Publications
Recent Faculty Publications
Michiko Suzuki’s first book, Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture, is now available from Stanford University Press. According to the press, “Presenting a fresh examination of women writers and prewar ideology, this book breaks new ground in its investigation of love as a critical aspect of Japanese culture during the early to mid-twentieth century. As a literary and cultural history of love and female identity, Becoming Modern Women focuses on same-sex love, love marriage, and maternal love—new terms at that time; in doing so, it shows how the idea of “woman,” within the context of a vibrant print culture, was constructed through the modern experience of love. Author Michiko Suzuki’s work complements current scholarship on female identities such as “Modern Girl” and “New Woman,” and interprets women’s fiction in conjunction with nonfiction from a range of media—early feminist writing, sexology books, newspapers, bestselling love treatises, native ethnology, and historiography. While illuminating the ways in which women used and challenged ideas about love, Suzuki explores the historical and ideological shifts of the period, underscoring the broader connections between gender, modernity, and nationhood.”
Ho-fung Hung’s edited volume, China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism, is now available from the Johns Hopkins University Press. According to the press, “With one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and a population quickly approaching two billion, China holds substantial sway over global financial, social, and cultural networks. This volume explains China’s economic rise and liberalization and assesses how this growth is reshaping the structure and dynamics of global capitalism in the twenty-first century. This cutting-edge collection of works by leading global political economists links current events to long-term trends in global capitalist development to provide a comprehensive analysis of China’s impact on the world. Scholars of China, world systems and globalization, international relations, and political economy will find this assessment worthy of study and an important starting point for further research.”
Winner of Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute 2007-08 First Book Award, Scott O’Bryan’s The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan is now available from the University of Hawai’i Press. According to the press, “Our narratives of postwar Japan have long been cast in terms almost synonymous with the story of rapid economic growth. Scott O’Bryan reinterprets this seemingly familiar history through an innovative exploration, not of the anatomy of growth itself, but of the history of growth as a set of discourses by which Japanese ‘growth performance’ as ‘economic miracle’ came to be articulated. The premise of his work is simple: To our understandings of the material changes that took place in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century we must also add perspectives that account for growth as a new idea around the world, one that emerged alongside rapid economic expansion in postwar Japan and underwrote the modes by which it was imagined, forecast, pursued, and regulated. In an accessible, lively style, O’Bryan traces the history of growth as an object of social scientific knowledge and as a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and imagined a newly materialist vision of social and individual prosperity. . . . O’Bryan also presents surprising accounts of the key role played by the ideal of full employment in national conceptions of recovery and of a new valorization of consumption in the postwar world that was taking shape.”
Winner of the 2010 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History, Klaus Mühlhahn’s new book, Criminal Justice in China: A History, is now available from Harvard University Press. According to the press, “Mühlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. In late imperial China, flogging, tattooing, torture, and servitude were routine punishments. Sentences, including executions, were generally carried out in public. After 1905, in a drive to build a strong state and curtail pressure from the West, Chinese officials initiated major legal reforms. Physical punishments were replaced by fines and imprisonment. Capital punishment, though removed from the public sphere, remained in force for the worst crimes. Trials no longer relied on confessions obtained through torture but were instead held in open court and based on evidence. Prison reform became the centerpiece of an ambitious social-improvement program. After 1949, the Chinese communists developed their own definitions of criminality and new forms of punishment. People’s tribunals were convened before large crowds, which often participated in the proceedings. At the center of the socialist system was ‘reform through labor,’ and thousands of camps administered prison sentences. Eventually, the communist leadership used the camps to detain anyone who offended against the new society, and the ‘crime’ of counterrevolution was born. Mühlhahn reveals the broad contours of criminal justice from late imperial China to the Deng reform era and details the underlying values, successes and failures, and ultimate human costs of the system. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.”
Winner of the 2009 Chicago Folklore Prize,
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.”
