New Books in East Asian Studies
1,316 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
June 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief. Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth centu...
April D. Hughes, "Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
June 25, 2021 08:00 - 47 minutesWhat is the relationship between Buddhism and politics? How might Buddhism be realized in this world? And how might Buddhist texts help legitimate new rulers? These questions are ably addressed in April Hughes’s Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2021). Students of Buddhism are familiar with Wu Zhao, or Wu Zetian, the only woman in Chinese history take the title of “emperor,” and her use of Buddhist ideas and imagery to support her...
Emily Ng, "A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao" (U California Press, 2020)
June 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIf China’s Mao era is seen by many as a time of great upheaval and chaos, there are also people and places for whom things appear quite different. Writing from one such place in A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (U California Press, 2020), Emily Ng foregrounds the perspective of a rural population in Henan province whose cosmological visions frame the Mao period as a time of relative calm, when a powerful sovereign brought order to both human and sprit realms. ...
In China’s Shadow: China and Southeast Asia
June 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDoes Southeast Asia face a stark choice between aligning with China or the United States? Can we understand domestic developments in the region as driven by wider geopolitics? Can the lacklustre regional organization ASEAN play a central role in mediating these dynamics, or are individual Southeast Asian countries locked into deeply unequal bilateral linkages? Is China a largely benevolent force in the region, or an untrustworthy would-be hegemon? In this session, we meet the authors of two r...
Ecological Civilization: Chinese Dream or Global Strategy?
June 18, 2021 08:00 - 25 minutesHow seriously should take the Chinese government’s discourse about ‘ecological civilization’? Mette Hansen argues that whatever the shortcomings of this rather grandiose notion, it offers an invaluable means of engaging China in important global debates about the future of the planet – and should not simply be glibly dismissed as an exercise in green-washing. She finds particular hope in pop-up local environmental initiatives that deploy the official discourse creatively to advance a green ag...
Susan Blakeley Klein, "Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater" (Harvard UP, 2020)
June 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater (Harvard UP, 2020) examines the theory and practice of allegory by exploring a select group of medieval Japanese noh plays and treatises. Susan Blakeley Klein demonstrates how medieval esoteric commentaries on the tenth-century poem-tale Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise) and the first imperial waka poetry anthology Kokin wakashū influenced the plots, characters, imagery, and rhetorical structure of seven plays (Maiguruma...
Manfred Elfstrom, "Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 18, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesPost-socialist China has seen extensive labor unrest in the form of strikes, protests, and riots. The party-state has responded, sometimes with greater repression, sometimes with institutional changes to better channel and represent worker interests, and sometimes with both. Manfred Elfstrom’s Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness (Cambridge UP, 2021) explores the feedback loop between citizen unrest and state response, using both extensive fieldwork and statisti...
Matthew Carl Strecher, "The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami" (U Minnesota Press, 2014)
June 14, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn an “other world” composed of language—it could be a fathomless Martian well, a labyrinthine hotel, or forest—a narrative unfolds, and with it the experiences, memories, and dreams that constitute reality for Haruki Murakami’s characters and readers. Memories and dreams in turn conjure their magical counterparts—people without names or pasts, fantastic animals, half-animals, and talking machines that traverse the dark psychic underworld of this writer’s extraordinary fiction. Fervently accl...
William A. Callahan, "Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations" (Oxford UP, 2020)
June 14, 2021 08:00 - 28 minutesHow can we theorize international relations by looking at how nose sizes are depicted in Asian art and literature? Why are Vietnamese immigration officials furious about the maps that appear in Chinese passports? What do Japanese gardens tell us about how nation-states are constructed and defined? And how we could re-imagine border walls as sites of creative destruction, illuminating the sublime? Anyone who knows the work of William Callahan professor of international relations at the London ...
Yao Li, "Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
June 11, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn the developing world, political turmoil often brings an end to promising economic growth stories. During its period of rapid economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s, China experienced a remarkable surge in the number of public protests. Yet these protests did not destabilize the regime. Yao Li’s book, Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests (Cambridge UP, 2018), combines quantitative research on a nationwide dataset of protests with in-d...
Douglas W. Shadle, "Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony" (Oxford UP, 2021)
June 11, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMost music students have been taught that the New World Symphony was the first piece of classical music written in an American national style which Antonín Dvorák invented when he utilized influences from Black music in the second movement. The impression most textbooks leave is that this innovation was instantly approved by composers and critics alike, and that American classical music was born through Dvorak’s intervention. Like most myths, this bears only a slight resemblance to the truth....
Sven Saaler, "Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan" (Brill, 2020)
June 08, 2021 04:00 - 54 minutesIn his pioneering study, Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan (Brill, 2020), Sven Saaler examines Japanese public statuary as a central site of historical memory from its beginnings in the Meiji period through the twenty-first century. Saaler shows how the elites of the modern Japanese nation-state went about constructing an iconography of national heroes to serve their agenda of instilling national (and nationalist) thinking into the masses. Based on a wide r...
The Politics of Chinese Media: A Discussion with Bingchun Meng
June 07, 2021 08:00 - 23 minutesFeeling betrayed by liberal ideals in the US and UK, how are Chinese international students dealing with rising racism during the pandemic? Bingchun Meng from LSE talks to Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD student at NIAS, about her latest research project, “Mediated Experience of Covid-19”, based on her students' real stories and their sophisticated reflections. The author of the book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (Palgrave, 2018) shares her views on the commonalities a...
Fei-Hsien Wang, "Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China" (Princeton UP, 2019)
June 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourPirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2019) is a detailed historical look at how copyright was negotiated and protected by authors, publishers, and the state in late imperial and modern China. In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. Wang draws on a vast range of previously underutilized...
Women Singer-Songwriters of 1970s Japan: A Discussion with Satoko Naito
June 04, 2021 08:00 - 28 minutesLasse Lehtonen speaks to Satoko Naito about his research on Japanese women singer-songwriters of the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on popular pioneers like Yumi Matsutoya (Yūmin), Miyuki Nakajima, and Takako Okamura, Dr. Lehtonen discusses how the artists assert their agency and artistry, not necessarily through their lyrics but via what Matsutoya once identified as "backstage feminism." He also shares his ideas on the important potential of incorporating music history and musicology in the study...
Eric Schluessel, "Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia" (Columbia UP, 2020)
June 04, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt a...
William P. Brecher, "Japan's Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930" (Brill, 2021)
May 31, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesJapan's Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930 (Brill, 2021) traces the shifting nature of autonomy in early modern and modern Japan. In this far-reaching, interdisciplinary study, W. Puck Brecher explores the historical development of the private and its evolving relationship with public authority, a dynamic that evokes stereotypes about an alleged dearth of individual agency in Japanese society. It does so through a montage of case studies. For the early modern era, case s...
Hsiao-wen Cheng, "Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women Without Men in Song Dynasty China" (U Washington Press, 2021)
May 28, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women Without Men in Song Dynasty China (University of Washington Press, 2021), Cheng Hsiao-wen’s monograph looks at the women who are not married or otherwise in relationships with men. Through a wide range of sources, including medical treatises, texts about religious cultivation, hagiographies, tales, and anecdotes, Cheng explores how “manless women” were understood in the Song dynasty. The book’s three sections—focusing on medicals texts, stories of enc...
Emei Burell, "We Served the People: My Mother's Stories" (Archaia, 2020)
May 27, 2021 08:00 - 35 minutesDuring the Cultural Revolution, many young Chinese in the cities were encouraged — if not ordered — to move to the countryside. Millions of young Chinese in high school and university moved to rural China ostensibly to “receive re-education from the poorest lower and middle peasants to understand what China really is” (to quote Mao Zedong, at the time). Many students remained in the countryside until the end of the Cultural Revolution almost a decade later. One of these young Chinese people w...
Yinghong Cheng, "Discourses of Race and Rising China" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
May 26, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourYinghong Cheng's book Discourses of Race and Rising China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) is a critical study of the development of a racialised nationalism in China, exploring its unique characteristics and internal tensions, and connecting it to other forms of global racism. The growth of this discourse is contextualised within the party-state’s political agenda to seek legitimacy, in various groups’ efforts to carve their demands in a divided national community, and has directly affected identi...
John Person, "Arbiters of Patriotism: Right-Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2020)
May 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourJohn Person’s Arbiters of Patriotism: Right-Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) narrates the struggle for ownership of the moral high ground of “patriotism” in the Japanese empire through a political biography of Mitsui Kōshi and Minoda Muneki, two of the most important Japanists of the empire, and the nationalist Genri Nippon Society to which they belonged. Though Person admits that “Mitsui’s reputation as a dangerous thinker is well warranted,” and that of all...
How China Loses: A Discussion with Luke Patey
May 17, 2021 08:00 - 34 minutesWestern media accounts often suggest that China is rising inexorably as a global economic and political powerhouse. A new book by Luke Patey offers a more nuanced picture, focusing on the growing backlash against Chinese aspirations. Author Luke Patey, a senior researcher from the Danish Institute for International Studies, discusses his new book How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Global Ambitions (Oxford University Press, 2021) with Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS. Their conversatio...
John Wong, "Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System" (Cambridge UP, 2016)
May 13, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016), John D. Wong examines the Canton trade networks that helped to shape the modern world through the lens of the prominent Chinese merchant Houqua, whose trading network and financial connections stretched from China to India, America and Britain. In contrast to interpretations that see Chinese merchants in this era as victims of rising Western mercantilism and oppressive Chin...
Opening Australia's Multilingual Archives to Rethink Australian Identity in the Asia-Pacific
May 13, 2021 08:00 - 20 minutesAustralia has always been multilingual. Yet English language sources have dominated political and popular discourses over the last few centuries, overshadowing the significant contribution made by other languages and cultures in shaping Australian history and identity. Professor Adrian Vickers spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about his work as part of an ambitious new Australian Research Council Discovery Project that seeks to investigate and document how speakers of (mainly non-Indigenous) languag...
B. Gramlich-Oka and A. Walthall, "Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
May 07, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutesAlthough scholars have emphasized the importance of women’s networks for civil society in twentieth-century Japan, Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2020) is the first book to tackle the subject for the contentious and consequential nineteenth century. The essays traverse the divide when Japan started transforming itself from a decentralized to a centralized government, from legally imposed restrictions on movement to the breakdown of travel barrier...
Odd Arne Westad, "Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations" (Harvard UP, 2021)
May 07, 2021 08:00 - 41 minutesBeing arguably each side’s most enduring international bond, the China-Korea relationship has long been of great practical and symbolic importance to both. Moreover, as Odd Arne Westad observes in his new book, this has in many ways also been a paradigmatic kind of tie between a large ‘empire’ and smaller (though by no means small) ‘nation’, and thus has much to teach us about past and present international relationships in East Asia and beyond. Westad’s Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years...
Kristen E. Looney, "Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2020)
May 03, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDr. Kristen Looney’s Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia published by Cornell University in 2020 interrogates how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Based on archival research and fieldwork in Asia, the book provides a comparative historical analysis by comparing China's development experience (1980s–2000s) with Taiwan (1950s–1970s) and South Kor...
Shivshankar Menon, "India and Asian Geopolitics" (Brookings, 2021)
May 03, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourA clear-eyed look at modern India's role in Asia and the broader world. One of India's most distinguished foreign policy thinkers addresses the many questions facing India as it seeks to find its way in the increasingly complex world of Asian geopolitics. A former Indian foreign secretary and national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon traces India's approach to the shifting regional landscape since its independence in 1947. From its leading role in the "nonaligned" movement during the cold ...
Mary A. Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019)
April 30, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMary Brazelton’s new book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell UP, 2019) could hardly be more timely. During the Covid-19 pandemic, China was in the headlines of Euro-American media as the site of the first cases of the disease. China is also centerstage in Brazelton’s insightful, antiracist book—not as a source of disease but as the source of an effective and pervasive global public health strategy that other nations during the Covid-19 pandemic have s...
K. Kale Yu, "Understanding Korean Christianity: Grassroot Perspectives on Causes, Culture, and Responses" (Pickwick, 2019)
April 30, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe cultural landscape plays a momentous role in the transmission of Christianity. Consequently, the global expansion of the church has led to the increasing diversification of world Christianity. As a result, scholars are turning more and more to native cultures as the point of focus. Understanding Korean Christianity: Grassroot Perspectives on Causes, Culture, and Responses (Pickwick, 2019) examines how this new discourse evolved as well as presenting a missional methodology based on the st...
Jeanne Shea et al., "Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies" (Berghahn, 2020)
April 29, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesKnown for a tradition of Confucian filial piety, East Asian societies have some of the oldest and most rapidly aging populations on earth. Today these societies are experiencing unprecedented social challenges to the filial tradition of adult children caring for aging parents at home. Marshalling mixed methods data, Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies (Berghahn, 2020) explores the complexities of aging and caregiving in contemporary East A...
A. Castiglioni et al, "Defining Shugendo: Critical Studies on Japanese Mountain Religion" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
April 26, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesAndrea Castiglioni, Fabio Rambelli, and Carina Roth's edited volume Defining Shugendo: Critical Studies on Japanese Mountain Religion (Bloomsbury, 2020) presents the newest studies on Shugendō-related practices and traditions from both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars. Contributors in their chapters explore how Shugendō constructed topologies and invented chronologies, how their practitioners were imagined and fictionalized, as well as how the tradition was reflected through materiality and...
A. Castiglioni and F. Rambelli, "Defining Shugendo: Critical Studies on Japanese Mountain Religion" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
April 26, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesAndrea Castiglioni and Fabio Rambelli's edited volume Defining Shugendo: Critical Studies on Japanese Mountain Religion (Bloomsbury, 2020) presents the newest studies on Shugendō-related practices and traditions from both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars. Contributors in their chapters explore how Shugendō constructed topologies and invented chronologies, how their practitioners were imagined and fictionalized, as well as how the tradition was reflected through materiality and visual cultur...
Kenneth J. Ruoff, "Japan's Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945-2019" (Harvard UP, 2021)
April 23, 2021 08:00 - 2 hoursKen Ruoff’s Japan’s Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945-2019 (Harvard UP, 2020), is a revised and expanded version of the author’s The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995 (2003). The book is an extensive and detailed treatment of the Japanese imperial institution as it enters a new era, Reiwa, with the abdication of the Heisei emperor (Akihito) in 2019. In addition to The People’s Emperor’s discussions of the creation of the postwar imperial institution as a “...
Uranchimeg Tsultemin, "A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia" (U Hawaii Press, 2020)
April 23, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHow, and why did a ger (yurt) develop into the largest and most important monastery in Mongolia, and how did it support the authority of its main resident, the Jebtsundampa Khutugtu? These are the questions that Uranchimeg Tsultemin answers about the mobile encampment of Ikh Khüree and the Jebtsundampa reincarnation lineage in A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia (University of Hawaii Press, 2020). This monastery on the move is referred to as Ikh Khüree in text...
Brenton Sullivan, "Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
April 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHow did Geluk Buddhism become the most widespread school of Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Asia and beyond? In Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Brenton Sullivan reveals the compulsive efforts by Geluk lamas and "Buddhist bureaucrats" (bla dpon) in the early modern period to prescribe and control a proper way of living the life of a Buddhist monk and to define a proper way of administering the monastery...
Robert T. Tierney, "Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame" (U California Press, 2010)
April 22, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutesTropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (U California Press, 2010) is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of “savagery” in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized. By examining the representations of Taiwan...
Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia, "Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan" (Stanford UP, 2019)
April 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHow did Japanese academics study their "fields" in places like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the transwar decades? How did they transform in the postwar, under the US Occupation, and after? Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan (Stanford UP, 2019) is the first monograph on the collective biography of this cohort of professional Japanese intellectuals, or in Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia's words, "the men of one age." Kadia observes that during the transwar decades (1930s-1060s), th...
Y. Yvon Wang, "Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2021)
April 16, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourY. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives--ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures--to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the ...
Jürgen P. Melzer, "Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation" (Harvard UP, 2020)
April 15, 2021 08:00 - 38 minutesJürgen Melzer’s Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation (Harvard UP, 2020) traces the history of Japanese aviation from its origins with hot-air balloons in the 1870s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Melzer’s narrative centers around three themes: transnational technology transfer and Japan’s efforts to attain technological independence, domestic efforts to mobilize public enthusiasm for aviation development (what Melzer calls “air-mindedness”), and the...
Jonathan Chatwin, "Long Peace Street: A Walk in Modern China" (Manchester UP, 2019)
April 15, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesChangan Jie, or Long Peace Street, stretches across central Beijing. Along it are several critical historical sites, including Zhongnanhai, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City: all important to Beijing’s history as the center of Imperial, Republican and then Communist China. Jonathan Chatwin, in his book Long Peace Street: A Walk in Modern China (Manchester University Press, 2019), recently published in paperback, uses the road as a way to present the modern history of Beijing and China. ...
Takeshi Watanabe, "Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan" (Harvard UP, 2020)
April 13, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesTelling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of c...
Yuichiro Onishi and Fumiko Sakashita, "Transpacific Correspondence: Dispatches from Japan's Black Studies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
April 09, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesTranspacific Correspondences: Dispatches from Japan’s Black Studies, an essay collection edited by Dr. Yuichiro Onishi and Dr Fumiko Sakashita, introduces a little-known, but critical history of Black Studies in Japan. Taking the Black Studies Association (Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai) as its focus, the collection charts the history of members of the Black Studies Association, and the ways in which Japanese scholars and writers studied, translated and disseminated the works of black radical thinkers...
Timon Screech, "Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
April 08, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesIn 1800, the Shogun’s chief minister wrote the following about the city of Edo: "Someone said that if Edo did not have frequent fires, then people would be more showy and flash. In the capital or in Osaka they do everything with lavish elegance: people hang up paintings in their homes or put out arrangements of flowers. But in Edo, even in the affluent areas, everything is restrained. People only display a single flower [in a bamboo tube or a simple pot]. The wealthy have fine chess sets, but...
Roundtable on Asian Migrant Sex Work
April 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode features three interviews with organizers and scholars concerned with Asian migrant sex work: SWAN Vancouver (Alison Clancey and Kelly Go), Dr. Lily Wong, and Dr. Yuri Doolan. On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long targeted three Atlanta-area spas and massage parlors and killed eight people: Delania Ashley Yuan González, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue. Six of these victims were Asian women. Within the days...
Jack W. Chen, "Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu" (Harvard UP, 2021)
April 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourAnecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu (Harvard UP, 2021) is a study of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China—and arguably of the entire traditional era. In a set of interconnected essays, Jack W. Chen offers new readings of the Shishuo xinyu that draw upon social network analysis, performance studies, theories of ritual and mourning, and concepts of gossip and reputation to illuminate how the anecdotes of the collection imag...
Daniel C. Mattingly, "The Art of Political Control in China" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
April 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2019) shows how China's authoritarian state ensures political control by non-violent mechanisms. Daniel C. Mattingly demonstrates how coercive control is achieved through informal means to achieve goals such as land redistribution, the enforcement of family planning policies, and the suppression of protest. He draws on a broad combination of empirical evidence - from qualitative case studies, experiments and national surveys, ...
Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, "Voices of Early Modern Japan" (Routledge, 2020)
April 01, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesIn this newly revised and updated 2nd edition of Voices of Early Modern Japan: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life During the Age of the Shoguns (Routledge, 2020), Constantine Nomikos Vaporis offers an accessible collection of annotated historical documents of an extraordinary period in Japanese history, ranging from the unification of warring states under Tokugawa Ieyasu in the early 17th century to the overthrow of the shogunate just after the opening of Japan by the West in the mid-19th ce...
Christopher Joby, "The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900): A Cultural and Sociolinguistic Study of Dutch as a Contact Language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan" (Brill, 2020)
April 01, 2021 04:00 - 51 minutesIn The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900): A Cultural and Sociolinguistic Study of Dutch as a Contact Language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan (Brill, 2020), Christopher Joby offers the first book-length account of the knowledge and use of the Dutch language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. For most of this period, the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan. Using the analytical tool of language process, this book explores the nature and consequences of contact between Dutch and...
Dennis J. Frost, "More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan" (Cornell UP, 2021)
March 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDennis Frost’s More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan is a history of disability sports in modern Japan. The 1964, 1998, and upcoming Paralympics are important case studies, but Frost’s interests go far beyond this pinnacle of international, competitive disability sports. More than Medals explores the history and development of disability sports, highlighting Japan as an international actor, Oita prefecture as a domestic and international disabil...