Search results for ""University of Hawai'i Press""

Until its recent political thaw, Burma was closed to most foreign researchers, and fieldwork-based research was rare. In The Traffic in Hierarchy, one of the few such works to appear in recent years, author Ward Keeler combines close ethnographic attention to life in a Buddhist monastery with a broad analysis of Burman gender ideology. The result is a thought-provoking analysis of Burmese social relations both within and beyond a monastery’s walls. Keeler shows that the roles individuals choose in Burman society entail inevitable trade-offs in privileges and prestige. A man who becomes a monk gives up some social opportunities but takes on others and gains great respect. Alternatively, a man can become a head of household. Or he can choose to take on a feminine gender identity—to the derision of many but not necessarily his social exclusion. A woman, by contrast, is expected to concern herself with her relations with family and kin. Any interest she might show in becoming a nun arouses ambivalent reactions: although it fulfills Buddhist teachings, it contravenes assumptions about a woman’s proper role. In Burma, hierarchical understandings condition all relationships, but hierarchy implies relations of exchange, not simply inequality, and everyone takes on subordinate roles in their bonds with some, and superordinate ones with others. Knowing where power lies and how to relate to it appropriately is key. It may mean choosing at times to resist power, but more often it involves exercising care as to whom one wishes to subordinate oneself, in what ways, and on what terms.Melding reflections on the work of theorists such as Dumont, Anderson, Warner, and Kapferer with close attention to the details of Burman social interaction, Keeler balances theoretical insights and ethnographic observation to produce a rich and challenging read. The conundrum at the heart of this book—whether to opt for autonomy, the Buddhist seeking of detachment, or for attachment, the desire for close bonds with others—is one that all humans, not just Burmans, must confront, and it is one that admits of no final resolution.

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This diverse anthology of original Buddhist texts in translation provides a historical and conceptual framework that will transform contemporary scholarship on Pure Land Buddhism and instigate its recognition as an essential field of Buddhist studies. Traditional and contemporary primary sources carefully selected from Buddhist cultures across historical, geopolitical, and literary boundaries are organized by genre rather than chronologically, geographically, or by religious lineage—a novel juxtaposition that reveals their wider importance in fresh contexts. Together these fundamental texts from different Asian traditions, expertly translated by eminent and up-and-coming scholars, illustrate that the Buddhism of pure lands is not just an East Asian cult or a marginal type of Buddhism, but a pan-Asian and deeply entrenched religious phenomenon. The volume is organized into six parts: Ritual Practices, Contemplative Visualizations, Doctrinal Expositions, Life Writing and Poetry, Ethical and Aesthetic Explications, and Worlds beyond Sukhavati. Each part is introduced and summarized, and each translated piece is prefaced by its translator to supply historical and sectarian context as well as insight into the significance of the work. Common and less-common issues of practice, doctrine, and intra-religious transfer are explored, and deeper understandings of the meaning of “pure lands” are gained through the study of the celestial, cosmological, internal, and earthly pure lands associated with various buddhas, bodhisattvas, and devotional figures. The introduction by the volume editors ties the diverse themes of the book together and provides a historical background to Pure Land Buddhist studies. Scholars of Buddhism and Asian religion, including graduate and post-graduate students, as well as Buddhist practitioners, will appreciate the range of translated materials and accompanied discussions made accessible in one essential collection, the first of its kind to center on the formerly-neglected topic of Buddhist pure lands.

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In Guardians of the Buddha's Home, Jessica Starling draws on nearly three years of ethnographic research to provide a comprehensive view of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) temple life with temple wives (known as bomori, or temple guardians) at its center. Throughout, she focuses on ""domestic religion,"" a mode of doing religion centering on more informal religious expression that has received scant attention in the scholarly literature.The Buddhist temple wife's movement back and forth between the main hall and the ""back stage"" of the kitchen and family residence highlights the way religious meaning cannot be confined to canonical texts or to the area of the temple prescribed for formal worship. Starling argues that attaining Buddhist faith (shinjin) is just as likely to occur in response to a simple act of hospitality, a sense of community experienced at an informal temple gathering, or an aesthetic affinity with the temple space that has been carefully maintained by the bomori as it is from hearing the words of a Pure Land sutra intoned by a professional priest. For temple wives, the spiritual practice of button hosha (repayment of the debt owed to the Buddha for one's salvation) finds expression through the conscientious stewardship of temple donations, caring for the Buddha's home and opening it to lay followers, raising the temple's children, and propagating the teachings in the domestic sphere. Engaging with what religious scholars have called the ""turn to affect,"" Starling's work investigates in personal detail how religious dispositions are formed in individual practitioners. The answer, not surprisingly, has as much to do with intimate relationships and quotidian practices as with formal liturgies or scripted sermons.

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In the early 1970s, Frank Chin, the outspoken Chinese American author of such plays as The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, wrote a fulllength novel that was never published and presumably lost. Nearly four decades later, Calvin McMillin, a literary scholar specializing in Asian American literature,would discover Chin’s original manuscripts and embark on an extensive restoration project. Meticulously reassembled from multiple extant drafts, Frank Chin’s “forgotten” novel is a sequel to The Chickencoop Chinaman and follows the further misadventures of Tam Lum, the original play’s witty protagonist.Haunted by the bitter memories of a failed marriage and the untimely death of a beloved family member, Tam flees San Francisco’s Chinatown for a life of self-imposed exile on the Hawaiian island of Maui. After burning his sole copy of a manuscript he believed would someday be hailed as “The Great Chinese American Novel,” Tam stumbles into an unlikely romance with Lily, a former nun fresh out of the convent and looking for love. In the process, he also develops an unusual friendship with Lily’s father, a washed-up Hollywood actor once famous for portraying Charlie Chan on the big screen. Thanks in no small part to this bizarre father/daughter pair, not to mention an array of equally quirky locals, Tam soon discovers that his otherwise laidback island existence has been transformed into a farce of epic proportions.Had it been published in the 1970s as originally intended, The Confessions of a Number One Son might have changed the face of Asian American literature as we know it. Written at the height of Frank Chin’s creative powers, this formerly “lost” novel ranks as the author’s funniest, most powerful, and most poignant work to date. Now, some forty years after its initial conception, The Confessions of a Number One Son is finally available to readers everywhere.

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This volume offers a comprehensive overview of Sikhism, which originated in India's Punjab region five hundred years ago. As the numbers of Sikhs settling outside of India continues to grow, it is necessary to examine this religion both in its Indian context and as an increasingly global tradition. While acknowledging the centrality of history and text in understanding the main tenets of Sikhism, Doris Jakobsh highlights the religion's origins and development as a living spiritual tradition in communities around the world. She pays careful attention to particular events, movements, and individuals that have contributed to important changes within the tradition and challenges stereotypical notions of Sikh homogeneity and stasis, addressing the plurality of identities within the Sikh tradition, both historically and within the contemporary milieu.Extensive attention is paid to the role of women as well as the dominant social and kinship structures undergirding Punjabi Sikh society, many of which have been widely transplanted through Sikh migration. The migration patterns are themselves examined, with particular focus on Sikh communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Finally, the volume concludes with a brief exploration of Sikhs and the Internet and the future of Sikhism.

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Burning for the Buddha is the first book-length study of the theory and practice of ""abandoning the body""(self-immolation) in Chinese Buddhism. It examines the hagiographical accounts of all those who made offerings of their own bodies and places them in historical, social, cultural, and doctrinal context. Rather than privilege the doctrinal and exegetical interpretations of the tradition, which assume the central importance of the mind and its cultivation, James Benn focuses on the ways in which the heroic ideals of the bodhisattva present in scriptural materials such as the Lotus Sutra played out in the realm of religious practice on the ground.

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In Japan the number of Special Permanent Residentsmost of whom are of Korean descentis declining. Does this mean Koreans living in Japan are becoming Japanese? This volume presents a compelling sociological analysis of Korean colonial migrants' and their descendants' politics of self-identification and their struggle for social justice.

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The Ryukyu islands have been inhabited by humans for over 30,000 years. Taking a multidisciplinary approach grounded in archaeology, this resource presents an updated framework for understanding early Ryukyu along with a new narrative featuring a fascinating cast of characters.

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Explores the relationship between the cycle of regime change and that of knowledge production, offering an alternative framework to periodize the history from 1850s to 2010s. Kisho Tsuchiya shows that the prevailing perceptions of East Timor have been shaped by large-scale wars, postwar consolidation, and the dominance of foreign observers.

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The People’s West Lake examines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to reconfigure Hangzhou’s urban space, alter the natural environment in West Lake (Xihu), and refashion the city’s culture in post-1949 China. It pieces together five initiatives between the 1950s and the 1970s: the dredging of the lake, the construction of the public park of Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor (Huagang guanyu), the afforestation movement, the development of collectivized pig farming around West Lake, and the two campaigns to remove lakeside tombs. These projects were intended to generate visible and tangible results—a lake with a good depth, a scenic public garden, greener hills surrounding the lake, a growing swine population and rising productivity of fertilizer, and a tourist site cleansed of burial grounds—while also being readily subject to the Party’s propaganda. These initiatives were designed both to achieve economic, cultural, and ecological utilities and to forge and popularize a sense of socialist nationhood. The CCP’s endeavor to fundamentally transform the West Lake area also opened up possibilities for both human and nonhuman actors to variously benefit from, get along with, and undermine the political authorities’ planning. This book thus emphatically foregrounds and unifies the agency of both humans and nonhuman entities that are not necessarily tied to intentionality, bringing into question the legitimacy of the human/nonhuman binary. Author Qiliang He explores the agency of both humans and nonhumans (including water, microbes, aquatic plants, the park, pigs, trees, pests, and tombs) to affect, deflect, and undercut the CCP’s sociopolitical programs, thereby diminishing the efficacy of state propaganda. Highlighting the nonpurposive agency of both actors problematizes the long-held resistance-accommodation paradigm, which presumes the resisters’ a priori subjectivities independent of the socialist system, in studying the state-society relationship in the People’s Republic of China. Using a project-based approach, The People’s West Lake gives the nature-human relationship in Mao’s China (best known as Mao’s "war against nature") historical and cultural specificities to reexamine the PRC regime’s central planning and the issues related to it.

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Praise for the French edition"This is a book that should be read by all those who are interested, whether near or far, in Buddhism, its history and its interpretations. . . . [Faure] proposes considering the ‘Life of the Buddha’ as a kind of treasure that never ceases to be reinvented and experienced, from story to story, from language to language, from culture to culture." —Roger-Pol Droit, Le MondeMany biographies of the Buddha have been published in the last 150 years, and all claim to describe the authentic life of the historical Buddha. This book, written by one of the leading scholars of Buddhism and Japanese religion, starts from the opposite assumption and argues that we do not yet possess the archival and archeological materials required to compose such a biography: All we have are narratives, not facts. Yet traditional biographies have neglected the literary, mythological, and ritual elements in the life of the Buddha. Bernard Faure aims to bridge this gap and shed light on a Buddha that is not historical but has constituted a paradigm of practice and been an object of faith for 2,500 years.The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha opens with a criticism of the prevalent historicism before examining the mythological elements in a life of the Buddha no longer constrained by an artificial biographical framework. Once the search for the "historical Buddha" is abandoned, there is no longer any need to limit the narrative to early Indian stories. The life—or lives—of the Buddha, as an expression of the creative imaginations of Buddhists, developed beyond India over the centuries. Faure accordingly shifts his focus to East Asia and, more particularly, to Japan. Finally, he examines recent developments of the Buddha’s life in not only Asia but also the modern West and neglected literary genres such as science fiction.

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Modern Japanese Buddhist monks of all denominations differ from those in other Asian countries because they frequently marry, drink alcohol, and eat meat. This has caused Buddhist scholars and practitioners generally to assume that early Japanese monastics had little interest in precepts and ordinations. Some medieval Japanese exegetes, however, were obsessively concerned with these topics as they strove to understand what it meant to be a Buddhist. This landmark collection of essays by Paul Groner, one of the leading authorities on Tendai Buddhism, examines the medieval Tendai School, which dominated Japanese Buddhism at that time, to uncover the differences in understanding and interpreting monastic precepts and ordinations. Rather than provide an unbroken narrative account—made virtually impossible due to the number of undated apocryphal texts and those lost in the numerous fires and warfare that beset Tendai temples as well as the difficulties of tracing how texts were used—Groner employs a multifaceted approach, focusing on individual monks, texts, ceremonies, exegetical problems, and institutional issues. Early chapters look at a major source of Tendai precepts, the apocryphal Brahma’s Net Sutra; the Tendai scholar Annen’s (b. 841) interpretations of the universal bodhisattva precept ordination and the historical background of his commentary on the subject; Tendai perfect-sudden precepts and the Vinaya; and the role of confession in the bodhisattva ordination. Groner goes on to discuss the Lotus Sutra, another key text for Tendai precepts, and the monk Kōen (1262–1317) and his role in developing the consecrated ordination, which is still performed today. Later essays introduce Jitsudō Ninkū’s (1307–1388) system of training by doctrinal debate and his commentary on ordinations; doctrinal discussions of killing; and Tendai discussions among several lineages on whether the precepts can be lost or violated. Many of the issues discussed in the volume—particularly how to distinguish various types of Buddhist practitioners and how to conduct ordinations—continue to preoccupy Tendai monks centuries later. The book concludes with an examination of the effects of early Tendai precepts on modern practice.

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Davida Malo’s Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi is the single most important description of pre-Christian Hawaiian culture. Malo, born in 1795, twenty-five years before the coming of Christianity to Hawaiʻi, wrote about everything from traditional cosmology and accounts of ancestral chiefs to religion and government to traditional amusements. The heart of this two-volume work is a new, critically edited text of Malo’s original Hawaiian, including the manuscript known as the "Carter copy," handwritten by him and two helpers in the decade before his death in 1853. Volume 1 provides images of the original text, side by side with the new edited text. Volume 2 presents the edited Hawaiian text side by side with a new annotated English translation. Malo’s text has been edited at two levels. First, the Hawaiian has been edited through a careful comparison of all the extant manuscripts, attempting to restore Malo’s original text, with explanations of the editing choices given in the footnotes. Second, the orthography of the Hawaiian text has been modernized to help today’s readers of Hawaiian by adding diacritical marks (‘okina and kahakō, or glottal stop and macron, respectively) and the punctuation has been revised to signal the end of clauses and sentences. The new English translation attempts to remain faithful to the edited Hawaiian text while avoiding awkwardness in the English. Both volumes contain substantial introductions. The introduction to Volume 1 (in Hawaiian) discusses the manuscripts of Malo’s text and their history. The introduction to Volume 2 contains two essays that provide context to help the reader understand Malo’s Moolelo Hawaii. "Understanding Malo’s Moolelo Hawaii" describes the nature of Malo’s work, showing that it is the result of his dual Hawaiian and Western education. "The Writing of the Moolelo Hawaii" discusses how the Carter copy was written and preserved, its relationship to other versions of the text, and Malo’s plan for the work as a whole. The introduction is followed by a new biography of Malo by Kanaka Maoli historian Noelani Arista, "Davida Malo, a Hawaiian Life," describing his life as a chiefly counselor and Hawaiian intellectual.

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For thirty years starting in the mid-1970s, the byline of Jim Dooley appeared on riveting investigative stories of organized crime and political corruption that headlined the front page of Honolulu's morning daily. In Sunny Skies, Shady Characters, James Dooley revisits highlights of his career as a hard-hitting investigative reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser and, in later years, for KITV television and the online Hawaii Reporter. His lively backstories on how he chased these high-profile scandals make fascinating reading, while providing an insider's look at the business of journalism and the craft of investigative reporting. Dooley's first assignment as an investigative journalist involved the city housing project of Kukui Plaza, which introduced him to the """"pay to play"""" method of awarding government contracts to obliging consultants. In later stories, he scrutinized bloody struggles over illicit gambling revenue, the murder of a city prosecutor's son, local syndicate ties to the Teamsters Union, and the dealings of Bishop Estate. His groundbreaking coverage of the forays by yakuza (Japanese organized crime) into Hawai'i and the continental United States were the first of its kind in American journalism.As Dooley pursued stories from the underside of island society, names of respected public figures and those of violent criminals filled his notebook: entertainer Don Ho, U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, Governors George Ariyoshi and Ben Cayetano, Mayor Frank Fasi, and notorious felons Henry Huihui, Nappy Pulawa, and Ronnie Ching. Woven throughout is the name of Big Island rancher Larry Mehau—was he the """"godfather of organized crime"""" in Hawai'i as alleged by the FBI, or simply an ex-cop who befriended power brokers in the course of doing business for his security guard firm? The book includes a timeline of Mehau's activities to allow readers to judge for themselves.

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“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bȇn Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise.Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In B?n Thành market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous.Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ng?c have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, post-war economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this ground-breaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of post-war southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Bȇn Thành market.

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At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of ""Remembering Simplified Hanzi"" and ""Remembering Traditional Hanzi"" covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ 'imaginative memory' to associate each character's component parts, or 'primitive elements', with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a 'story' that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory.

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Just married and returning to live in her new husband's native land, a young Austrian woman arrived with her Burmese husband by passenger ship in Rangoon in 1953. They were met at dockside by hundreds of well-wishers displaying colorful banners, playing music on homemade instruments, and carrying giant bouquets of flowers. She was puzzled by this unusual welcome until her embarrassed husband explained that he was something more than a recently graduated mining engineer - he was the Prince of Hsipaw, the ruler of an autonomous state in Burma's Shan mountains. And these people were his subjects!She immersed herself in the Shan lifestyle, eagerly learning the language, the culture, and the history of the Shan hill people. The Princess of Hsipaw fell in love with this remote, exotic land and its warm and friendly people. She worked at her husband's side to bring change and modernization to their primitive country. Her efforts to improve the education and health care of the country, and her husband's commitment to improve the economic well-being of the people made them one of the most popular ruling couples in Southeast Asia. Then the violent military coup of 1962 shattered the idyllic existence of the previous ten years. Her life irrevocably changed. Inge Sargent tells a story of a life most of us can only dream about. She vividly describes the social, religious, and political events she experienced. She details the day-to-day living as a "reluctant ruler" and her role as her husband's equal - a role that perplexed the males in Hsipaw and created awe in the females. And then she describes the military events that threatened her life and that of her children.Twilight over Burma is a story of a great happiness destroyed by evil, of one woman's determination and bravery against a ruthless military regime, and of the truth behind the overthrow of one of Burma's most popular local leaders.

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Worldwide supplies of sugar and cotton were impacted dramatically as the U.S. Civil War dragged on. New areas of production entered these lucrative markets, particularly in the South Pacific, and plantation agriculture grew substantially in disparate areas such as Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii. The increase in production required an increase in labor; in the rush to fill the vacuum, freebooters and other unsavory characters began a slave trade in Melanesians and Polynesians that continued into the twentieth century. ""The White Pacific"" ranges over the broad expanse of Oceania to reconstruct the history of ""blackbirding"" (slave trading) in the region. It examines the role of U.S. citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) in the trade and its roots in Civil War dislocations. What unfolds is a dramatic tale of unfree labor, conflicts between formal and informal empire, white supremacy, threats to sovereignty in Hawaii, the origins of a White Australian policy, and the rise of Japan as a Pacific power and putative protector. It also pieces together a wonderfully suggestive history of the African American presence in the Pacific. Based on deft archival research in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, the United States, and Great Britain, ""The White Pacific"" uncovers a heretofore hidden story of race, labor, war, and intrigue that contributes significantly to the emerging intersectional histories of race and ethnicity.

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A contemporary translation remaining faithful to the original collection of tales, poems and parables of Taoist philosophy. The collection covers a wide range of issues, from ambition to politics, and is accompanied by an introduction on the author and his place in Chinese thought and history.

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Huineng (638–713), author and hero of the Platform Sutra, is often credited with founding the Southern school of Chan Buddhism and its radical doctrine of "sudden enlightenment." However, manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang at the beginning of the twentieth century reveal that the real architect of the Southern school was Huineng’s student Shenhui (684–758). An ardent evangelist for his master’s teaching and a sharp critic of rival meditation teachers of his day, Shenhui was responsible for Huineng’s recognition as the "sixth patriarch," for the promotion and eventual triumph of the sudden teaching, and for a somewhat combative style of Chan discourse that came to be known as "encounter dialogue." Shenhui’s historical importance in the rise and success of Chan is beyond dispute, yet until now there has been no complete translation of his corpus into English.This volume brings together John McRae’s lifetime of work on the Shenhui corpus, including extensively annotated translations of all five of Shenhui’s texts discovered at Dunhuang as well as McRae’s seminal studies of Shenhui’s life, teachings, and legacy. McRae’s research explores the degree to which the received view of the Northern school teachings is a fiction created by Shenhui to score rhetorical points and that Northern and Southern teachings may have been closer to one another than the canonical narrative depicts. McRae explains Shenhui’s critical role in shaping what would later emerge as "classical Chan," while remaining skeptical about the glowing image of Shenhui as an effective mentor and inspired revolutionary. This posthumously published book is the fulfillment of McRae’s wish to make Shenhui’s surviving writings accessible through carefully annotated English translations, allowing readers to form their own opinions.

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Explores the history of religious encounters between Christian missionaries and Thai Buddhists during the nineteenth century, a period of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia that fundamentally transformed Siamese society and religious institutions.

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The first Okinawan language textbook written for English-speakers, Basic Okinawan: From Conversation to Grammar is a groundbreaking work that will help students develop conversational skills and build a solid foundational understanding of the language's grammar and vocabulary.

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In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon. By the early twenty-first century, people in nearly every corner of the world have undergone the initiations that authorize them to channel a cosmic energy—known as Reiki—to heal body, mind, and spirit. They lay hands on themselves and others, use secret symbols and incantations to send Reiki to distant recipients, and strive to follow five precepts to cultivate their spiritual growth. Reiki’s international rise and development is due to the work of Hawayo Takata (1900–1980), a Hawai‘i-born Japanese American woman who brought Reiki out of Japan and adapted it for thousands of students in Hawai‘i and North America, shaping interconnections across the North Pacific region as well as cultural transformations over the transwar period spanning World War II.Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on Hawai‘i plantations to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, Stein examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades. Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices’ homeland.

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This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China's belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term ""postsocialism"" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.

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Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia investigates how foods came to be established as moral entities, how moral food regimes reveal emerging systems of knowledge and enforcement, and how these developments have contributed to new Asian nutritional knowledge regimes. The collection's focus on cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons across Asia brings into view a broad spectrum of modern Asia that extends from East Asia, Southeast Asia, to South Asia, as well as into global communities of Western knowledge, practice, and power outside Asia.The first section, "Good Foods," focuses on how food norms and rules have been established in modern Asia. Ideas about good foods and good bodies shift at different moments, in some cases privileging local foods and knowledge systems, and in other cases privileging foreign foods and knowledge systems. The second section, "Bad Foods," focuses on what makes foods bad and even dangerous. Bad foods are not simply unpleasant or undesirable for aesthetic or sensory reasons, but they can hinder the stability and development of persons and societies. Bad foods are symbolically polluting, as in the case of foreign foods that threaten not only traditional foods, but also the stability and strength of the nation and its people. The third section, "Moral Foods," focuses on how themes of good versus bad are embedded in projects to make modern persons, subjects, and states, with specific attention to the ambiguities and malleability of foods and health. The malleability of moral foods provides unique opportunities for understanding Asian societies' dynamic position within larger global flows, connections, and disconnections.Collectively, the chapters raise intriguing questions about how foods and the bodies that consume them have been valued politically, economically, culturally, and morally, and about how those values originated and evolved. Consumers in modern Asia are not simply eating to satisfy personal desires or physiological needs, but they are also conscripted into national and global statemaking projects through acts of ingestion. Eating, then, has become about fortifying both the person and the nation.

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Turning toward Edification discusses foreigners in Korea from before the founding of Chosŏn in 1392 until the mid-nineteenth century. Although it has been common to describe Chosŏn Korea as a monocultural and homogeneous state, Adam Bohnet reveals the considerable presence of foreigners and people of foreign ancestry in Chosŏn Korea as well as the importance to the Chosŏn monarchy of engagement with the outside world. These foreigners included Jurchens and Japanese from border polities that formed diplomatic relations with Chosŏn prior to 1592, Ming Chinese and Japanese deserters who settled in Chosŏn during the Japanese invasion between 1592 and 1598, Chinese and Jurchen refugees who escaped the Manchu state that formed north of Korea during the early seventeenth century, and even Dutch castaways who arrived in Chosŏn during the mid-1700s. Foreigners were administered by the Chosŏn monarchy through the tax category of "submitting-foreigner" (hyanghwain). This term marked such foreigners as uncivilized outsiders coming to Chosŏn to receive moral edification and they were granted Korean spouses, Korean surnames, land, agricultural tools, fishing boats, and protection from personal taxes. Originally the status was granted for a limited time, however, by the seventeenth century it had become hereditary. Beginning in the 1750s foreign descendants of Chinese origin were singled out and reclassified as imperial subjects (hwangjoin), giving them the right to participate in the palace-sponsored Ming Loyalist rituals. Bohnet argues that the evolution of their status cannot be explained by a Confucian or Sinocentric enthusiasm for China. The position of foreigners - Chinese or otherwise - in Chosŏn society must be understood in terms of their location within Chosŏn social hierarchies. During the early Chosŏn, all foreigners were clearly located below the sajok aristocracy. This did not change even during the eighteenth century, when the increasingly bureaucratic state recategorized Ming migrants to better accord with the Chosŏn state's official Ming Loyalism. These changes may be understood in relation to the development of bureaucratized identities in the Qing Empire and elsewhere in the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as part of the vernacularization of elite ideologies that has been noted elsewhere in Eurasia.

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This volume examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of “world renewal” (yonaoshi). In the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), a number of entities, both natural and supernatural, came to be worshipped as “gods of world renewal.” These included disgruntled peasants who demanded their local governments repeal unfair taxation, government bureaucrats who implemented special fiscal measures to help the poor, and a giant subterranean catfish believed to cause earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich. In the modern period, yonaoshi gods took on more explicitly anti-authoritarian characteristics. During a major uprising in Saitama Prefecture in 1884, a yonaoshi god was invoked to deny the legitimacy of the Meiji regime, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new religion Ōmoto predicted an apocalyptic end of the world presided over by a messianic yonaoshi god.Using a variety of local documents to analyze the veneration of yonaoshi gods, Takashi Miura looks beyond the traditional modality of research focused on religious professionals, their institutions, and their texts to illuminate the complexity of a lived religion as practiced in communities. He also problematizes the association frequently drawn between the concept of yonaoshi and millenarianism, demonstrating that yonaoshi gods served as divine rectifiers of specific economic injustices and only later, in the modern period and within the context of new religions such as Ōmoto, were fully millenarian interpretations developed. The scope of world renewal, in other words, changed over time.Agents of World Renewal approaches Japanese religion through the new analytical lens of yonaoshi gods and highlights the necessity of looking beyond the boundary often posited between the early modern and modern periods when researching religious discourses and concepts.

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The frequent appearance of androgyny in Ming and Qing literature has long interested scholars of late imperial Chinese culture. A flourishing economy, widespread education, rising individualism, a prevailing hedonism - all of these had contributed to the gradual disintegration of traditional gender roles in late Ming and early Qing China (1550-1750) and given rise to the phenomenon of androgyny. Now, Zuyan Zhou sheds new light on this important period, offering a highly original and astute look at the concept of androgyny in key works of Chinese fiction and drama from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The work begins with an exploration of androgyny in Chinese philosophy and Ming-Qing culture. Zhou proceeds to examine chronologically the appearance of androgyny in major literary writing of the time, yielding novel interpretations of canonical works from The Plum in the Golden Vase, through the scholar-beauty romances, to The Dream of the Red Chamber. He traces the ascendance of the androgyny craze in the late Ming, its culmination in the Ming-Qing transition, and its gradual phasing out after the mid-Qing. The study probes deviations from engendered codes of behavior both in culture and literature, then focuses on two parallel areas: androgyny in literary characterization and androgyny in literati identity. The author concludes that androgyny in late Ming and early Qing literature is essentially the dissident literati's stance against tyrannical politics, a psychological strategy to relieve anxiety over growing political inferiority.

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From its humble ""straw mat"" origins to its paradoxical status as a national treasure, p'ansori has survived centuries of change and remains the primary source of Korean narrative and poetic consciousness. In this innovative work, Chan Park celebrates her subject not as a static phenomenon but a living, organic tradition adapting to an ever-shifting context. Drawing on her extensive literary and performance backgrounds, Park provides insights into the relationship between language and music, singing and speaking, and-traditional and modern reception. Her ""performance-centered"" approach to p'an-sori informs the discussion of a wide range of topics, including the amalgamation of the dramatic, the narrative, and the poetic; the invocation of traditional narrative in contemporary politics; the vocal construction of gender; and the politics of preservation.

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In Japan today, women are the primary drivers of religious re-enchantment, and they are exerting pressure on shrines, temples, and the media industries to accommodate their interests and aesthetic tastes. Laura Miller examines how the occult manifests to offer avenues of self-exploration and spiritual capital that fundamentally appeal to women.

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On February 1, 2021, Myanmar was thrown into a state of crisis by a military coup, abruptly ending a decade of civilian rule. The junta imprisoned the political opposition and deployed lethal force to quell dissent, thinking that most people would meekly acquiesce. However, they underestimated the tenacity of the nascent democracy that had taken root in the last decade. Instead, a civil disobedience movement quickly emerged, with people going on strike across the country to prevent the junta from exerting control, which was soon followed by armed struggle among urban youth. Forging the Nation: Land Struggles in Myanmar’s Transition Period examines how democratic institutions were fought over and built from 2011 to 2020 through the lens of land politics. This book explains how the differences in outcomes in the contest over land are situated in the specific historic and political contexts of Myanmar’s states and regions, despite them being subject to the same national dynamics.As Myanmar is an agriculture-based economy involving two-thirds of the population, land remains a coveted asset in the era of the "global land rush," referring to the intensification of capital’s pursuit of land since the food price surges in 2008–2009. Thus, land is also the ideal lens through which to understand the dynamics of a country that underwent a three-part transition: towards democracy, towards peace with a national ceasefire, and towards open markets after the lifting of sanctions by the West. Against a fraught democratization process that unfolded from 2011 to 2020, Forging the Nation looks at how state and societal actors in Myanmar’s multiethnic society, recovering from over seven decades of civil war, negotiated land politics to shape democratic land institutions. By exploring the interaction of the democratic transition, ethnic politics, and global capital pressures on land across national, regional, and local scales, this book provides an overarching frame that pulls together these three facets that are usually treated separately in the literature. Finally, by emphasizing the co-constituent relationship between democratization and land politics, this book makes a unique contribution to understanding the role of land in political-economic transitions.

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Hulihia" refers to massive upheavals that change the landscape, overturn the normal, reverse the flow, and sweep away the prevailing or assumed. We live in such days. Pandemics. Threats to ʻāina. Political dysfunction, cultural appropriation, and disrespect. But also powerful surges toward sustainability, autonomy, and sovereignty.The first two volumes of The Value of Hawai'i (Knowing the Past, Facing the Future and Ancestral Roots, Oceanic Visions) ignited public conversations, testimony, advocacy, and art for political and social change. These books argued for the value of connecting across our different expertise and experiences, to talk about who we are and where we are going.In a world in crisis, what does Hawai'i's experience tell us about how to build a society that sees opportunities in the turning and changing times? As islanders, we continue to grapple with experiences of racism, colonialism, environmental damage, and the costs of modernization, and bring to this our own striking creativity and histories for how to live peacefully and productively together. Steered by the four scholars who edited the previous volumes, The Value of Hawai'i 3: Hulihia, the Turning offers multigenerational visions of a Hawaiʻi not defined by the United States. Community leaders, cultural practitioners, artists, educators, and activists share exciting paths forward for the future of Hawai'i, on topics such as education, tourism and other economies, elder care, agriculture and food, energy and urban development, the environment, sports, arts and culture, technology, and community life.These visions ask us to recognize what we truly value about our home, and offer a wealth of starting points for critical and productive conversations together in this time of profound and permanent change.

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Developed collaboratively by leading classroom teachers and linguists of Korean, High Intermediate replaces Advanced Intermediate as the third-year textbook in the popular Korean language-learning series Integrated Korean. All volumes are developed according to performance-based methodology and principles: contextualization, learner-centeredness, use of authentic materials, function/task-orientedness, balance between skill-getting and skill-using, and integration of speaking, listening, reading, writing, and culture. Grammar points are systematically introduced with simple but adequate explanations and abundant examples and exercises.Each situation/topic-based lesson consists of objectives, pre-lesson topics, and conversation reading, further reading, and culture sections. Conversation and reading sections contain comprehension questions, grammar and usage, activities, and English translations. Vocabulary for each lesson appears conveniently at the bottom of the page.Integrated Korean is a project of the Korean Language Education and Research Center (KLEAR) with the support of the Korea Foundation. In addition to the five-level Integrated Korean textbooks and workbooks, KLEAR volumes include Korean Reader for Chinese Characters, Korean Composition, Selected Readings in Korean, Readings in Modern Korean Literature, Korean Language in Culture and Society, and A Resource for Korean Grammar Instruction. A dictionary of Korean grammar and usage is forthcoming.

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One of the most important and celebrated works of premodern Korean prose fiction, Kŭmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle) is a collection of five tales of the strange artfully written in literary Chinese by Kim Sisŭp (1435-1493). Kim was a major intellectual and poet of the early Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1897), and this book is widely recognized as marking the beginning of classical fiction in Korea.The present volume features an extensive study of Kim and the Kŭmo sinhwa, followed by a copiously annotated, complete English translation of the tales from the oldest extant edition. The translation captures the vivaciousness of the original, while the annotations reveal the work's complexity, unraveling the deep and diverse intertextual connections between the Kŭmo sinhwa and preceding works of Chinese and Korean literature and philosophy. The Kŭmo sinhwa can thus be read and appreciated as a hybrid work that is both distinctly Korean and Sino-centric East Asian. A translator's introduction discusses this hybridity in detail, as well as the unusual life and tumultuous times of Kim Sisŭp; the Kŭmo sinhwa's creation and its translation and transformation in early modern Japan and twentieth-century (especially North) Korea and beyond; and its characteristics as a work of dissent.Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk will be welcomed by Korean and East Asian studies scholars and students, yet the body of the work-stories of strange affairs, fantastic realms, seductive ghosts, and majestic but eerie beings from the netherworld-will be enjoyed by academics and non-specialist readers alike.

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Written by one of the leading scholars of Japanese religion, Protectors and Predators is the second installment of a multivolume project that promises to be a milestone in our understanding of the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism—specifically the nature and roles of deities in the religious world of medieval Japan and beyond. Bernard Faure introduces readers to medieval Japanese religiosity and shows the centrality of the gods in religious discourse and ritual. Throughout he engages theoretical insights drawn from structuralism, post-structuralism, and Actor-Network Theory to retrieve the “implicit pantheon” (as opposed to the “explicit orthodox pantheon”) of esoteric Japanese Buddhism (Mikky?). His work is particularly significant given its focus on the deities’ multiple and shifting representations, overlappings, and modes of actions rather than on individual characters and functions.In Protectors and Predators Faure argues that the “wild” gods of Japan were at the center of the medieval religious landscape and came together in complex webs of association not divisible into the categories of “Buddhist,” “indigenous,” or “Shinto.” Furthermore, among the most important medieval gods, certain ones had roots in Hinduism, others in Daoism and Yin-Yang thought. He displays vast knowledge of his subject and presents his research—much of it in largely unstudied material—with theoretical sophistication. His arguments and analyses assume the centrality of the iconographic record as a complement to the textual record, and so he has brought together a rich and rare collection of more than 170 color and black-and-white images. This emphasis on iconography and the ways in which it complements, supplements, or deconstructs textual orthodoxy is critical to a fuller comprehension of a set of medieval Japanese beliefs and practices and offers a corrective to the traditional division of the field into religious studies, which typically ignores the images, and art history, which oftentimes overlooks their ritual and religious meaning.Protectors and Predators and its companion volumes should persuade readers that the gods constituted a central part of medieval Japanese religion and that the latter cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation, parallelism, or complementarity between some monolithic teachings known as “Buddhism” and “Shinto.” Once these reductionist labels and categories are discarded, a new and fascinating religious landscape begins to unfold.

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Students who have learned to read and write the kanji taught in Japanese schools run into the same difficulty that Japan university students themselves face: the number of characters included in the approved list is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialisation requires supplementary kanji of its own, there is considerable overlap. With that in mind, this book employs the same methods as Volumes 1 and 2 of Remembering the Kanji to introduce additional characters useful for upper-level proficiency, bringing the total of all three volumes to 3,000 kanji. The 3rd edition has been updated to reflect the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010, all of which have been relocated in Volume 1. The selection of 800 new kanji is based on frequency lists and cross-checked against a number of standard Japanese kanji dictionaries. Separate parts of the book are devoted to learning the writing and reading of these characters. The writing requires only a handful of new “primitive elements.” A few are introduced as compound primitives (“measure words”) or as alternative forms for standard kanji. The majority of the kanji are organised according to the elements introduced in Volume 1. As in Volume 2, Chinese readings are arranged into groups for easy reference, enabling the student to take advantage of the readings assigned to “signal primitives” already learned. Seven indexes include hand-drawn samples of the new characters introduced and cumulative lists of the key word and primitive meaning, and of the Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, that appear in all 3 volumes of the series.

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Why is education potentially subversive? How does ethnocentrism facilitate an oppressive status quo? Who actually benefits from war? Questions such as these were integral to the work of writer Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943), one of modern Japan's most dedicated antimilitarist intellectuals. He was wholeheartedly committed to fundamental change and produced numerous literary works expressing his passionate opposition to armed force as an instrument of imperialism. His only full-length novel, superbly translated here as Militarized Streets, was censored by both Japan's imperial government and the U.S. occupation authorities. Best known for his ""Siberian stories"" of the late 1920s - vivid descriptions of agonies suffered by Japanese soldiers and Russian civilians during Japan's invasion of the newly emerged Soviet Union - Kuroshima also wrote powerful narratives dealing with the hardships, struggles, and rare triumphs of Japanese peasants. The present volume comprises much of Kuroshima's most highly acclaimed work for the first time in English.

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When the storytellers of ancient Hawaii gathered by the light of candlenut torches, they told tales that explained the world around them. These tales described how the gods created the earth and its life, how the stars were created, and why the days are longer in summer. Other stories recounted the pranks of Kamapuaa the Pig-Man, the origin of the tapa tree, the death of the monster reptile mo-o, and the home of the volcano goddess, Pele.From this rich body of mythology, author Vivian Thompson has drawn twelve myths. She retells them with the true flavor and simplicity of the storytellers of long ago. Thompson's words are accompanied by the illustrations of Hawaii artist Marilyn Kahalewai, who has captured the delight and drama of the ancient tales.

