Books in the Harvard East Asian Monographs series

Defeat in World War II profoundly shaped how the Japanese reconstructed national identity and reengaged with Asia. In Asia and Postwar Japan, Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in Japanese thought, activism, and politics-as a symbolic geography, as a space for grassroots engagement, and as the source of a new politics of hope.

Earthquake Children is the first book to examine the origins of modern Japan's infrastructure of resilience. Janet Borland vividly demonstrates that Japan's contemporary culture of disaster preparedness-and its people's ability to respond calmly in times of emergency-are the results of learned and practiced behaviors inspired by earlier tragedies.

In this in-depth study, Felix Boecking challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. It argues instead that international trade, government tariff revenues, and hence China's fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed.

Jun Uchida draws on previously unused materials in multi-language archives to uncover the obscured history of the Japanese civilians who settled in Korea between 1876 and 1945, with particular focus on the first generation of "pioneers" between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated Japan's colonial presence on the Korean peninsula.

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting chronicles the life of a modern art form. In the late 1910s Chinese painters began working outdoors. They also adopted linear perspective and Cartesian optics. Yi Gu reflects on the complex interaction of local and Western aesthetics within the new form and on the nature of visual modernity in China.

Forty lessons introducing students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.