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Mark Jones examines the making of a new child's world in Japan, 1890-1930, and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. He also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context-the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan.

In the years of rapid economic growth following the protest movements of the 1960s, artists and intellectuals in Japan searched for a means of direct impact on the whirlwind of historical and cultural transformations of their time. This book explores the theoretical and cultural implications of experimental arts in a range of media.

For the writers and poets of early-20th-century Japan, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.

Tian, or Heaven, had been used in China since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god. Examining excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han-dynasty artisans transformed various notions of Heaven-as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky-into pictorial entities, not by what they looked at, but by what they looked into.

Relations between the Choson and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the "traditional" Chinese "tribute system." In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Choson Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists.

Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. He was instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by futurism, dadaism, and surrealism. This critical biography examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and flamboyant figure.

Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his time. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami's fiction, Suter complicates our understanding of the author's oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific.

Maclachlan analyzes the institutions, interest groups, and leaders involved in the evolution of Japan's postal system from the early Meiji period until 2010. At the crux of her analysis is Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro's crusade to privatize Japan's postal services, one of the most astonishing political achievements in postwar Japanese history.

Sonia Ryang casts new light on the study of North Korean culture and society by reading literary texts as sources of ethnographic data. Ryang focuses critical attention on three central themes-love, war, and self-that reflect the nearly complete overlap of the personal, social, and political realms in North Korean society.

This study investigates the Japanese experiment with financial imperialism-or "yen diplomacy"-at several key moments between the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and how these practices impacted the development of receiving nations and defined their geopolitical position in the postcolonial world.

The 16 chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880-1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival.

Jung-Sun N. Han examines the role of liberal intellectuals in reshaping transnational ideas and internationalist aspirations into national values and imperial ambitions in early twentieth-century Japan. Han's focus is on the ideas and activities of Yoshino Sakuzo (1878-1933), who was a champion of prewar Japanese liberalism and Taisho democracy.

Kim explores the dynamic relationship between Korean and Japanese Buddhists in the years leading up to the Japanese annexation of Korea. Conventional narratives portray Korean Buddhists as complicit in the religious annexation of the peninsula, but this view fails to account for the diverse visions, interests, and strategies that drove both sides.

Satoru Saito examines the similarities between detective fiction and the novel in prewar Japan. Arguing that interactions between the genres were critical moments of literary engagement, Saito demonstrates how detective fiction provided a framework through which to examine and critique Japan's literary formations and its modernizing society.

In tracing the development under founder Zhang Jian (1853-1926) and his successors of the Dasheng Cotton Mill in Nantong, the author documents the growth of regional enterprises as local business empires from the 1890s until the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949.

Focusing on themes of crisis and innovation, this book illuminates the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; analyzes links between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and rethinks the "premodernity" of the eras.

In this cross-cultural study of "emotion management," the author argues that even though the goals of normative control in factories, offices, and shops may be similar across cultures, organizational structure and the surrounding culture affect how that control is discussed and conceived.

Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power.

These chapters trace the biographical thread running through Nakagami's works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.

This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged.

Buddhism in medieval Korea is characterized as "State Protection Buddhism," a religion whose primary purpose was to rally support (supernatural and popular) for and legitimate the state. This study is an attempt to specify Buddhism's place in Koryo and to ascertain to what extent and in what areas Buddhism functioned as a state religion.

Koreans and Burakumin, two of the largest minority groups in modern Japan, share a history of discrimination that spans the decades of Japan's modernization and imperial expansion. Bayliss explores the historical processes that cast them as "others" on the margins of the Japanese empire and that also influenced their views of themselves.

South Korea was one of the poorest economies on the planet after the Korean War; by the twenty-first century, it had become a middle-income country, home to some of the world's leading industrial corporations. From Miracle to Maturity offers an analysis of Korea's remarkable economic growth and considers whether its economy is now underperforming.

Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors in the early twentieth century encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by staging tensions between Japan's newly heteronormative culture and the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse.

Eyferth charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan, tracing the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men.

Informed by theories of nostalgia, collective memory, cultural nationalism, and gender, this book draws on the author's extensive fieldwork in probing the practice of identity-making and the processes at work when Japan becomes "Japan."

Free trade proponent Ayukawa Yoshisuke (1880-1967) was founder of the Nissan conglomerate and leader of the Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation, a linchpin of Japan's efforts to economically exploit its overseas dependencies. Through exploring the reasons for Ayukawa's failure, Iguchi illuminates many of Japan's current economic problems.

Scholars have often taken Shinkokinshu (1205) to represent a nostalgia for greatness presumed to have been lost in the wars of the late 1100s. The author argues that the compilers of this anthology of waka poetry instead saw their collection as a "new" beginning, a revitalization and affirmation of courtly traditions, and not a reaction to loss.

The authors analyze the social, cultural, and political meaning attached to the cult of Confucius; its history; the legends, images, and rituals associated with it; the power of the descendants of Confucius; the main temple in the birthplace of Confucius; and the contemporary fate of temples to Confucius.