Books in the Asian Voices series

This pioneering book provides a comprehensive survey of ancient Chinese women's history, covering thousands of years from the Neolithic era to China's unification in 221 BCE. For each period-Neolithic, Shang, Western Zhou, and Eastern Zhou-Hinsch explores aspects of female life such as marriage, family life, politics, ritual, and religious roles.

This important study provides the only comprehensive survey of Chinese women during the early medieval period of disunion known as the Six Dynasties, which lasted from the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in AD 220 to the reunification of China by the Sui dynasty in AD 581.

This book explores the profound influence of Zen Buddhist-linked terrorism in modern Japan. Brian Victoria follows a band of Zen Buddhist-trained adherents who ardently believed in their mission to carry out political assassinations in the 1930s, facilitating Japan's transformation into a totalitarian state and setting the stage for Pearl Harbor.

This important study provides the only comprehensive survey of Chinese women during the early medieval period of disunion known as the Six Dynasties, which lasted from the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in AD 220 to the reunification of China by the Sui dynasty in AD 581.

Now updated with a substantive new introduction, this compelling social history uses diaries, memoirs, fiction, trial testimony, personal recollections, and eyewitness accounts to weave a fascinating tale of what ordinary Japanese endured throughout their country's era of booming economic growth.

In 1943, 15-year-old Maria Rosa Henson was taken by Japanese soldiers occupying the Philippines and forced into prostitution as a "comfort woman." Now with a new introduction and foreword that assess the ongoing controversy over comfort women, her powerful memoir will be essential reading for all those concerned with violence against women.

This clear and accessible text provides a comprehensive survey of women's history in China from the Neolithic period through the Qing Dynasty (10,200 BC-1911 AD).

This compelling social history tells the stories of ordinary people in modern Japan. Tatsuichi Horikiri spent a lifetime searching out old items of clothing and oral accounts to shed light on those who used these items. He illuminates not only the often desperate lives of these people but also their hopes, aspirations, and human values.

This is the memoir of a South Korean dissident who was unjustly accused of spying for the North Koreans and jailed for 19 years as a political prisoner. It traces Suh Sung's experiences as a Korean citizen of Japan before his incarceration, his time in prison, and his subsequent release.

These stories introduce an emerging generation of women writers, including Chen Ran, Bikwan Wong and Chen Xue. By presenting fiction from the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the collection deliberately maps the literary contours of same-sex intimacy in cultural rather than purely political terms.

This lively book explores changes in contemporary China through the compelling personal accounts of young Chinese journalists. Through a series of engaging oral histories, Judy Polumbaum puts a human face on vital issues of freedom of expression and information that will chart China's future.

Now in a significant new edition, this landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II, including cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments.

One of Japan's most important intellectuals, Nambara Shigeru defended Tokyo Imperial University against its rightist critics and opposed Japan's war. His poetic diary (1936-1945), published only after the war, documents his profound disaffection. In 1945 Nambara became president of Tokyo University and was an eloquent and ardent spokesman for academic freedom. In this first English-language collection of his key work, historian and translator Richard H. Minear introduces Nambara's career and thinking before presenting translations of the most important of Nambara's essays, poems, and speeches. A courageous but lonely voice of conscience, Nambara is one of the few mid-century Japanese to whom we can turn for inspiration during that dark period in world history.

Contains essays offering a look at the history of Japan during the Asia-Pacific War. This book provides an intimate account of the scars of war. It also includes personal anecdotes.

Through travels that range from Geneva to Pyongyang, this book takes readers on an odyssey through one of the most extraordinary forgotten tragedies of the Cold War the return of over 90,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward.

This historical ethnography draws attention to the range of cultural and social practices that exist within contemporary Okinawa. The narrative problematizes both the location of identity and the processes involved in negotiating identities within Okinawa.

Discusses mother-daughter relationships in urban China. This book reflects on how women make sense of the shifts in practices and representations of gender that frame their lives, and how their self-identification as mothers and daughters contributes to the redefinition of those practices.

Voices Carry is the riveting autobiography of one of China's most prominent citizens of the twentieth century. Beginning with his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, Ying Ruocheng's narrative takes us through unexpectedly amusing adventures durin

Exploring sensitive issues often hidden to outsiders, this engaging study traces the transformation of Ku Village during the first tumultuous decade of reform.

'In this English translation, Moon's story is usefully framed by apparatus necessary to bring its message to even those taking their first look at South Asian culture...The result is an easy to digest short-course on what it means to be a Dalit, in the words of one notable Dalit.'-Journal of Asian Studies

An exploration of the experiences of women entrepreneurs amidst the contradictions of a free-wheeling commercial culture set within the patriarchal constraints of contemporary Taiwan. The book focuses on the voices and perspectives of the women themselves.

In this oral history, Ogata Masato, fisherman and Minamata disease sufferer, tells of the devastation of methyl mercury poisoning and the impact of industrial pollution on his own life, on his extended family and on the fishing culture in Minamata Bay, Japan.

This ethnography focuses on the romantic experiences of women from adolescence to maturity in a rural village in North Bali. It delves into the intensity of passion that exists below the harmonious veneer of traditional patterns of courtship and marriage, motherhood, and connubial fidelity.