Kyoto CSEAS Series on Asian Studies – serie

Both the Japanese and Filipino people experienced a re-writing of their national histories upon being defeated by the United States: the Philippines after 1902 and Japan after 1945. This re-writing was conducted in order to justify and explain US rule and its ideology of modernisation and democracy. These new histories portrayed the immediate past as the dark ages: the Spanish colonial period for the Philippines and Japan's wartime totalitarianism and militarism. What kind of dilemmas and contradictions did Filipino and Japanese historians and intellectuals embrace by accepting the US re-writing of their national histories? Did Japanese Filipino and Japanese historians interact at all, under the US hegemony? The idea of America's Shadow is meant to shed a light on areas of darkness in both Japanese and Philippine historiographies and understanding of their region.Through an examination of the commonalities, differences and interactions of Japanese and Filipino histories, ideas of history, modernisation theory, and area studies, Serizawa makes an important contribution to sorting through the tangled histories of Asia in the complicated matrix of colonial, wartime and Cold War contexts.

A collection of essays engaging with Buddhism in Thailand and the virtues of distraction and variety within the materialist turn in studies of religion.In Thailand, Buddhism is deeply integrated into national institutions and ideologies, making it tempting to think of Buddhism in Thailand as a textual, institutional, cultural, and conceptual whole. At the same time, religious expression in the country reflects anything but a single order. Often gaudy, cacophonous, variegated, and jumbled, diversity and apparent contradiction abound. A more open engagement with Buddhism in Thailand requires a willingness to be distracted, to step away from received hierarchies and follow the intriguing detail in the ornate design, the odd textual reference, and to prefer "thin description" over a search for meaning. Justin McDaniel's well-known book-length writings in Buddhist and Theravada studies cannot be fully understood without taking into account his shorter writings, what he calls his wayward distractions. Collected together for the first time, these essays cover subjects ranging from ornamental art to marriage and emotion, the role of Hinduism, neglected gender and ethnic diversity, Buddhist inflections in contemporary art practice, and the boundaries between the living, dead, and undead. These writings will be of importance to students of Theravada and Thailand, of religion in Southeast Asia and more generally, of the materialist turn in studies of religion.

The serious degradation of the vast peatlands of Indonesia since the 1990s is the proximate cause of the haze that endangers public health in Indonesian Sumatra and Borneo, and also in neighbouring Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Moreover peatlands that have been drained and cleared for plantations are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. This new book explains the degradation of peat soils and outlines a potential course of action to deal with the catastrophe looming over the region. Concerted action will be required to reduce peatland fires, and a successful policy needs to enhance social welfare and economic survival, support natural conservation and provide a return on investment if there is to be a sustainable society in the peatlands.This book argues that regeneration is possible through a new policy of people’s forestry that includes reforestation and rewetting peat soils. The data come from a major long-term research effort—the humanosphere project—that coordinates work done by researchers from the physical, natural and human or social sciences.

Men are disadvantaged in the marriage markets of many Asian countries, and in some cases their response is to look abroad for a partner. Receiving countries for marriage migrants include Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, while the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and parts of mainland China supply wives to these territories. In the absence of uniform international regulations concerning the rights and obligations of partners, such unions are treated differently in different jurisdiction. In extreme cases migrants or their children become stateless, and when marriages break down, migrants sometimes face major legal problems.In such circumstances, marriage migrants are often portrayed as powerless, uneducated victims. Rejecting this perspective, the authors in this volume explore the agency of women who migrate abroad to acquire opportunities unavailable to them in their homelands. They show that the trajectories of marriage migrants are often not a simple movement from home to destination but can involve return, repeated, or extended migrations, and that these transitions that can alter geographies of power in economics, nationality or ethnicity. Based on features shared by many marriage migrants, the book identifies them as an emerging minority at the frontier of the nation-state, a group whose status may well carry over to future generations.

Extricating liberalism from the haze of anti-modernist and anti-European caricature, this book traces the role of liberal philosophy in the building of a new nation. It examines the role of toleration, rights, and mediation in the postcolony. Through the biographies of four Filipino scholar-bureaucrats—Camilo Osias, Salvador Araneta, Carlos P. Romulo, and Salvador P. Lopez—Lisandro E. Claudio argues that liberal thought served as the grammar of Filipino democracy in the 20th century. By looking at various articulations of liberalism in pedagogy, international affairs, economics, and literature, Claudio not only narrates an obscured history of the Philippine state, he also argues for a new liberalism rooted in the postcolonial experience, a timely intervention considering current developments in politics in Southeast Asia.

After the fall of Suharto in Indonesia in 1998, the new government under B.J. Habibie introduced a decentralization policy that dramatically changed relations between the central and local governments. Under decentralization, local governments engaged in bureaucratic and political conflict with the central government over control of natural resources and fairer distribution of rents from these resources. Local elites demanded greater involvement in shaping economic and political institutions.Decentralization is among the most important political economic developments in Indonesia over the last thirty years. This book evaluates three cases (in the provinces of East Kalimantan, West Sumatra, and Riau) of deepseated political conflict and intrigue implicating central government, local governments and multinational companies. The author’s analysis shows how competition to manage and control Indonesia’s vast natural resources is no longer limited to national level interests, nor can it be restricted only to the local level. The study elucidates changes in the structure of the national political economy as the result of deep engagement of local actors in disputes with the central government over control of natural resources. These changes will mean new patterns of distribution of natural resource rents, with implications for Indonesia’s evolving democratic politics and modes of governance. The study is also relevant to investors and resource industry players trying to understand Indonesia’s political economy.