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Aesthetic Life is a study of modern Japan, engaging the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the "beautiful woman" (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organization, and tactics from Japan's early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai.

This study of Japan's transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and Tokyo policymakers. Smith sheds light on how average Japanese responded to problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.

Japan's "merchant capital" in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial center into the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyo's. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular literature and cinema-as well as contemporary radio, television, music, and comedy-from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Edith Sarra radically rethinks the Tale of Genji by focusing on the figure of the house-both the narrative's images of aristocratic mansions and its representation of their inhabitants. Unreal Houses opens new perspectives on the architectonics of the Genji and the feminine milieu that midwifed what has been called the world's first novel.

Seth Jacobowitz rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture, presenting the first systematic study of the ways that media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

Investigating the late 16th through the 19th century, this work looks at the shifting boundaries between the Choson state and the adherents of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and popular religions. It counters the static view of the Korean Confucian state and elucidates its relationship to the wider Confucian community and religious groups.

Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were female figures in late nineteenth century domestic novels. This study disrupts the canonical account of a non-gendered, linear progress toward modern Korean selfhood and examines translation's impact on Korea's construction of modern gender roles.

Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation, which was introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century. Anne Reinhardt illuminates both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China's experience, its continuities with colonialism, and its links to global processes.

Halle O'Neal unpacks jeweled pagoda mandala paintings and their revolutionary entwining of word and image to reveal crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art-including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.

In the first comprehensive study of Guo Moruo in English, Pu Wang explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer, Mao Zedong's last poetic interlocutor, a Marxist historian, president of China's Academy of Sciences, and translator of Goethe's Faust.

Imaginative Mapping analyzes how intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras used specific features and aspects of the landscape to represent their idea of Japan and produce a narrative of Japan as a cultural community. Nobuko Toyosawa argues that the circulation spatial narratives allowed readers to imagine the broader conceptual space of Japan.

Famine Relief in Warlord China explores relief efforts during the greatest ecological crisis of the pre-Nationalist Chinese republic. Pierre Fuller details how indigenous action from the household to the national level, not international intervention, sustained the lives of millions of the destitute in Beijing.

Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture provides a textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Study of drum ballads opens up new perspectives in Chinese literature and history and offers a new paradigm that will interest scholars of cultural history, literature, legal history, and popular culture.

Forty lessons introducing students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.

The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889-1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres. This book takes up Hyakken's fiction and essays written during Japan's prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time.

In the early 20th century, China began to import and then to manufacture thousands of consumer goods. Politicians feared trade deficits. Intellectuals feared loss of national sovereignty. And manufacturers wondered how they could survive a flood of cheap imports. Gerth argues that the responses of these groups helped foster modern nationalism.

A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants' lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era.

Drawing on varied archaeological and archival sources, David B. Lurie highlights the diverse modes and uses of writing that coexisted in Japan between the first and eighth centuries. This book illuminates not only the textual practices of early Japanese civilization but also the comparative history of writing and literacy in the ancient world.

This manual for students focuses on archival research in the economic and business history of the Republican era (1911-1949). Following a general discussion of archival research and research aids for the Republican period, the handbook introduces the collections of archives in the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Before the late 1980s Taiwan's successful exporters were overwhelmingly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). What accounts for their success and their benign neglect by the state? The author argues that it was an unintended consequence of the state's policy toward the private sector and its political strategies for managing societal forces.

These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China's Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch'ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. They culminate in Hart's return visit to Europe with the Pinch'un Mission and his marriage in Northern Ireland.

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown focuses on a Chinese immigrant community in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. It tells the story of how Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state during periods of war and peace.

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting chronicles the life of a modern art form. In the late 1910s Chinese painters began working outdoors. They also adopted linear perspective and Cartesian optics. Yi Gu reflects on the complex interaction of local and Western aesthetics within the new form and on the nature of visual modernity in China.

Jun Uchida draws on previously unused materials in multi-language archives to uncover the obscured history of the Japanese civilians who settled in Korea between 1876 and 1945, with particular focus on the first generation of "pioneers" between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated Japan's colonial presence on the Korean peninsula.

Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as mere propaganda, not only was liked in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. Considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art from the point of view of its longue duree, Mittler suggests that it built on a tradition of earlier art works, which allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory.

In this in-depth study, Felix Boecking challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. It argues instead that international trade, government tariff revenues, and hence China's fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed.

Earthquake Children is the first book to examine the origins of modern Japan's infrastructure of resilience. Janet Borland vividly demonstrates that Japan's contemporary culture of disaster preparedness-and its people's ability to respond calmly in times of emergency-are the results of learned and practiced behaviors inspired by earlier tragedies.

Dancing the Dharma examines the theory and practice of allegory by exploring a select group of medieval Japanese noh plays and treatises. Understanding noh's allegorical structure and paying attention to the localized historical context for individual plays are key to recovering their original function as political and religious allegories.

In Varieties of State Regulation, Yukyung Yeo explores how the Chinese central party-state continues to oversee the most strategic sectors of its economy, and how the form of central state control varies considerably across leading industrial sectors, depending on the dominant mode of state ownership, conception of control, and governing structure.