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Abstract: This issue of HJAS features three articles that engage with literary works. Gala Follaco examines four "chronicles of prosperity" (hanjōki 繁盛記) that describe Tokyo during the first years after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, with a particular focus on their depiction of its aural landscape—the newfangled bells and whistles of a rapidly changing city. Suyoung Son, working at the intersection of art history, book history, and literary studies, writes on the successful late Ming publisher Yu Xiangdou 余象斗 (ca. 1560–1637) and the images of himself he inserted into his books. She sees these images not so much as self-promotion as a call for readers to appreciate the publisher's intellectual labor. Finally, Keith McMahon ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Tokyo, 1874. rickshaws are everywhere to be seen. Introduced in 1869, they now circulate by tens of thousands in the streets of the new capital. In Hattori Bushō's 服部撫松 (1842–1908) Tōkyō shin hanjōki 東京新繁昌記 (A new record of flourishing Tokyo; 1874–1876), passengers excuse themselves with ritual expressions whose meaning is downplayed while their sonority is emphasized.1 They are introduced aurally, their external features are absent, nor do we find the smallest hint at their state of mind as they board and get off. To announce rickshaws, whose description is essentially acoustic, Bushō resorts to onomatopoeias:Voices saying "I beg your pardon" merge with the wheels' sound, then trail away: beg your pardon, rattle ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The self-images of the late Ming publisher, Yu Xiangdou 余象斗 (ca. 1560–1637), are one of the most compelling emblems of the flourishing print culture in late imperial China.1 Yu Xiangdou was a prolific commercial publisher in the low-end commercial book center of Jianyang 建陽 in northern Fujian Province, which reached its heyday in the sixteenth century.2 He published more than forty-five titles over some fifty years in a variety of genres, including the Confucian Classics, examination literature, almanacs, daily encyclopedias, legal guidebooks, literary collections, histories, and popular fiction. Many of his books enjoyed great success, being reprinted several times both in his lifetime and after his death. Yu ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The sexually explicit contents of Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 have long subjected the book to intense debate.1 Questions asked ever since the novel first appeared have centered on such things as whether or not it is an obscene book (yinshu 淫書), how "good" or "bad" its obscenity is, or what purpose its salacious contents serve. Yet no study so far has done what can be considered a sustained critical analysis of the novel's language of sex.2 What does the novel's language of sex accomplish in terms of its aesthetics, meaning, and function' What are the modes of portraying sex' What is the economy of sexual description' Such questions have to do with the artful use of language and imagery, as well as the way the author uses such ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: How might the field of Heian literary studies become more open and more energizing to inhabit' I was invited to review two new books on Heian literature and soon felt drawn to consider a broader range of monographs and issues, including what it means to inhabit this subfield presently and how we might improve our interpretive and pedagogical work. In a fit of genuine optimism, I initially wrote: "Edith Sarra's and Takeshi Watanabe's new books help me hold out hope for anglophone Heian literary studies. Despite being focused squarely on single texts, both studies add much to our understanding of Heian literature, mining metaphors of exorcism and architecture to expand our sense of how literary texts, historical ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 2013, Xi Jinping, the ambitious new president and Communist Party secretary of the People's Republic of China (PRC), launched his grand vision of a "new era" of cooperative globalization under the auspices of his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, Ch. Yidai yilu 一帶一路). Taking up previous campaigns that had urged Chinese corporations to "go out" and secure "win-win" investment partnerships around the world, state media touted the BRI as the seamless continuation across Eurasia of a millennia-old "Silk Road Spirit" of open, peaceful, and mutually beneficial trade.1 Chinese nationalist netizens in the PRC and abroad have declared China's BRI to be the only possible alternative to post–Cold War capitalist globalization ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: An important part of religious life in China is the veneration and supplication of various deities, who are typically represented in the form of statues or paintings. These ubiquitous objects of worship can be found in various temples and shrines across China (and other areas where traditional Chinese culture is present), as well as in the homes of individual families and places of business. They are associated with a wide range of beliefs, practices, and traditions. Some of them are primarily linked with one of the three teachings—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—which over the centuries have exerted enormous influences on various facets of Chinese life, within and outside of the religious sphere. There are also ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Andrew Chittick has written the first English work that provides a full overview of the Six Dynasties (Liuchao 六朝), comprising Wu 吳 (220–280), Eastern Jin 晉 (318–420), Liu Song 劉宋 (420–479), Southern Qi 齊 (479–502), Liang 梁 (502–557), and Chen 陳 (557–589). This bold, pioneering, and insightful book concludes that we should refer to these polities as the Jiankang 建康 empire, since they had the same city (present-day Nanjing) as their capital and shared numerous characteristics. Chittick's book furnishes a penetrating analysis of the Jiankang empire, covering its linguistic complexity, political culture, frontier policy, military affairs, economic trends, and popular religion, as well as its piety in Buddhism. This ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "The mountain ranges in Korea cover more than half the total area of the country. Owing to indiscriminate felling of trees without public supervision, which was practiced for a long time past, most of the mountain slopes … have become denuded of trees."1 Traditionally, academic histories of Korean forests almost inevitably start with the assertions of the Japanese colonial authorities, such as this quotation from a report published by Tokyo's famous precolonial Resident-General Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文 in 1907. In this colonial narrative, Korean forest history, in comparison with Japan's, was not auspicious. The Chosŏn dynasty bequeathed only degraded forests and mountains, covered not in trees but in vividly red soil. ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This comparative study explores how selected Japanese architects and writers imagined, represented, or visualized the city. Describing in vivid detail their shared investments in what Gardner usefully terms the narrative "elements" of the city, this book offers a captivating mapping of two deeply entangled domains where Japan's urban imaginaries took on new contours during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Deftly attending to the speculative dimensions of both literary and architectural discourses of the city, Gardner's book opens new interdisciplinary entryways to Japan's vocabularies of urban environments and planetary urbanization, analyzing the role of speculative futures therein.This volume complements a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "Nothing prospers," Sophocles writes, "without pain and toil."1 While South Korea's spectacular rise to economic world prominence in the late twentieth century owes much to its strong developmental state headed by former army general Park Chung Hee 朴正熙, who seized political power in a military coup d'état in May 1961, neither the state's aggressive export regime that drove the economy during those years nor its astonishing statistical achievements can be comprehended without reference to the composition and competitiveness of the country's labor force. In an earlier book, Hyung-A Kim examines the dynamic triumvirate in the presidential Blue House consisting of Park, his chief-of-staff Kim Chŏngnyŏm 金正濂, and second ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "Many mountains, few fields" (shanduo tianshao 山多田少). During the mid-Ming, gazetteer editors used this phrase to explain why residents of Huizhou 徽州 Prefecture abandoned agriculture for trade, initially in timber and other mountain products.1 The geographical reality that this phrase describes provides a commonsense explanation for why this mountainous, interior prefecture became the homeland of Ming China's most renowned trade diaspora. This rationale echoes in even the best work on emigrant communities of overseas Chinese trade and labor diasporas in the modern era.2 Yet most mountainous areas of China did not spawn powerful trade diasporas. Indeed, other mid-Ming writers used this same phrase to explain why ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Mårten Söderblom Saarela sets a new precedent for research about the languages of late imperial China and makes a vital contribution to the international genre of language histories with his biography of the Manchu script and its significance beyond the physical and political domains of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Whereas it is well established how Manchu was ostensibly invented to serve as a writing system of political importance for the Qing state, its development as a literary language remains to be fully explored, particularly beyond the imperial metropolis of Beijing and northeastern China. Söderblom Saarela makes the compelling case that Manchu was a world language of the early modern age. Although Manchu ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As its subtitle declares, Land of Strangers engages with the concept of the Confucian "civilizing project" to understand the incorporation of Xinjiang into China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1912), during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Schluessel's book, however, centers on the experiences of ordinary southern Xinjiang Muslims. Their daily lives were largely uninformed by nascent struggles of Uyghur protonationalism in conflict with a monolithic Chinese state—struggles that increasingly structure the narrative assumptions of current work on the region. The author wants to let his sources "speak for themselves, without a predetermined theoretical framework" to allow "their concerns to guide the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe, by Stephen Whiteman, focuses on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu shanzhuang 避暑山莊, hereafter Mountain Estate), the renowned Qing dynasty (1636–1912) summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde), located 180 kilometers northeast of Beijing, beyond the Great Wall. Originally one of a network of traveling palaces at which the Manchu emperor would stop during his annual tours among the court's Inner Mongolian allies, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the site was transformed by the Kangxi 康熙 emperor (r. 1661–1722) into a lavish complex of gardens and palaces that eventually served as a secondary Qing capital. Most extant scholarship ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Simon Wickhamsmith's Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921–1948) makes an important contribution to our understanding of Mongolian literature in the first three decades of the Mongolian People's Republic. This book begins with the Mongolian People's Revolution of 1921 (Arad-un qubisγal) and ends with the codification of Mongolian socialist realism in the first congress of Mongolian writers in 1948. Wickhamsmith extends the historical and anthropological work of Irina Morozova, David Sneath, and other researchers, who have depicted the gradual transformation of Mongolia into a modern, Soviet-modeled socialist state, in which a new political and national vocabulary, as well as new institutions and social roles ... Read More PubDate: 2023-02-26T00:00:00-05:00