New Books in Japanese Studies

If we wish to understand the role of China in today’s global society, we would do well to remind ourselves of the tragic, titanic struggle which that country waged in the 1930s and 1940s not just for its own national dignity and survival, but for the victory of all the Allies, west and east, against some of the darkest forces that history has ever produced.– Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s War with Japan 1937-45Understanding China and its approach to policy formation in various political and economic spheres of the 21st century needs to recognize this influential country’s historical reference points in order to better grasp its sensitivities and the interwoven nature of its relationships with the west. One way to commit to such an educational undertaking is through the highly accessible scholarship of Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University. His interesting and readable works cover much of contemporary Chinese history, and his most recent book, China’s Good War: how World War II is shaping a new nationalism was published last year by Harvard University Press, and thoroughly covered on the New Books Network East Asian Studies with Daigengna Duoer in December 2020 – well worth a careful listen.Today’s interview introduces Professor Mitter’s four previous books revealing people significant to the political and social history of early to mid-20th century China, as well as his smart summary of modern China – part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series. Mitter’s framing of his historical narratives help provide an understanding of a Chinese nation composed of individuals confronting stark choices, and revealing what it means to be Chinese. Along with his latest book China’s Good War, those interested in the contemporary arc of social history and the development of a political system are well advised to dig into Mitter’s books which can be nicely supplemented with his well-articulated thoughts on BBC radio programs and his 2015 Asia History Channel documentary, “The Longest War: China’s World War II.”His first four books briefly discussed today start in 2000 with the University of California Press release of: The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance and Collaboration in Modern China; A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2004) Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008) Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) Rana’s contributions to China studies and scholarship since receiving his PhD from Cambridge University include not only his books, journal articles, and chapters in edited books, but regular contributions to reviews and essays for the Financial Times, Guardian, and International New York Times among others.Rana Mitter is currently Director of the Oxford University China Center, and is currently working on the connections between war and nationalism in China from the 1930s to the present. His interests include the Republican period (1912-1949), the Cold War and Sino-Japanese relations.Keith Krueger lectures at SILC Business School – Shanghai University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Eika Tai’s Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) tackles the complex histories of Japanese “military sexual violence” and the activism by women in Japan, mostly since the 1990s. Tai’s contribution to scholarship on the so-called “comfort women” issue begins with a helpful overview of both the comfort women movement and also the political and social context in which that movement arose and continues today. Part 2: Activist Narratives, includes four chapters. Chapters 3-5 look at different ways that activists in Japan―primarily Japanese women responding directly or indirectly to the testimony of survivors―have approached the “comfort women” issue. Tai tells the stories of two or three representative activists in each of these chapters, and demonstrates how they encapsulate a particular way of being “activists in the perpetrator state.” Chapter 6 follows the same structural approach, but ties together some of the threads from previous chapters in its analysis of the transnational feminism that led to the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in 2000. The book’s conclusion contrasts this approach with the thought of feminist scholar Ōgoshi Aiko, and introduces the idea of “Feminism against Japan’s Military Sexual Violence,” the title of Chapter 7. Because it breaks new ground in understanding not just the question of military sexual violence, but also the histories of philosophical and activist feminisms, Comfort Women Activism will be of interest to historians of East Asia, gender, social movements, and more.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/japanese-studies

Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) by Torsten Weber examines how Asianism became a key concept in mainstream political discourse between China and Japan and how it was used both domestically and internationally in the contest for political hegemony. It argues that, from the early 1910s to the early 1930s, this contest changed Chinese and Japanese perceptions of ‘Asia’, from a concept that was foreign-referential, foreign-imposed, peripheral, and mostly negative and denied (in Japan) or largely ignored (in China) to one that was self-referential, self-defined, central, and widely affirmed and embraced. As an ism, Asianism elevated ‘Asia’ as a geographical concept with culturalist-racialist implications to the status of a full-blown political principle and encouraged its proposal and discussion vis-à-vis other political doctrines of the time, such as nationalism, internationalism, and imperialism. By the mid-1920s, a great variety of conceptions of Asianism had emerged in the transnational discourse between Japan and China. Terminologically and conceptually, they not only paved the way for the appropriation of ‘Asia’ discourse by Japanese imperialism from the early 1930s onwards but also facilitated the embrace of Sino-centric conceptions of Asianism by Chinese politicians and collaborators.Dr. Torsten Weber is a historian of modern and contemporary East Asia specializing in the history of Japanese-Chinese relations and interactions.Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Is the Indo-Pacific already the most dominant in terms of global power, politics, and wealth? In his newest book, Michael R. Auslin considers the key issues facing the Indo-Pacific which have ramifications for the entire world. Geopolitical competition in the region threatens stability not just in Asia, but globally. In a series of essays, Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020) Auslin examines the key issues that are changing the balance of power in Indo-China and globally. He examines China's aggressive global policies and strategies, and its attempts to bend the world to its wishes. He argues that the global focus on the Sino-US competition for power has obscured "Asia's other great game" - the rivalry between long-time foes, China and Japan. He questions whether Kim-Jong-un can control his nuclear weaponry and the implications for safety if he cannot. Auslin examines the plight of women in India and asks whether its "missing women" are potentially hampering any role that India might play on the global stage. Underlying these concerns, the book analyses U.S. strategy in region. If there is be a shift in the global balance of power, what role can and should the U.S. take in limiting China's hegemony? The dramatic final chapter paints a bleak picture of a Sino-American Littoral war in the very near future. Is this the geopolitical trajectory in the Indo-Pacific? Michael R. Auslin offers a "future-history" of what soon could be. Michael Auslin, PhD, is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, he specializes in US policy in Asia and geopolitical issues in the Indo-Pacific region.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan’s greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye. The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda’s films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics. An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda’s oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives.Linda C. Ehrlich—writer, teacher, editor—has published extensively about world cinema, art, and traditional theatre in a number of acclaimed academic journals.Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts. In Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese (Routledge, 2020), Wesley Robertson provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan.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/japanese-studies

