Books in the Harvard East Asian Monographs series

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism-the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government-Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era.

Scholars have noted the role of China's demand for silver in the emergence of the modern world. This book discusses the interaction of this demand and the early-19th-century Latin American independence movements, changes in the world economy, the resulting disruptions in the Qing dynasty, and the transformation from the High Qing to modern China.

De Weerdt examines how occupational, political, and intellectual groups shaped curricular standards and examination criteria during the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), and how these standards in turn shaped political and intellectual agendas. This book reframes the debate over the civil service examinations and their place in the imperial order.

Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.

Includes chapters which treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations. This book examines how Japanese have (en) gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

In Seeing Stars, Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes, revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena.

Following the end of WWII in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia. This title analyzes how the human remnants of empire served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of the national identities in Japan.

This biography casts new light on the life and career of Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo. Connecting his experiences as a naval officer to his service as foreign minister and ambassador, Mauch reassesses Nomura's contributions as a hard-nosed realist whose grasp of the underlying realities of Japanese-U.S. relations went largely unappreciated.

Though dismissed as a poet following his death, Tao Yuanming (365?-427) is now considered one of China's greatest writers. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history illuminates the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.

The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, the Uyghurs of Yining, a city in the Xinjiang region of China, express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice.

This book describes the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. The great festivals were their supreme collective achievements, carried out virtually without aid from local officials or educated elites. Newly discovered manuscripts allow Johnson to reconstruct the festivals in unprecedented detail.

Owen analyzes the redirection of poetry following the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. In the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium-a repertoire of styles, genres, and the voices of past poets.

Mountains have always been integral components of China's religious landscape. Early in Chinese history five mountains were co-opted into the imperial cult and declared sacred peaks-yue-demarcating and protecting the imperium's boundaries. Here, Robson demonstrates the value of local and Buddho-Daoist studies in research on Chinese religion.

Bianco focuses on "spontaneous" rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. The author shows that predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against state agents, and suggests that 20th-century Chinese peasants were less different from 17th- or 18th-century French peasants than might be imagined.

Urbanization was central to development in late imperial China. Yet scholars agree it triggered neither Weberian urban autonomy nor Habermasian civil society. Using Nanjing as a central case, the author shows that, prompted by this contradiction, the actions and creations of urban residents transformed the city on multiple levels.

Presenting fresh insights on the internal dynamics and global contexts that shaped foreign relations in early modern Japan, Robert I. Hellyer challenges the still largely accepted wisdom that the Tokugawa shogunate, guided by an ideology of seclusion, stifled intercourse with the outside world, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This work explores interactions between society and environment in China's most important marine fishery, the Zhoushan Archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, from its nineteenth-century expansion to the exhaustion of the most important fish species in the 1970s.

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon: every economy linked to international financial and commodity markets suffered. The aim of this book is not merely to show that China could not escape the consequences of drastic declines in financial flows and trade but also to offer a new perspective for understanding modern Chinese history.

For centuries, readers of Tao Qian have felt directly addressed by his poetic voice. This book revisits Tao's approach to his readers by attempting to situate it within the particular poetics of address that characterized the Six Dynasties classicist tradition.

Where does Neo-Confucianism fit into the story of China's history? This book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support.

A study that investigates the poetics and thematics of the Silla sequence, uncovering what is known about the actual historical event and the assumptions and concerns that guided its re-creation as a literary artifact and then helped shape its reception among contemporary readers.

Mark Jones examines the making of a new child's world in Japan, 1890-1930, and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. He also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context-the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan.

In the years of rapid economic growth following the protest movements of the 1960s, artists and intellectuals in Japan searched for a means of direct impact on the whirlwind of historical and cultural transformations of their time. This book explores the theoretical and cultural implications of experimental arts in a range of media.

Tian, or Heaven, had been used in China since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god. Examining excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han-dynasty artisans transformed various notions of Heaven-as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky-into pictorial entities, not by what they looked at, but by what they looked into.

Relations between the Choson and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the "traditional" Chinese "tribute system." In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Choson Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists.

Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. He was instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by futurism, dadaism, and surrealism. This critical biography examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and flamboyant figure.

Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his time. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami's fiction, Suter complicates our understanding of the author's oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific.

Maclachlan analyzes the institutions, interest groups, and leaders involved in the evolution of Japan's postal system from the early Meiji period until 2010. At the crux of her analysis is Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro's crusade to privatize Japan's postal services, one of the most astonishing political achievements in postwar Japanese history.

Sonia Ryang casts new light on the study of North Korean culture and society by reading literary texts as sources of ethnographic data. Ryang focuses critical attention on three central themes-love, war, and self-that reflect the nearly complete overlap of the personal, social, and political realms in North Korean society.