family’s life in Hawai‘i without him, their decision to ‘voluntarily’ enter Mainland detention camps in the hope of reuniting, and their subsequent frustration as that reunion bogged down in red tape and government apathy.

January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-9761493-1-6 / $26.00 (PAPER)
Distributed for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i

The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan

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The Okinawan DiasporaAlthough much has been written on Okinawan emigration abroad, The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within, by Steve Rabson, is the first book in English to consider the topic in Japan. It is based on a wide variety of secondary and primary sources, including interviews conducted by the author in the greater Osaka area over a two-year period. The work begins with the experiences of women who worked in Osaka’s spinning factories in the early twentieth century, covers the years of the Pacific War and the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, and finally treats the period following Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972. Throughout, it examines the impact of government and corporate policies, along with popular attitudes, for a compelling account of the Okinawan diaspora in the context of contemporary Japan’s struggle to acknowledge its multiethnic society.

January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3534-7 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory around the Web

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Hawaii's Mauna Loa ObservatoryWhile researching his latest book, Hawai‘i’s Mauna Loa Observatory: Fifty Years of Monitoring the Atmosphere, Forrest Mims spent hours searching for a small, unmarked beach near Hilo Bay. It was here in December 1840 that the U.S. Exploring Expedition began its long and difficult journey to the summit of Mauna Loa to make the first scientific measurements from atop the volcano. Read about the expedition in Mims’ weekly science column in the San Antonio Express-News: http://www.mysanantonio.com/life/article/Expedition-collected-data-on-Hawaiian-volcano-2517912.php.

For other interesting history tidbits from Mims’ book, check out this post from Raising Islands, written by veteran Hawai‘i science journalist Jan TenBruggencate: http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2012/01/mauna-kea-in-kamehamehas-time-it-was.html.

The Painted King Author Interviewed

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Glenn Wharton, author of The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawaii, recently spoke about his book, queer conservation, and the complexities of community-based cultural engagement. The interview appeared online in both San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter and Chicago’s Windy City Times.

On Wharton’s attraction to Hawai‘i: I’ve always been attracted to Hawaiian culture, in part because of the falsetto singing, ukulele music, and storytelling through dance, but also because of the gentle nature of many Hawaiians that I’ve met over the years. As an island culture, everything moves more slowly. People in semi-rural areas like the one that surrounds the Kamehameha I sculpture embrace outsiders with warm aloha, but only after the outsider has proven that they have a genuine love for the culture and the land.

On the decision to restore the Kamehameha statue to its painted form: “As I got deeper into the community, I learned there were many voices, and they didn’t all agree on the sculpture’s meaning or how to go about conserving it. Indeed, some of my colleagues on the mainland did accuse me of ‘going native’ in that I was sharing professional authority with people who didn’t ‘understand art history,’ and that we should honor the original artist’s intention no matter what local residents think today. Maintaining the rather quirky tradition of painting the sculpture in life-like colors that’s evolved since its 1883 installation was going a bit too far for some of my colleagues.”

Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011 Announced

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Each year Choice Magazine, the official publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, compiles a distinguished list of Outstanding Academic Titles. The following UH Press book was recognized for 2011. A complete list of titles will be available in Choice’s January 2012 issue.

Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy by Tatiana Gabroussenko

“[A] superbly researched, readable study. . . . Gabroussenko’s account of writers in the last ‘socialist paradise’ is invaluable, if tragic, reading. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice (February 2011)

Sitting in Oblivion: The Heart of Daoist Meditation, by Livia Kohn and distributed by UH Press for Three Pines Press, was also recognized as a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title.

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