Books in the Harvard East Asian Monographs (HUP) series

Strict decrees on the observance of death were part of the myriad laws enacted under the Tokugawa shogunate to control nearly every aspect of Japanese life. Hirai explores how this class of legislation played an integrative part in Japanese society by codifying religious beliefs and customs the Japanese people had cherished for generations.

In the late 1800s, Japanese leaders invited Unitarian missionaries to Japan to further modernization. Mohr looks at the debates sparked by the encounter between Unitarianism and Buddhism and considers how the idea of "universal truth" was used by both missionaries and by Japanese intellectuals and religious leaders to promote their own agendas.

Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors in the early twentieth century encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by staging tensions between Japan's newly heteronormative culture and the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse.

Eyferth charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan, tracing the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men.

Informed by theories of nostalgia, collective memory, cultural nationalism, and gender, this book draws on the author's extensive fieldwork in probing the practice of identity-making and the processes at work when Japan becomes "Japan."

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.

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).

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.

The goal of Worldly Stage is to show how the theater acquired the figurative power to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. Conceptions of theatrical spectatorship, Sophie Volpp argues, helped shape a discourse on social spectatorship that suggested how a discerning person might evaluate the performance of status.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 work provides a history of the Rinzai Zen monastic institution in Medieval Japan.

Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organization, and tactics from Japan's early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai.