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By studying Japanese films and their associated literature, this book reveals the covert stories of Japanese women of various statuses and time periods in an exegesis of their story versus orthodox history. Fifteen films are studied to bring this theme into focus. They are: Imamura Shohei’s The Ballad of Narayama, Naruse Mikio’s Mother, Idemitsu Mako’s Great Mother, Kinugasa Teinousuke’s Gate of Hell, Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth, Kuwabata Kagenobu’s Love and Lie, Toyoda Shiro’s The Mistress, Kumai Kei’s Sandakan Brothel No. 8, Takahashi Banmei’s A New Love in Tokyo, Nishikawa Katsumi’s A Dancing Girl in Izu, Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Chizuko’s Younger Sister, Ichikawa Jun’s Tsugumi, Mizoguchi Kenji’s Life of Oharu, Itami Juzo’s Tampopo, and Ishikawa Jun’s Grass Fish on a Tree.The five chapters, ""Mother,"" ""Wife,"" ""Whore,"" ""Girl"" and ""Woman,"" represent categories the public used to code Japanese women in the pre-feminist age. Each chapter features three films depicting women in the pre-modern age, in the World War II period, and in late twentieth century Japan, and each embraces the three films within the thematic perspective of ecological feminism, sexuality, alienation, illusion, and power-over/power-to, respectively.The book sheds light on cultural, historical, and/or ideological backgrounds of the films under study in important new ways and breaks new ground in the study of women in Japanese culture.

In China in the 1920s and 1930s, foreigners were frequently at risk of being captured by bandits and held for ransom. The phenomenon became so common that foreigners who were captured were called “foreign tickets” (yang piao). Because of their unique status in China due to extraterritoriality, foreign captives were more prized than Chinese victims. Successive CCP leaders in various Soviet areas also in the 1920s and 1930s greatly valued the “foreign tickets” they captured. In 1930 there were an estimated twenty-five missionaries in China being held by Communist groups. The foreigners suffered great deprivations in captivity; some were tortured and a small number were killed. The CCP plundered their personal and church possessions and even took funds intended for relief efforts. However, it must be said, that the CCP, like Chinese bandits, tended to treat foreigners slightly better than they did Chinese captives, whose lives were held very cheap.,br> It is in this context that A Foreign Missionary on the Long March, a previously unpublished eyewitness account of the Chinese Communist Party’s epoch Long March, so resonates. The author, a New Zealand-born missionary for the China Inland Mission from 1913 to 1945 was captured and held hostage for 413 days by the CCP’s Sixth Army from 1934 to 1935. Hayman’s grim account of the Red Army in retreat gives a new perspective on the historic Long March, as well as a glimpse of the CCP in the time before Mao came to prominence. It also blurs the line between the Communists and common bandits. CCP historiography has turned the Long March into the founding myth of the PRC. Hayman’s memoirs offer a fresh perspective on this crucial period of CCP history and implicitly, in the role it plays in the CCP’s current hold on power.

Watsuji’s Koji Junrei is a book of impressions of a trip he took in 1918 to Japan’s ancient capital of Nara, where he saw a number of Buddhist temples. By then, Watsuji had already published influential, groundbreaking books on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and the book Guzu saiko (Resurrection of Idols).Koji Junrei is significant in that it began a modern literary trend of “travel writing” about ancient temples and shrines in Japan and elsewhere. While the genre had existed for centuries, it was Koji Junrei that almost singlehandedly resurrected it.

This volume looks in detail at trade between the Qing dynasty and the Edo shogunate primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While touching on all manner of items traded, from where, to where, and the like, Oba Osamu particularly focuses on the importation of Chinese books to Japan. This entails a detailed discussion and analysis of the censorship procedures for detecting works with any sort of Christian content—strictly forbidden—and the punishments meted out to the guilty importers. Oba also looks at the families responsible for inspecting books—it became a hereditary post—and the Chinese interpreters attached to the Nagasaki Magistrates office.According to Professor Fogel, “[Oba] . . . asks: How did Japanese of the late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji eras learn about the West? In fact, with certain exceptions, their major texts on Western affairs were classical Chinese texts (Kanbun), often translations of Western books made by European missionaries together with their Qing collaborators. Oba’s attention to this central importance of classical Chinese texts was the crowning achievement of his career, and it has earned him extraordinary praise from both Japanese and Chinese historians.”

Presented in four thematic sections, Scenes from Dutch Formosa brings together a variety of genres and historical essays to contextualise the Dutch Formosan colonial era between 1625 and 1663, for an audience of postcolonial, culture, and performance studies readers.The collection examines diverse Dutch, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese dramatic-dialogic interpretations of the Dutch East India Company’s presence in Taiwan. Introductory and concluding essays by historian Murray A. Rubinstein set the global stage with a scholarly sweep on the role of Dutch Formosa in an ongoing international drama of diplomacy.

This collection of nine short stories written by Inoue Hisashi (1934-2010) evokes the mysterious and uncanny tone of traditional folktales from rural Tohoku, Japan, while reflecting the playful approach of this major satirist of modern Japanese literature.

By the late nineteenth century, Japanese readers had access to translations of many of Europe and America’s best mystery writers. The popularity of the genre led to Japanese writers honestly translating these stories into Japanese; or to modifying the story according to the Japanese author’s taste; and, sometimes to outright plagiarism of Western stories to be passed off as works by Japanese authors. The popularity of mysteries was ensured in Japan, and the ensuing century-plus has seen remarkable examples of Japanese literary innovation.This volume highlights some of Japan’s most creative responses to the mystery genre. Some of the works are innovative because they were written by authors (or, in one case, a poet) who did not normally write mysteries. Others are innovative for their variations on standard elements detective fiction, or for using mystery tropes to interrogate social norms such as social standing, or gender roles. Some works play on technological innovations as keys to the mystery. Some of the works are meta-fictive explorations of the mystery, using detective fiction to investigate detective fiction.Scholars, students and mystery readers alike will find this volume full of surprises.

In Elegy of a River Shaman, Fang Qi has elegantly woven folk songs and shamanic chants into an intricate, beautiful, and wrenchingly powerful narrative of the destruction and erasure of the traditional culture along the rugged, remote gorges surrounding the Yangzi River.

Takashi Yoshida provides a historical analysis of war and peace museums from the late nineteenth century to the present and traces the historical development of a pacifist discourse in postwar Japan that centred on Japan’s war crimes and responsibility during the so-called Fifteen Year War, which began in 1931 with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and ended in 1945 with the nation’s defeat. Prior to the defeat, a culture of war gripped the Japanese empire. Every segment of Japanese popular culture during the war bore witness to the flood of patriotism. In this book Yoshida attempts to demonstrate that the acceptance of Japanese wartime aggression and atrocities as historical facts remains evident to this day in the culture of peace museums in Japan. Those who have little knowledge of contemporary Japan often hastily conclude that the Japanese have been united and monolithic in the way they feel the war should be remembered. This book seeks to challenge that assumption.

The crimson thread noted in the title of this book aptly describes the nature of Teriyama’s stories and the interstitial webbing joining them together thematically by the metaphorical twisting together of unrequited love, abandonment, irremediable separation, and disappointment. Told in the manner of fantasy and magic realism, the stories are populated with characters who face the vagaries of fortune, happiness always just out of their reach. Terayama is a realist speaking through the medium of fantasy. The stories are “tales for adults”, and indeed they are written in such a way as to mimic and sometimes parody classic fairy tale style. Yet, these tales are far from traditional in content; rather, they turn our conventional thinking and expectations upside down. This topsy-turvy world of Terayama is unsettling and disconcerting at times, but his world is, without a doubt, thought provoking.

Shimada Kenji (1917–2000) was one of the great scholars of Chinese history and culture of the twentieth century. This volume brings to English a number of his scholarly writings, introductions to his two principle books, an autobiographical interview given late in life, and a lengthy round- table discussion by former students and disciples.

Drawing on recent scholarship this study effectively re-examines Japan’s policies in Korea from 1910 to 1945 and contributes to the growing field of historical revisionism in Korean colonial history.

The historic movement, the emotional speeches, the underground publications, and the famous legal battles all helped the islanders to learn about many hitherto totally alien concepts of socialism and Western democracy, including surplus value, historical materialism, the eight-hour working day, the right to strike, the consent of the governed, popular elections, suffrage, and home rule.

Several decades after the Korean War, the unnamed narrator of this story is taken in by an aged Turk, Uncle Hassan, a veteran of that conflict who makes a living as a butcher in a Seoul slum. The precocious narrator, a troubled boy, wonders who his parents are and why they abandoned him. He befriends a number of people, all poor and downtrodden, including Aunt Anna, a caring woman running a restaurant; Uncle Amos, a compulsive liar and a Greek who stayed on in Korea after the war, and many others. As the narrator gets to know them, he finds his path, realizing what human community is all about and what love means. Employing the child's point of view, he humorously grapples with the hypocrisy of grown-ups, racism, prejudices against the poor and different religions, and most of all, the meaning of fighting another nation's war and its aftermath. The novel begins with "my adoptive father's blood flows in my body" and ends with an echo, "my adoptive father's blood is still flowing in my body." In between, the narrator, lost and hurt, is healed by the flawed but sympathetic characters.

