New Books in East Asian Studies

In this interview, we talk to Takashi Miura, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona, about his book Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan, (University of Hawaii Press, 2019).The book 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly true of China which covers a continental landmass encompassing multitude of different language families and groups. Indeed, what is even meant by “Chinese” is unclear when one considers the huge range of related but mutually unintelligible linguistic varieties – from Cantonese to Shanghainese and many other lesser known ones. The story of how the Beijing-derived language today known – at least in English – as “Mandarin” became the standard is thus a highly complex one.In Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Gina Anne Tam takes us through the ways that people in China have navigated the country’s complex linguistic landscape while also negotiating profound questions over the meanings of modern Chinese identity itself.Moving smoothly from the late imperial period up to the Maoist sixties and indeed beyond, this book is a rich source of insight into how states standardize language, and along the way explores the linguistic debates underlying many vital projects, from educating a nation, to writing novels, organizing socialist revolution, performing opera, and indeed dissing foreigners in rap tracks.Gina Anne Tam is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Trinity University, Texas.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dynastic book looks at how Chinese approaches to knowledge changed during the Ming and Qing as state-commissioned pharmacopeias dwindled, amateur investigations into the knowledge of things soared, and, ultimately, as natural history was de-medicalized, all while commercialization, monetization, long-distance trade, and empire flourished. This exceptionally rich and intimately text-based study introduces readers to a number of fascinating bencao (materia media), makes a compelling case for studying Chinese history through the lens of pharmacy, and demonstrates that Chinese pharmacy itself has a rich and vibrant history—all with stunning ease. This is both an essential and a joyful read for China historians, while still accessible for non-specialists interested in reading about the early modern world, medicine, the history of knowledge, and stories of strange drugs and the even stranger men who dispensed them.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. She is interested in book history, early modern translation, and anything involving a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for granted, believing that they are set in concrete rather than themselves being the subject of longer-run cycles of historical change.– Martin Jacques, When China Rules the WorldThe biggest question of the twenty-first century is: What does China want? China is without question the rising power of the age. What that means for the current global order, crafted and led by the United States since the end of World War II, is the topic of think tank studies, Congressional hearings, vats of newsprint, and dinner conversations from Washington to Tokyo. What exactly will China do with its new power? Will China become a partner to the West and its allies, or will it wish to change the world, to promote new values, institutions, and patterns of trade and finance? Will it play by our rules, or write new ones? … The answer to these questions is, at its heart, quite simple: China wants what it always had. China was a superpower for almost all of its history, and it wants to be a superpower again.This comes from the first chapter of Schuman’s Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World (Public Affairs Press, 2020). A perceptive and interesting selective historical narrative that identifies China’s exceptionalism and points out key moments in its long-standing existence as a superpower – militarily, economically, and culturally. A key and recurring theme is how China’s own perception of itself has changed over the centuries and should prove helpful to anyone trying to better understand our current historical moment. Schuman’s purpose is to help readers better develop a more nuanced background concerning China’s role in the world today and the future, as well as the West’s relationship with this Confucian-based civilization. Nicely written with a critical and cohesive theme linking back to his opening notion that ‘there is so such thing as world history – at least not one that holds the same meaning for everyone.’ Available in Audible, Kindle, and hardcover versions.Michael Schuman has been a journalist based in East Asia since 1996 and writes extensively about the region’s history and current affairs. Formerly a correspondent with The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine he now writes for The Atlantic and Bloomberg Opinion – this is his third book.Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Bringing attention to the importance of li (an articulated system of social domination and political legitimization, consisting of rituals, ceremonies, and rites) as the foundation of the Qing political system, Macabe Keliher’s book The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China (University of California Press, 2019) challenges traditional understandings of state-formation and helps us rethink how we tell the story of the founding of the Qing.Focusing on how rituals and other practices of legitimization emerged, formed, and were then codified, the book is a deep dive into the early years of the dynasty. Using Chinese and Manchu-language archival materials, including edicts, memorials, legal codes, and court records, Keliher emphasizes how concerned with li the Qing really was, and in turn how very different from the Ming the Qing ended up being.Covering all aspects of ritual, from court ceremony to sumptuary greetings, clothing regulations, and how members of the imperial family were dealt with, this is a lucidly written and wonderfully detailed book that will be of interest to those who work on the Qing—as well as anyone interested in ritual, state formation, early modern empires, and systems of domination more broadly.Macabe Keliher is a historian of early modern and modern China. He is assistant professor of history at Southern Methodist University.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in the History and East Asian Languages program at Harvard University. She in interested in book history, early modern translation, and anything involving a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Today I talked to Charlotte Bruckermann about her new book Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China (Berghahn Books, 2019).Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond.Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her interests delve into themes, such as Chinese state-society relations, space and memory, to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of baseball in Taiwan, the role of baseball in the Japanese imperial system, and the complicated nature of Taiwanese national identity.In Empire of Infields, Harney engages with the historiography of baseball in Taiwan. He argues that baseball was not necessarily a place for the formation of a Taiwanese nationalist identity, nor was it a space for colonial resistance to the Japanese, but instead it was a site for mutual engagement and cultural genesis with the Japanese and different groups of Taiwanese people. He considers Taiwanese baseball transnationally within the larger frames of the Japanese imperial nation-state and the Kuomintang’s retrocession Sinicization project. He shows how and why indigenous Taiwanese players travelled the empire, young Japanese and ethnically Chinese Taiwanese people competed in the same international high school baseball competitions, and postwar Japanese students won the Little League World Series.His discussion of Taiwanese identity encompasses the islands diverse populations throughout the twentieth century. He focuses less on baseball as resistance and instead is interested in the way that baseball helped to produce lasting connections between Taiwan and Japan. In the postwar, Chiang Kai-Shek responded ambivalent to the Taiwanese game. Baseball offered the regime ties to the United States and opportunities to compete internationally, but it also threatened to produce Taiwanese nationalism that would undermine their argument for continued rule of the mainland. Taiwan’s post-imperial connections with Japan remained important as Taiwanese baseball remained linked with the metropole. Taiwanese players competing in Japan and Japanese news regularly appearing in their erstwhile colony.Although Harney’s work proceeds largely chronologically, he balances between two periods: the era of Japense colonialism (1895-1945) and the postwar period (1945-1968). Within each section, his work moves thematically, engaging with related issues of Taiwanese nationalism, Japanese educational systems, race under empire, the Cold War, and the trans-Pacific histories of sports.Empire of Infields will appeal to readers interested in Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese history as well as people fascinated by international baseball.Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Many people outside China, and indeed many urbanites living in the country, rarely think about its vast rural areas. Yet today’s People’s Republic in many ways owes existence to the countryside where, seven and more decades ago, a rural revolution brought the new state into people’s lives, and new people under the state’s stewardship.Brian DeMare’s highly engaging Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2019) tells the story of this revolution, and indeed shows how the process was itself a story. Key to the psychological, political and economic transformations which unfolded in China’s million villages in the 1940s and ‘50s was a powerful narrative impulse – a Maoist “script” for revolution which gave shape to often chaotic and violent events. Untangling this script – and the relationship between the “literal and the literary” as DeMare puts it – is key to interpreting this formative cataclysm of the PRC’s recent past. Professor Brian DeMare specializes in modern Chinese history. A cultural historian studying the Communist Party's great enterprise, Professor DeMare researches how Chinese citizens have negotiated with the politicization of their everyday lives.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century.The translations in Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic. (Stone Bridge Press, 2020)--spanning a period of some thirty years, from 1937 until 1965--bring to life some of Xu Xu’s most representative short fictions from prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan.The Afterword illustrates that Xu Xu’s idealistic tendencies in defiance of the politicization of art exemplify his affinity with European romanticism and link his work to global literary modernity.Frederik H. Green is an associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and culture of the Qing dynasty and the Republican Period, Sino-Japanese cultural relations, post-socialist Chinese cinema, and contemporary Chinese art. He holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University and an MPhil and PhD in Chinese literature from Yale University. He is a translator of Chinese and associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the country during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. TB was a plague of epic proportions in industrializing Japan, particularly affecting young women workers in the new textile factories. These marginalized laborers, many from rural villages, were not a priority for Japan’s first modern administrations, who focused their energies elsewhere and left the welfare of tuberculosis patients to the private sector. The opening left by this choice was filled by American evangelicals, who saw an opportunity to advance their missionary work in Japan.Perelman identifies a kind of twinned moral entrepreneurship, arguing that a tacit agreement was hammered out between the two sides, with the government accepting the evangelical groups’ assistance with this public health emergency in exchange for noninterference in their efforts to spread Christianity. The history of TB in Japan is well studied and understood, but American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan breathes new life into this old story by its attention to different actors and dynamics. It will be of interest not only to scholars of Japanese and East Asian history and culture, but also to historians of science, medicine and public health, and Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies