Books in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University series

Sovereignty Experiments tells the story of how authorities in Korea, Russia, China, and Japan-through diplomatic negotiations, border regulations, legal categorization of subjects and aliens, and cultural policies-competed to control Korean migrants as they suddenly moved abroad by the thousands in the late nineteenth century. Alyssa M. Park...

Beauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive.

Heroes and Toilers offers an unprecedented account of life and labor in postwar North Korea that looks at both governance and popular resistance. Cheehyung Harrison Kim traces the state's pursuit of progress through industrialism and examines how ordinary people challenged the state every step of the way.

In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research, The Battle for Fortune looks at the rising stakes of Tibetans' encounters with Chinese state-led development projects in the early 2000s. The book builds upon anthropology's qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of...

This in-depth exploration of culture, media, and protest follows South Korea's transition from the Korean War to the political struggles and socioeconomic transformations of the Park Chung Hee era. Charles Kim explores how state ideologues and mainstream intellectuals expanded their efforts by elevating the nation's youth as the core protagonist of a newly independent Korea.

In Promiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation of Russian and British film theory as well as...

In Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill traces the radical changes to Japanese military institutions, as well as the consequences of military reforms in his accounts of the Boshin War (1868-1869) and the Satsuma Rebellions of 1877. He shows how pre-1868 developments laid the foundations for the army that would secure Japan's Asian empire.

Government wrongdoing or negligence harms people worldwide, but not all victims are equally effective at obtaining redress. In Accidental Activists, Celeste L. Arrington examines the interactive dynamics of the politics of redress to understand why not.

A detailed investigation of the contemporary Philippine Left, focusing on the political challenges and dilemmas that confronted activists following the disintegration of the Marcos regime and the reestablishment of electoral democracy under Corazon...

The origins and evolution of technocratic fascism in wartime Japan.

In Casualties of History, Lee K. Pennington relates for the first time in English the experiences of Japanese wounded soldiers and disabled veterans of Japan's "long" Second World War (from 1937 to 1945).

Armstorng examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.