Category: Japan

Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey

Posted on by UH Press

For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century.

Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson, is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3174-5 / $19.00 (PAPER)

The Thought War Now in Paperback

Posted on by UH Press

The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, by Barak Kushner, is now available in paperback.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3208-7 / $18.00 (PAPER)

Here’s what reviewers had to say about the cloth edition.

“Completely individual and very interesting. . . . Kushner’s book is, I think, the first to treat propaganda as a profession in wartime Japan. He follows it through its various stages and is particularly interested in its popular acceptance—wartime comedy, variety shows, how entertainers sought to bolster their careers by adopting the prewar message, which then filtered down into society and took hold. Using almost entirely primary materials, which have not before been translated, Barak re-creates the wartime world in which propaganda was the truth. In so doing, he has given us an eminently readable account of an unknown aspect of the war and has defined our understanding of it.” —Donald Richie, Japan Times (Read full review)

“[The Thought War] reveals a good deal more about Japan at war than has been available heretofore in Western languages. If propaganda is understood in its classic sense of truth or falsehood deliberately spread to promote a cause, [it] detects wide evidence of it in political ideology, public relations, advertising, hortatory admonitions to citizens, and even in the coercive tactics of the thought police. This soundly researched book highlights the multiple, often ill-coordinated sources of Japan’s wartime propaganda. . . . [It] should help considerably in advancing the urgent project of defining and assessing responsibility, not only for Japan but for all combatants, and not only for World War II but for all conflicts and modes of political violence.” —Journal of Japanese Studies

“Kushner discovers that, contrary to what is usually believed, Japan’s wartime propaganda was rational, depicting Japan as a modern state. It was effective because it appealed to reason rather than to mystical nationalism or to the cult of the emperor. It presented Japan as a progressive, scientific, and hygienic country, ‘the harbinger of civilization that Asia should strive to emulate’ (p. 11). As such, Japan shouldered the obligation to liberate and lead its less fortunate neighbors. This message had a great appeal to intellectuals, who supported the war as a campaign to liberate Asia.” —Monumenta Nipponica (Access full review at Project Muse)

“The emperor figured little, Kushner notes, in Japanese propaganda. What did figure, first and foremost, was ‘modernization.’ This was the overall theme, and it was intellectually respectable. Japan was a demonstrably ‘modern’ country, the only one in Asia. It was a ‘civilizing force,’ the natural leader of a pan-Asian modernity drive. Stalinist, Nazi and fascist propaganda depended upon dictatorial force on the one hand and, in the sense that its messages could scarcely withstand intelligent scrutiny, mass intellectual self-suppression on the other. Japanese propaganda was different. It was credible. Japan had modernized; Japan was more advanced than its Asian neighbors.” —International Herald Tribune

Remembering the Kana

Posted on by UH Press

Following on the phenomenal success of Remembering the Kanji, James W. Heisig has prepared a companion volume for learning the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of modern Japanese: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each. In six short lessons of about twenty minutes, each of the two systems of “kana” writing are introduced in such a way that the absolute beginner can acquire fluency in writing in a fraction of the time normally devoted to the task.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3164-6 / $15.00 (PAPER)

Remembering the Kanji

Posted on by UH Press

Anyone who has tried to learn to read and write Chinese characters ends up using a variety of ways to remember the component parts. Several books propose different kinds of memory aids to help kanji learners. In Remembering the Kanji 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters, James W. Heisig offers his own bag of effective tricks.

The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in such a way as to make them both easy to remember. It is intended not only for the beginner, but also for the more advanced student looking for some relief from the constant frustration of how to write the kanji and some way to systematize what he or she already knows. The author begins with writing because–contrary to first impressions–it is in fact the simpler of the two. He abandons the traditional method of ordering the kanji according to their frequency of use and organizes them according to their component parts or “primitive elements.” Assigning each of these parts a distinct meaning with its own distinct image, the student is led to harness the powers of “imaginative memory” to learn the various combinations that result. In addition, each kanji is given its own key word to represent the meaning, or one of the principal meanings, of that character. These key words provide the setting for a particular kanji’s “story,” whose protagonists are the primitive elements.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3165-3 / $32.00 (PAPER)

The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga

Posted on by UH Press

One of Japan’s most renowned intellectuals, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) is perhaps best known for his notion of mono no aware, a detailed description of the workings of emotions as the precondition for the poetic act. As a poet and a theoretician of poetry, Norinaga had a keen eye for etymologies and other archaeological practices aimed at recovering the depth and richness of the Japanese language.

The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, translated and edited by Michael F. Marra, contains his major works on the Yamato region—the heartland of Japanese culture—including one of his most famous poetic diaries, The Sedge Hat Diary (Sugagasa no Nikki), translated into English here for the first time.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3078-6 / $57.00 (CLOTH)

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