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China’s past and present have been in a continuous dialogue throughout history, one that is heavily influenced by time and language: the temporal orientation and the linguistic apparatus used to express and solidify identity, ideas, and practices. Presenting a host of in-depth case studies, Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History argues for and demonstrates the significance of "New Sinology" by restoring the role of language/philology in the research and understanding of how modern China emerged. Reading the modern as a careful and ongoing conversation with the past renders the "new" in a different perspective. This volume is a significant step toward a new historical narrative of China’s modern history, one wherein "ruptures" can exist in tandem with continuities. The collection accentuates the deep connection between language and power—one that spans well across China’s long past—and hence the immense consequences of linguistic-related methodology to the comprehension of power structures and identity in China.Each of the essays in this volume tackles these issues, the methodological and the thematic, from a different angle but they all share the Sinological prism of analysis and the basic understanding that a much longer timeframe is required to make sense of Chinese modernity. The languages examined are diverse, including modern and classical Chinese, as well as Manchu and Japanese. Taken together they bring a spectrum of linguistic perspectives and hence a spectrum of power relations and identities to the forefront. While the essays focus on late Qing and early twentieth-century eras, they refer often to earlier periods, which are necessary to making real sense of later eras. The methodological and the thematic do not only converge, but also generate a plea for fostering and expanding this approach in current and future studies.

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The Japanese Empire and Latin America provides a comprehensive analysis of the complicated relationship between Japanese migration and capital exportation to Latin America and the rise and fall of the empire in the Asia-Pacific region. It explains how Japan’s presence influenced the cultures and societies of Latin American countries and also explores the role of Latin America in the evolution of Japanese expansion. Together, this collection of essays presents a new narrative of the Japanese experience in Latin America by excavating trans-Pacific perspectives that shed new light on the global significance of Japan’s colonialism and expansionism. The chapters cover a variety of topics, such as economic expansion, migration management, cross-border community making, the surge of pro-Japan propaganda in the Americas, the circulation of knowledge, and the representation of the "other" in Japanese and Latin American fictions. By focusing on both government action and individual experiences, the viewpoints examined create a complete analysis, including the roles the empire played in the process of settler identity formation in Latin America. While the colonialist and expansionist discourses in Japan set a stage for the beginning of Japanese migration to Latin America, it was the vibrant circulation of information between East Asia and the Americas that allowed the empire to stay at the center of the cultural life of communities on the other side of the globe. The empire left an enduring mark on Latin America that is hard to ignore. This volume explores long-neglected aspects of the Japanese global expansion; and thus, moves our understanding of the empire’s significance beyond Asia and rethinks its legacy in global history.

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Amid the decline of many of Japan’s rural communities, the hot springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot. Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan have enticed village youth to return home to take over successful family businesses and revive the community. Chris McMorran spent nearly two decades researching ryokan in Kurokawa, including a full year of welcoming guests, carrying luggage, scrubbing baths, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and talking with co-workers and owners about their jobs, relationships, concerns, and aspirations. He presents the realities of ryokan work—celebrated, messy, ignored, exploitative, and liberating—and introduces the people who keep the inns running by making guests feel at home.McMorran explores how Kurokawa’s ryokan mobilize hospitality to create a rural escape from the globalized dimensions of everyday life in urban Japan. Ryokan do this by fusing a romanticized notion of the countryside with an enduring notion of the hospitable woman embodied by nakai, the hired female staff who welcome guests, serve meals, and clean rooms. These women are the face of the ryokan. But hospitality often hides a harsh reality. McMorran found numerous nakai in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who escaped violent or unhappy marriages by finding employment in ryokan. Yet, despite years of experience, nakai remain socially and economically vulnerable. Through this intimate and inventive ethnography of a year in a ryokan, McMorran highlights the importance of both the generational work of ryokan owners and the daily work of their employees, while emphasizing the gulf between them. With its focus on small, family-owned businesses and a mobile, vulnerable workforce, Ryokan makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Japanese workplace. It also will interest students and scholars in geography, mobility studies, and women’s studies and anyone who has ever stayed at a ryokan and is curious about the work that takes place behind the scenes.

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This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes.Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a "unified Japan" and its "illegal war" or "race war," early chapters on the destruction of Japan’s diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan’s lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the "performance of Japaneseness," the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever.Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.

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In East Asia’s largest cities, hundreds of thousands of women remain single into middle age and beyond, giving rise to a demographic transformation with profound implications for their societies. Labeled in the media as "loser dogs" and "parasites" in Japan and "leftover women" in mainland China and Hong Kong, single women in East Asia are criticized for being choosy, selfish, and overly independent. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with more than a hundred single women in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, Making Our Own Destiny is the first study to comprehensively compare the views and experiences of single women living in these three great cities—cities that stand at the forefront of the region’s movement toward later marriage and rising singlehood.This well-researched book explores how single women attempt to take advantage of unprecedented opportunities for success in education and work while navigating marriage and family expectations. Unlike their counterparts in Europe and North America, many do not have romantic partners and most do not have children. What do these women want? How do they see themselves and their place in society? What are their values, goals, and dreams? As they work to balance opportunities with expectations, single women in urban East Asia find themselves deeply embedded in the caregiving systems of their societies. In Shanghai, author Lynne Nakano finds single women rushing to marry to enter intergenerational relationships of care. In Hong Kong, they consider the risks of marriage as they tend to the needs of natal and extended families. In Tokyo, many single women hope to marry to have children while others find a place for themselves in their families as elder caregivers.Nakano’s intimate portrayals not only expose meticulously planned family strategies gone awry, engagements broken, and careers abandoned, but also highlight the experiences of women embracing the joys of remaining single. Hers is a fascinating study of modern women finding meaning in their lives while offering an insightful glimpse into the future of urban families in an age of low fertility and long transitions into adulthood.

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