New Books in East Asian Studies

Compiled around 1235, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura's 100 Poems by 100 Poets, is one of the most important collections of poetry in Japan. Though the poets include emperors and empresses, courtiers and high priests, ladies-in-waiting and soldier-calligraphers, the collection is far more than a fascinating historical document. As the translators, James Hadley and Nell Regan, note in A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (Dedalus Press, 2020), "these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers". 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 texts that are examined in this study move in and out of different languages or are multilingual in their origins. Texts and authors do not move randomly; rather, they follow routes shaped by the history of contact between different nations of the transpacific. As these texts move into and out of the Chinese language or become multilingual, they necessarily do not always remain Sinophone. The works of the authors discussed are refracted out of Chinese literature into American, Malaysian, and Japanese literatures and, in some cases, back into Chinese again. Following their paths through multiple languages makes visible the ways that these trajectories are informed by, are arrested by, and bend around historical and geopolitical barriers across the Pacific. To this end, examining the path that these texts from a transpacific perspective allows for the possibility of not only multilingual but multidirectional movement.The transpacific trajectories discussed in this book give rise to a number of different versions or interpretations of several texts. When put into conversation with one another, these texts often acquire new meaning as they move between different languages, countries, or time periods. In Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions Across the Transpacific (Cambria Press, 2020) author Clara Iwasaki reads four canonical Chinese writers in relation to their translations, interpellations, and interpretations in different languages, revealing them to be more worldly than previously supposed. Texts, writers, and characters appear in different languages, sometimes taking markedly different forms. Authors translate and translators become authors. When individual texts are read in the context of their language or country of origin, these valences of meaning become lost. It is in reading clusters of texts together that these hidden relationship to other writers, other languages, and other texts become visible. To this end, Iwasaki looks at four writers, Xiao Hong, Yu Dafu, Lao She, and Zhang Ailing, through what she calls refractive relations. Following transpacific circuits, these writers and texts move not simply from periphery to center, or from obscurity to canon, but back and forth between literary, linguistic, and national communities. Many literary encounters today have their origin in meetings of authors and texts decades earlier. Rather than focusing on a single text, this book focuses on the relationship between the different works and how these texts acquire meaning when read in relation to each other. This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series headed by Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania). Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies Department at University of Alberta. 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 Russian cultural presence in Japan after the Meiji Revolution was immense. Indeed, Japanese cultural negotiations with Russian intellectuals and Russian literature, art, theology and political thought, formed an important basis for modern Japanese transnational intellectual, cultural, literary, and artistic production. And yet, despite the depth and range of “Japan’s Russia,” this historical phenomenon has been markedly neglected in our studies of modern Japanese intellectual life. This absence may be attributed to the fact that “Japan’s Russia” as idea and cultural expression developed outside the logic of Western modernity. There has been an interconnected logic behind this ignorance, a systematic lacuna in our historiography that tied method to historical actors, concept to theory.Olga V. Solovieva and Sho Konishi's Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria, 2021) seeks to depart from this logic in order to identify thoughts and practices that helped produce a dynamic transnational cultural phenomenon that we identify as “Japan’s Russia.” It does so by orchestrating case studies from cutting-edge scholarship originating in multiple disciplines, each with its own methodological and theoretical implications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre (Harvard UP, 2020) is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts—eight Mirrors—that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, “China,” attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. In so doing, she uncovers how a dynamic web of evolving concepts of time, place, language use, and cosmological forces was deployed to order the past in an age of unprecedented social movement and upheaval.Despite the Mirrors’ common concerns and commitments, traditional linguistic and disciplinary boundaries have downplayed or obscured their significance for medieval thinkers. Through their treatment here as a multilingual, multi-structured genre, the Mirrors are revealed, however, as the dominant mode for reading and writing the past over almost three centuries of Japanese history.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020) Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations. Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialist past that mediates between nostalgia and trauma, anticipation and retrospection, propaganda and testimony. Assembling each chapter like a memorial exhibit, Li explores how corporeal traces, archival documents, camera images, and material relics serve as commemorative media. Prison writings and police files reveal the infrastructure of state surveillance and testify to revolutionary ideals and violence, victimhood and complicity. Photojournalism from the Great Leap Forward and documentaries from the Cultural Revolution promoted faith in communist miracles while excluding darker realities, whereas Mao memorabilia collections, factory ruins, and memorials at trauma sites remind audiences of the Chinese Revolution's unrealized dreams and staggering losses.Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In Transnational Identities on Okinawa’s Military Bases: Invisible Armies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Johanna Zulueta considers the role of civilian workers on U.S. bases in Okinawa, Japan and how transnational movements within East Asia during the Occupation period brought foreign workers, mostly from the Philippines, to work on these bases. Decades later, in a seeming “reproduction of base labour”, returnees of both Okinawan and Philippine heritage began occupying jobs on base as United States of Japan (USFJ) employees. The book investigates the role that ethnicity, nationality, and capital play in the lives of these base employees, and at the same time examines how Japanese and Okinawan identity/ies are formed and challenged. It offers a valuable resource for those interested in Japan and Okinawa, U.S. military basing, migration, and mixed ethnicities.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China’s pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People’s Republic.China's Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society Under Mao (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876-1956) was a journalist, intellectual, and self-proclaimed socialist active in early twentieth-century Japan. In Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imaginations: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Leiden UP, 2020), Nadine Willems follows the life and travels of this thinker, who has been known as a “radical anarchist” as well as “the conscience of Japan.”During his seven-and-a-half-year self-imposed exile in England, Belgium, and France following the High Treason Incident, Ishikawa Sanshirō mingled with thinkers and activists such as the English social philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and lived with the family of Paul Reclus (1858-1941), the nephew of the French anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus (1830-1905). Reclusian ideas of “social geography” as a politically engaged science that is mindful of the moral responsibilities of geography as a discipline were pivotal to the formation of Ishikawa’s own socio-political model of domin seikatsu (“life of the people of the earth”). However, instead of characterizing Ishikawa as a radical intellectual inspired by Western thought in a narrative of one-directional influence, Willems positions Ishikawa in a transnational network of thinkers that engaged with geographical imaginations and their actualizations.Willems observes that through his engagements with “grassroots” geography and Buddhist ideas such as interconnectedness, Ishikawa Sanshirō challenged Japan’s modernization, capitalism, and social-Darwinism, proposing instead to “re-humanize” science and embark on experiments in self-sufficient living and the establishment of a loose local network of self-governing farmers’ councils in Japan.Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Winifred Bird’s Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes (Stone Bridge Press, 2021) is more than just a look at the culture and meanings of foraging in Japan complete with an eclectic collection of recipes and a guide for foragers, though it is certainly that. Eating Wild records the author’s encounters with quirky people―including a caldera dweller, a bear hunter, and a seaweed scientist―in surprising places―from snowy northern mountains to quiet Kyoto streets―and is animated by an obvious and effusive love of food, of travel, of people, and of the environment. Bird begins by observing that for many in contemporary Japan, wild forage is as much about “the pleasure of picking and the incidental beauty” as it is about “anything as practical as nutritional content,” but that this attitude is very much the product of particular historical and economic circumstances. Her sensitivity to this issue is foregrounded in chapters 2 and 3, on horse chestnuts and bracken, respectively. Bird’s background as an environmental journalist is particularly noticeable, for example, in her final chapter on wild seaweeds and the costs and benefits of aquaculture. Though as its full title Eating Wild Japan indicates, Bird’s fieldwork is rooted firmly in Japan, this is a book that will appeal to foodies and travel-starved East Asia neophytes as much as to veterans and scholars of Japan.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya 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

In The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religion (Bloomsbury 2018), Fabio Rambelli invites various fifteen scholars of Japanese religions to reflect on a well taken-for-granted fact: although the sea has always been a critical source of religious inspirations for Japan, the study of Japanese religions has chosen to turn its attention away from the sea and in the process, became essentially continental and landlocked. In fifteen chapters, this edited volume re-centers the study of Japanese religions on the coastal peripheries and calls for a geo-philosophy of the sea, or, a thalassosophy. Rambelli reminds us that "there is no sustained study in the intellectual history of the sea in Japan," and in fact, "we know very little about Japanese conceptualizations of the sea, not only in religious thought, but also in cosmology and premodern scientific discourses." This edited volume is thus an attempt to fill this knowledge gap and is the first book of its kind to focus on the role of the sea in Japanese religions. Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies