Books in the Harvard East Asian Monographs series

By approaching May Fourth from novel perspectives, the authors of the eight studies in this volume seek to contribute to the ongoing critique of the movement.

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.

Through a close examination of economic trends and case studies of particular families, this study demonstrates that Japan's protoindustrial economy was far more volatile than portrayed in most studies to date. Few rural elites survived the competitive and unstable climate of this era.

This second edition of Dru Gladney's critically acclaimed study of the Muslim population in China includes a new preface by the author, as well as a valuable addendum to the bibliography, already hailed as one of the most extensive listing of modern sources on the Sino-Muslims.

This book explores nation and modernity in China by focusing on the work of Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967). Through his literary and aesthetic practice as an essayist, Zhou espoused a way of constructing the individual and affirming the individual's importance in opposition to the normative national subject of most May Fourth reformers.

In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire.

Hijiya-Kirschnereit brings a sophisticated and graceful method of analysis to this English translation of her book on the shishosetsu, one of the most important yet misunderstood genres in Japanese literature.

The outbreak of the "Minamata Disease" in 1950s Japan remains one of the most horrific examples of environmental poisoning in history. Based on primary documents and interviews, this book describes responses to this incidence of mercury poisoning, focusing on the efforts of its victims and their supporters to secure redress.

Writers and intellectuals in modern Japan have long forged dialogues across the boundaries separating the spheres of literature and thought. This book explores some of their most provocative connections in the volatile years of the 1920s to 1950s, revealing unexpected intersections of literature, ideas, and politics in a global transwar context.

Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited for marketing. This book offers ethnographic case studies on the symbolic qualities of idols and how they relate to the conceptualization of self among adolescents.

The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi explores how sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi's continued and evolving presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan changes with the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.

In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea were derived primarily from the new mobility afforded by transportation. Kim explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, and its connection with the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.

Hyung Il Pai examines how archaeological finds from Northeast Asia have been used in Korea to construct a myth of state formation emphasizing the ancient development of a pure Korean race that created a civilization rivaling those of China and Japan. He shows that the Korean state was formed far later with influences from throughout Northern Asia.

In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues that South Korea's contemporary urban middle class not only exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition of Koreans to seek high status.

The Anime Boom in the United States is a comprehensive and empirically grounded study of the expansion of anime marketing and sales into the United States. It explores the transnational networks of anime production and marketing while also investigating the cultural and artistic processes the art form inspired.

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.