What happens to everyday-life in a city when it becomes subsumed into an empire? Who becomes responsible for the everyday building and management of the new imperial enclave? How do local residents and colonial settlers manage to live side-by-side in new imperial arrangements?In Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45 (University of British Columbia Press 2019), Bill Sewell examines how Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and other civilians in northeast Asia sought to inscribe Manchuria as theirs, and how Japanese imperial architects and civilians in Changchun engaged in diverse empire-building efforts that transformed the city into a modern urban capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell argues that "Constructing empire was a mundane and popularly imagined affair as well as a diplomatic, political, and military one." Although studies on empire tend to focus on elite decisions or actions, Sewell contends that "popular dimensions must also be considered to grasp fully empire's nature."Constructing Empire also reminds us that Changchun, a city in northeast China and today's Jilin province, was a regional trade hub in Qing Inner Asia before the arrival of foreign empire builders. Although the land on which the city was built originally belonged to the Mongolian Front Gorlos Banner, Changchun's first cityscape was constructed by its Chinese settlers in the Qing. After the Russo-Japanese War, Changchun became a boundary between the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence in northeast China and a transfer point for travel between Europe and Asia.Although the Japanese presence in Manchuria was initially under military authority following the Russo-Japanese War, Sewell observes that the presence of Japanese civilians became increasingly strong after the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu) established transportation infrastructures, coal mines, power-generation facilities, factories, experimental farms, and railway-zone towns.Under Japanese occupation, Changchun was renamed Xinjing (J: Shinkyō) and became the capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell shows that constructing empire in Xinjing occurred in diverse contexts and was motivated by colonial imaginaries that allowed Japanese civilians to perceive the urban city and its spaces as places of work, worship, recreation, and residence. Residents of Xinjing were also segregated between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese, with access to spaces and resources in the city unequally distributed. Sewell points out that behind the façades of Pan-Asianism, the Japanese recreated in Xinjing much of the lifestyle that characterized life back home, demonstrating that "there was a closer allegiance to Japanese customs and society than to anything broadly Pan-Asia."Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In Creativity in Tokyo: Revitalizing a Mature City (Palgrave, 2020), Heide Imai and Matjaz Ursic focues on overlooked contextual factors that constitute the urban creative climate or innovative urban milieu in contemporary cities. Filled with reflections based on interviews with a diverse range of creative actors in various local neighborhoods in Tokyo, it offers a rare glimpse into the complex set of elements that provide long-term, physical, and sociocultural support to urban creativity. The authors highlight the interplay between physical and soft (social) factors in the process of place-making and explore how a city’s creativity is influenced by financial support and accessible infrastructure, as well as the sets of informal networks, services, and tacit, locally embedded knowledge that provide the basic layers of stimuli needed for creativity to fully develop. The authors show how the future development of creativity and the overall development of a city depend not only on the (top-down) planning strategies of formal authorities, but also on the appropriate (bottom-up) inclusion of heterogeneous elements that are provided and embedded within the small, hidden context of city spaces.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

One of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and its population. In The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Woojeong Joo offers a new interpretation of Ozu's career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozu's depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence. Firmly situating him within the context of the Japanese film industry, Woojeong Joo examines Ozu's work as a studio director and his relation to sound cinema, and looks in-depth at his wartime experiences and his adaptation to post-war Japanese society. Drawing on Japanese materials not previously examined in western scholarship, this is a ground-breaking new study of a master of cinema.In this interview, I asked Woojeong a series of questions concerning the operative notion of the "everyday" in the works of Ozu. It seems that the ordinary and oft-repetitive experience of the "present" enabled Ozu to create a space in which one could resist the nationalistic dictum of the "Japanese spirit" in 1930–40s Japan. Despite the fact that there is a certain continuity between his pre-war and post-war works (just like the works of the Kyoto School philosophers that the book cites), and despite the limitations Ozu's works inherently contain for a contemporary audience, his films are saturated with acute social commentaries, and offer insight into the emergence of different social "everday"s in modern Japan. Woojeong's interpretation of "feminity" in the works of Ozu also demonstrates his cross-cultural and cross-generational sensitivity, which is necessary for understanding the significance of "femininity" in the wider intellectual and historical context of feminist philosophy and Gender studies. I ended with a question about Ozu's signature technique of the "low height" angle. Is there anything that we should know about this distinct technique? What did Ozu intend to achieve with this peculiar viewpoint? Woojeong's informed answer, just like this book, will no doubt make us feel like watching the Ozu films again.Woojeong Joo received his PhD degree from University of Warwick. He has worked at the University of East Anglia as a postdoctoral research assistant for the AHRC-funded project "Manga to Movies" and is currently teaching in the Japan-in-Asia Cultural Studies Program at Nagoya University, Japan.Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. I specialize in comparative and Japanese philosophy but I am also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities. An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies