Bøger udgivet af Harvard University, Asia Center

Through a close examination of economic trends and case studies of particular families, this study demonstrates that Japan's protoindustrial economy was far more volatile than portrayed in most studies to date. Few rural elites survived the competitive and unstable climate of this era.

This book is a study of labor relations and the first generation of skilled workers in colonial Korea, a subject crucial to the understanding of modernization in twentieth-century Korea. Born in rural Korea, these workers confronted both the colonial experience and the modern workplace as they interacted with Japanese managers and workers.

This small but comprehensive dictionary contains 7,773 Chinese characters and 104,000 compounds taken from the classics, general literature, magazines, and newspapers.

Constantine Vaporis challenges the notion that an elaborate and restrictive system of travel regulations in Tokugawa Japan prevented widespread travel. Instead, he maintains that a "culture of movement" developed in that era.

David M. Robinson explores how grand displays like the royal hunt, archery contests, and the imperial menagerie were presented in literature and art in the early Ming dynasty. He argues these spectacles were highly contested sites where emperors and court ministers staked competing claims about rulership and the role of the military in the polity.

One of the central literary texts of the Heian period (794-1185), Tales of Ise has inspired extensive commentary. Offering a comprehensive history of the work's reception, Jamie Newhard reveals the ideological and aesthetic issues shaping criticism over the centuries as the audience for classical Japanese literature expanded beyond the aristocracy.

Sho Konishi traces the emergence from 1860 to 1930 of transnational networks of Russian and Japanese "cooperatist anarchists" devoted to creating a state-free society. Arguing that this radical movement forms one of the intellectual foundations of modern Japan, Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that challenges Western narratives.

The Real Modern examines three Korean authors of the 1930s-Pak T'aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T'aejun-whose works critique competing modes of literary representation in the period of Japanese colonial rule. A re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context, it sheds new light on the relationship between political discourse and aesthetics.

The dominant literary genre in Song dynasty China, shi poetry reflected profound changes occurring in Chinese culture from 960-1279. Michael Fuller traces the intertwining of shi poetry and Neo-Confucianism that led to the cultural synthesis of the last years of the Southern Song and set the pattern of Chinese society for the next six centuries.

Income Inequality in Korea explores the relationship between economic growth and social developments over the last three decades. Analyzing equalizing trends in the 1980s to early 1990s and reversals since the 1997-1998 financial crisis, the authors examine the growing gap between rich and poor in Korea and offer solutions for reducing inequality.

The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire at the turn of the twentieth century created numerous literary contact nebulae. This book analyzes three of them: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature.

This book explores the interaction between two "places," China and Guanzhong, the capital area of several dynasties, examining how Guanzhong literati conceptualized three sets of relations: central/regional, "official"/"unofficial," and national/local. It further traces the formation of a critical communal self-consciousness.

South Korea is home to some of the largest evangelical Protestant congregations in the world. This book investigates the meaning of-and the reasons behind-a particular aspect of contemporary South Korean evangelicalism: the intense involvement of middle-class women.

Based on the author's fieldwork in Zhejiang, this book explores the emergence and success of township and village enterprises in China. This study also examines how ordinary rural residents have made sense of and participated in the industrialization engulfing them in recent decades.

This book examines how China's three late imperial dynasties-the Yuan, Ming, and Qing-conquered, colonized, and assumed control of the southwest. Herman highlights the indigenous response to China's colonization of the southwest, particularly that of the Nasu Yi people of western Guizhou and eastern Yunnan, who left an extensive written record.

This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era. It analyzes how students used the tools of civic education to make themselves into young citizens, and explores the complex social and political effects of educated youths' civic action.

In the sengoku era in Japan, warlords and religious institutions vied for supremacy, with powerhouses such as the Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism fanning violent uprisings of ikko ikki, bands of commoners fighting for various causes. Tsang delves into the complex and often contradictory relationship between these groups.

The Tale of Genji has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to obscurity. The author calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light on this undervalued body of work and examining three representative texts as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji.

Park argues that the mukwa-Korea's state military examination-was not only the primary means of recruiting aristocrats as new members of the military bureaucracy, but also a way for the ruling elite to partially satisfy the status aspirations of marginalized regional elites, secondary status groups, commoners, and manumitted slaves.

This study focuses on postwar Japan's foreign policy making in the political and security areas, the core UN missions. The intent is to illustrate how policy goals forged by national security concerns, domestic politics, and psychological needs gave shape to Japan's complicated and sometimes incongruous policy toward the UN since World War II.

This book presents two histories of the early Korean kingdom of Paekche (trad. 18 BCE-660 CE). The first, written by Best, is based largely on primary sources. This initial history serves, in part, to introduce the second, an extensively annotated translation of the oldest history of the kingdom, The Paekche Annals (Paekche pon'gi).

Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that hindered the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, native-place lodges fostered a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms in the early 20th century.

Nakamura argues that the study of Western medicine assembled doctors from all over the country in efforts to effect social change. By examining the social impact of Western learning at the level of everyday life, the book offers a broad picture of the way in which Western medicine, and Western knowledge, was absorbed and adapted in Japan.

Before the late 1980s Taiwan's successful exporters were overwhelmingly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). What accounts for their success and their benign neglect by the state? The author argues that it was an unintended consequence of the state's policy toward the private sector and its political strategies for managing societal forces.

Kokugaku, or nativism, was an important intellectual movement from the 17th-19th century in Japan, and its worldview remains influential. McNally's primary goal is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane's role in the creation and perpetuation of an enduring intellectual tradition.

What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.

Why does literature's voice still seduce us into reading? What is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? These essays on Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, visit the force of the scandalous to confront such questions.

Throughout history, Mount Tai has been a magnet for both women and men from all classes-emperors, aristocrats, officials, literati, and villagers. This book examines the behavior of those who made the pilgrimage to Mount Tai and their interpretations of its sacrality and history, as a means of better understanding their identities and mentalities.

By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.