Category: Japan

Prophet Motive Now Available in Paperback

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Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan, by Nancy K. Stalker, is now available in paperback.

“Nancy Stalker’s study of Deguchi Onisaburô and the Japanese new religion Oomoto sheds new light on issues of religious leadership, charisma and entrepreneurship. In analysing how one seminal new religion expanded in early twentieth-century Japan, she focuses on what she terms Onisaburô’s ‘charismatic entrepreneurship’ to demonstrate the close links between innovative leadership and religious success. In so doing she contributes significantly to the study of new religions by demonstrating the importance of entrepreneurial leadership and the close and essential links between religion and economics. . . . By widening her focus to the Japanese new religions in general, Stalker shows Onisaburô to be one of the most important figures in Japanese religious history. His activities, such as his espousal of art, internationalism and peace messages, have served as a virtual blueprint of activity for many subsequent Japanese religious leaders. She demonstrates further the significance of Oomoto as one of the most seminal new religions of the twentieth century.” —Ian Reader, University of Manchester

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3226-1 / $26.00 (PAPER)

Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature

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Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, “endlessly interpretable,” and food, like literature, “looks like an object but is actually a relationship.” So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, by Tomoko Aoyama, explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people’s relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other. The examples she offers are taken from novels (shosetsu) and other literary texts and include well known writers (such as Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Hayashi Fumiko, Okamoto Kanoko, Kaiko Takeshi, and Yoshimoto Banana) as well as those who are less widely known (Murai Gensai, Nagatsuka Takashi, Sumii Sue, and Numa Shozo).

September 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3285-8 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

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)

Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism

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For more than a thousand years, Buddhism has dominated Japanese death rituals and concepts of the afterlife. The nine essays in Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism, edited by Jacqueline I. Stone and Mariko Namba Walter, ranging chronologically from the tenth century to the present, bring to light both continuity and change in death practices over time. They also explore the interrelated issues of how Buddhist death rites have addressed individual concerns about the afterlife while also filling social and institutional needs and how Buddhist death-related practices have assimilated and refigured elements from other traditions, bringing together disparate, even conflicting, ideas about the dead, their postmortem fate, and what constitutes normative Buddhist practice.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3204-9 / $52.00 (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)

Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific

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What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco, take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3241-4 / $35.00 (PAPER)

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)

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)

Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art Now Available in Paperback

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Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600-2005, by Patricia J. Graham, is now available in paperback.

“This book is densely written and copiously illustrated, rich with evidence that Buddhist art has thrived over the last four hundred years and continues to do so. One of the book’s many contributions is how it traces the widening patronage of Buddhist art, which helped to create and support a new class of Buddhist artists and appreciation for their art beyond the walls of the Buddhist temples.” —Buddhadharma

April 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3191-2 / $29.00 (PAPER)

Soto Zen in Medieval Japan Now in Paperback

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Soto Zen in Medieval Japan, by William M. Bodiford, is now available in paperback.

“Carefully researched and set forth with finesse, Bodiford’s study advances dramatically our understanding of the introduction and development of Zen in Japan. . . . [This] is the most important English work on Soto Zen to date; it is a ‘must’ for any student, scholar, or practitioner interested in the genesis and early development of this important strand of Japanese Buddhism.” —Journal of Japanese Studies

Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No. 8
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute
April 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3303-9 / $28.00 (PAPER)

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