Publications
Recent Faculty Publications
Michael Dylan Foster’s first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai, is now available from the University of California Press. According to the press, "Water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yōkai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, exploring their meanings in the Japanese cultural imagination and offering an abundance of valuable and, until now, understudied material. Michael Dylan Foster tracks yōkai over three centuries, from their appearance in seventeenth-century natural histories to their starring role in twentieth-century popular media. Focusing on the intertwining of belief and commodification, fear and pleasure, horror and humor, he illuminates different conceptions of the 'natural' and the 'ordinary' and sheds light on broader social and historical paradigms—and ultimately on the construction of Japan as a nation." -
Michael Robinson’s newest book, Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, is now available from the University of Hawai‘i Press. According to the press, "Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910." -
Richard Rubinger’s new book, Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan, is now available from the University of Hawai‘i Press. According to the press description, “The book begins by tracing the origins of popular literacy up to the Tokugawa period and goes on to discuss the pivotal roles of village headmen during the early sixteenth century, a group extraordinarily skilled in administrative literacy using the Sino-Japanese hybrid language favored by their warrior overlords. Later chapters focus on the nineteenth-century expansion of literacy to wider constituencies of farmers and townspeople. Using direct measures of literacy attainment such as village surveys, election ballots, diaries, and letters, Rubinger demonstrates the spread of basic reading and writing skills into virtually every corner of Japanese society. The book ends by examining data on illiteracy generated from conscription examinations given by the Japanese army during the Meiji period, bringing the discussion into the twentieth century.”