A China Scholar’ Long March is a collection of fifty pieces written between 1978 and 2015 by Charles Horner, a China Scholar, a former U.S. government official, and the author of the two-volume work Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate. The pieces originally appeared in general interest publications such as The American Interest, The National Interest, and Commentary; in newspapers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post; and in some more specialized periodicals such as China Heritage Quarterly and the Naval War College Review.The first piece dates from 1978, when the so-called ‘Rise of China’ was about to begin and, as such, Horner’s writings span a generation of China’s trying to make sense of its own rise and of American scholars and commentators trying to make sense of it also. Horner’s 1992 article, ‘China on the Rise’ is now bracketed, a quarter century later, by a growing sense that the so-called Rise of China is coming to an end, and that a generation of commentary about it is about to come to an end along with it.

This volume examines high-rise housing projects called danchi that were built during Japan’s years of “high speed economic growth” (1955–1972) to house aspiring middle-class families migrating to urban areas.

Farewell Valley is divided into four seasons each represented by a different character. It takes place in a remote village in Kangw?n Province, where Farewell Valley RR Station is located.

The Long Road is the sole work of Korean literature in English that treats the Korean diaspora experience in Australia.

Even before the Japanese first ventured abroad in the modern era, they came to understand that Shanghai was the closest and easiest way to learn about the wider world. They sent a series of missions abroad, most to Europe and several to Shanghai specifically. Virtually all of the European voyages called at Shanghai coming and going. Liu Jianhui shows what the Japanese saw in Shanghai and how they interacted with the Chinese.Liu then describes what he calls an informational network in East Asia whereby the latest scientific and political development from the West were written up in Chinese-language journals published by Protestant missionaries (with its hub in Shanghai) and how those journals circulated among Japanese as well. Shanghai was also the place that Japanese elite's first learned about the modern printing press. Indeed, as Liu puts it, they first experienced “modernity” in Shanghai. And, he looks at the role of Shanghai in the opening of Japan. He shows how Shanghai went from being a place onto which Japanese projected their hopes to a place deemed the centre of modernity and ultimately to the height of decadence (not necessarily a bad thing for many of them). It came to be dubbed the “demon capital,” and countless Japanese authors (from Meiji through WW II) set their fiction in it. Moviemakers, songwriters, and poets also saw fit to use Shanghai as a core theme.

Even before the Japanese first ventured abroad in the modern era, they came to understand that Shanghai was the closest and easiest way to learn about the wider world. They sent a series of missions abroad, most to Europe and several to Shanghai specifically. Virtually all of the European voyages called at Shanghai coming and going. Liu Jianhui shows what the Japanese saw in Shanghai and how they interacted with the Chinese.Liu then describes what he calls an informational network in East Asia whereby the latest scientific and political development from the West were written up in Chinese-language journals published by Protestant missionaries (with its hub in Shanghai) and how those journals circulated among Japanese as well. Shanghai was also the place that Japanese elite's first learned about the modern printing press. Indeed, as Liu puts it, they first experienced “modernity” in Shanghai. And, he looks at the role of Shanghai in the opening of Japan. He shows how Shanghai went from being a place onto which Japanese projected their hopes to a place deemed the centre of modernity and ultimately to the height of decadence (not necessarily a bad thing for many of them). It came to be dubbed the “demon capital,” and countless Japanese authors (from Meiji through WW II) set their fiction in it. Moviemakers, songwriters, and poets also saw fit to use Shanghai as a core theme.

Modern Japanese women writers as artists as cultural critics is a subject that has not received adequate attention from Japan specialists in North America. Translated and discussed here are critical essays by three of the most innovative, outspoken, and provocative women writers in recent Japanese literary history: Yuriko Miyamoto (1899–1951), Saegusa Kazuko (1929– ), and Minako Oba (1930–2007) with the objective of, one, presenting a Japan that thrives in and on a multiplicity of voices, in contrast to its conformist image in the West; and, two, filling the critical need for English translations of primary sources aimed, in particular, at non-Japan specialists.The notion of women as “cultural critics” stretches back to the Heian era (797–1190 ce), and is notably exmplified by Sei Shonagon’s work The Pillow Book (992 ce), which, with its wit, barbed references, and no-nonsense comments on life around her, has become part of the Japanese literary canon. Her legacy reappeared after a long hiatus in the generation of women writers who swiftly took advantage of the “Taisho (1911–1926) Democracy.”The “Woman Question” debate in Japan today, which Japanese women view as a basic human rights issue, has been revisited by contemporary Japanese women writers who have also gradually developed a feminist credo that espouses the equality of men and women concomitant with the expansion of the emotional interaction and intellectual interchange between the sexes.

Modern Japanese women writers as artists as cultural critics is a subject that has not received adequate attention from Japan specialists in North America. Translated and discussed here are critical essays by three of the most innovative, outspoken, and provocative women writers in recent Japanese literary history: Yuriko Miyamoto (1899–1951), Saegusa Kazuko (1929– ), and Minako Oba (1930–2007) with the objective of, one, presenting a Japan that thrives in and on a multiplicity of voices, in contrast to its conformist image in the West; and, two, filling the critical need for English translations of primary sources aimed, in particular, at non-Japan specialists.The notion of women as “cultural critics” stretches back to the Heian era (797–1190 ce), and is notably exmplified by Sei Shonagon’s work The Pillow Book (992 ce), which, with its wit, barbed references, and no-nonsense comments on life around her, has become part of the Japanese literary canon. Her legacy reappeared after a long hiatus in the generation of women writers who swiftly took advantage of the “Taisho (1911–1926) Democracy.”The “Woman Question” debate in Japan today, which Japanese women view as a basic human rights issue, has been revisited by contemporary Japanese women writers who have also gradually developed a feminist credo that espouses the equality of men and women concomitant with the expansion of the emotional interaction and intellectual interchange between the sexes.

By studying Japanese films and their associated literature, this book reveals the covert stories of Japanese women of various statuses and time periods in an exegesis of their story versus orthodox history. Fifteen films are studied to bring this theme into focus. They are: Imamura Shohei’s The Ballad of Narayama, Naruse Mikio’s Mother, Idemitsu Mako’s Great Mother, Kinugasa Teinousuke’s Gate of Hell, Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth, Kuwabata Kagenobu’s Love and Lie, Toyoda Shiro’s The Mistress, Kumai Kei’s Sandakan Brothel No. 8, Takahashi Banmei’s A New Love in Tokyo, Nishikawa Katsumi’s A Dancing Girl in Izu, Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Chizuko’s Younger Sister, Ichikawa Jun’s Tsugumi, Mizoguchi Kenji’s Life of Oharu, Itami Juzo’s Tampopo, and Ishikawa Jun’s Grass Fish on a Tree.The five chapters, ""Mother,"" ""Wife,"" ""Whore,"" ""Girl"" and ""Woman,"" represent categories the public used to code Japanese women in the pre-feminist age. Each chapter features three films depicting women in the pre-modern age, in the World War II period, and in late twentieth century Japan, and each embraces the three films within the thematic perspective of ecological feminism, sexuality, alienation, illusion, and power-over/power-to, respectively.The book sheds light on cultural, historical, and/or ideological backgrounds of the films under study in important new ways and breaks new ground in the study of women in Japanese culture.

An autobiography by celebrated Japanese writer/television show host/journalist Kurihara Miwako, Where Are the Sunflowers depicts the failure of two over forty adults to find lasting happiness, while introducing social prejudice and discrimination as the catalysts for their misery. Protagonist Kyoko Igarashi’s fear of her parents’ prejudice toward buraku ancestry eventually destroys her short marriage to Taro Kaiji, a wonderfully warm and sympathetic man of buraku origin. The other man she wanted to marry, much earlier, was a third-generation Korean. That relationship was doomed because the man’s father continued to despise the Japanese for their historic mistreatment of his people and thus insisted that he marry a Korean woman. Thus are two of Japan’s most destructive social taboos, buraku heritage and Korean ancestry, introduced in a manner which is within easy reach of any reader.

An autobiography by celebrated Japanese writer/television show host/journalist Kurihara Miwako, Where Are the Sunflowers depicts the failure of two over forty adults to find lasting happiness, while introducing social prejudice and discrimination as the catalysts for their misery. Protagonist Kyoko Igarashi’s fear of her parents’ prejudice toward buraku ancestry eventually destroys her short marriage to Taro Kaiji, a wonderfully warm and sympathetic man of buraku origin. The other man she wanted to marry, much earlier, was a third-generation Korean. That relationship was doomed because the man’s father continued to despise the Japanese for their historic mistreatment of his people and thus insisted that he marry a Korean woman. Thus are two of Japan’s most destructive social taboos, buraku heritage and Korean ancestry, introduced in a manner which is within easy reach of any reader.

In this collection of short stories, Ma Yuan tells enigmatic tales about an eponymous narrator’s travels in Tibet that question the very meaning of “story” and our assumptions about meaning itself. Yang Xiaobin’s introduction explores Ma Yuan’s role as China’s first postmodernist author. Ma Yuan’s stories and novellas develop metafiction in synergy with Tibetan Buddhism’s notion of the cosmos as an illusion.Ma Yuan is of interest for his cloaked allusions to the tortured relationship between Chinese and Tibetans. Where government propaganda portrays the Chinese as the liberators of Tibet, “Vagabond Soul” depicts Chinese economic exploitation of Tibetans—the Chinese narrator bribes a Tibetan beggar to steal rare a rare old Tibetan coin mold for the narrator to mold counterfeits. A Fiction” is a tongue-in-cheek allegory of the Chinese fascination with “primitive” Tibet: a Chinese narrator’s love affair with a nubile Tibetan leper.An aficionado both of western postmodernist fiction and of traditional Chinese Daoism, Ma Yuan portrays the disorienting interaction of traditional Tibetan life and Chinese “modernization” so as to render absurd the rational premises of what we usually call “the modern world.”

In this collection of short stories, Ma Yuan tells enigmatic tales about an eponymous narrator’s travels in Tibet that question the very meaning of “story” and our assumptions about meaning itself. Yang Xiaobin’s introduction explores Ma Yuan’s role as China’s first postmodernist author. Ma Yuan’s stories and novellas develop metafiction in synergy with Tibetan Buddhism’s notion of the cosmos as an illusion.Ma Yuan is of interest for his cloaked allusions to the tortured relationship between Chinese and Tibetans. Where government propaganda portrays the Chinese as the liberators of Tibet, “Vagabond Soul” depicts Chinese economic exploitation of Tibetans—the Chinese narrator bribes a Tibetan beggar to steal rare a rare old Tibetan coin mold for the narrator to mold counterfeits. A Fiction” is a tongue-in-cheek allegory of the Chinese fascination with “primitive” Tibet: a Chinese narrator’s love affair with a nubile Tibetan leper.An aficionado both of western postmodernist fiction and of traditional Chinese Daoism, Ma Yuan portrays the disorienting interaction of traditional Tibetan life and Chinese “modernization” so as to render absurd the rational premises of what we usually call “the modern world.”

From the author of Wives and Concubines (titled Raise the Red Lantern in the acclaimed 1991 Oscar-nominated film by Zhang Yimou), Rice and many other major works of contemporary Chinese fiction comes a new collection of novellas that ranges from mystery in swinging prewar Shanghai to the violent gangs of the Cultural Revolution.In The Gardener’s Art, a family dispute ends in the disappearance of a wealthy dentist. As his wife and children plunge into crisis and suspicion, the clues of the case lead them into Shanghai’s seamy side. A brilliant evocation of a vanished pre-Communist time, in all its glamor and squalor.A Divorce Handbook is the bitterly funny tale of a man, unhappy in marriage, who comes up against the inflexible attitudes of a traditional society. One of the most perceptive works to chart China’s shifting social mores.In Tattoo, a lame adolescent is marked by the death of his brother in gang warfare. Overcoming his injuries through the practice of martial arts, he seeks to revive the flagging fortunes of his gang, but must face treachery and contempt at every turn.This volume by Su Tong demonstrates his mastery of the full sweep of twentieth-century China.

From the author of Wives and Concubines (titled Raise the Red Lantern in the acclaimed 1991 Oscar-nominated film by Zhang Yimou), Rice and many other major works of contemporary Chinese fiction comes a new collection of novellas that ranges from mystery in swinging prewar Shanghai to the violent gangs of the Cultural Revolution.In The Gardener’s Art, a family dispute ends in the disappearance of a wealthy dentist. As his wife and children plunge into crisis and suspicion, the clues of the case lead them into Shanghai’s seamy side. A brilliant evocation of a vanished pre-Communist time, in all its glamor and squalor.A Divorce Handbook is the bitterly funny tale of a man, unhappy in marriage, who comes up against the inflexible attitudes of a traditional society. One of the most perceptive works to chart China’s shifting social mores.In Tattoo, a lame adolescent is marked by the death of his brother in gang warfare. Overcoming his injuries through the practice of martial arts, he seeks to revive the flagging fortunes of his gang, but must face treachery and contempt at every turn.This volume by Su Tong demonstrates his mastery of the full sweep of twentieth-century China.