Books published by Harvard University, Asia Center

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.

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.

Sarah M. Allen explores the tale literature of eighth- and ninth-century China to show how written tales of the Tang canon we know today grew out of a fluid culture of hearsay in elite society. The book focuses on two main types of tales, those based in gossip about recognizable public figures and those developed out of lore concerning the occult.

Tamara T. Chin explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance ("Silk Road") markets. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets.

The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Chapters analyze the Korean experience from a wide range of economic and social perspectives, as well as describing the country's economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met.

From the 1910s to the 1940s, a wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the Korean cultural scene with differing agendas but shared demands for equality and social justice. Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture, focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression.

Catherine L. Phipps examines a largely unacknowledged system of "special trading ports" that operated under full Japanese jurisdiction in the shadow of the better-known treaty ports. Phipps demonstrates why the special trading ports were key to Japan's achieving autonomy and regional power during the pivotal second half of the nineteenth century.

Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the powers of the state and of local elites, Lee shows that state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing.

Investing Japan demonstrates that foreign investment is a vital and misunderstood aspect of Japan's modern economic development. This study investigates the role played by foreign companies in the Japanese experience of modernization, highlighting their identity as key agents in the processes of industrialization and technology transfer.

Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are full of suggestive sounds. Characters curse in colorful dialect accents, and action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords. Paize Keulemans examines the relationship between these novels and earlier storyteller manuscripts to explain the purpose and history of these sounds.

Natasha Heller offers a cultural history of Buddhism through a case study of the Chan master Zhongfeng Mingben. Monks of his stature developed a broad set of cultural competencies for navigating social and intellectual relationships. Heller shows the importance of situating monks as actors within wider sociocultural fields of practice and exchange.

After the 1911 fall of the Qing dynasty, many declared the classical Chinese poetic tradition dead. In Modern Archaics, Shengqing Wu draws on extensive archival research into the poetry collections and literary journals of two generations of writers to challenge this claim and demonstrate the continuing significance of the classical form.

K. E. Brashier examines practices of memorializing the dead in early imperial China. After surveying how learning in this period relied on memorization and recitation, he treats the parameters name, age, and kinship as ways of identifying a person in Han public memory, as well as the media responsible for preserving the deceased person's identity.

Hiraku Shimoda places the origin of modern Japanese regionalism in the tense relationship between region and nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study shows that "region," often seen as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities.

Melek Ortabasi reassesses the influence of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, in shaping modern Japan's cultural identity. Only the second book-length English-language study of Yanagita, this book moves beyond his pioneering work in folk studies to reveal the full range of his contributions as a public intellectual.

Trent E. Maxey documents how religion came to be seen as the "greatest problem" by the architects of the modern Japanese state. Maxey shows that in Meiji Japan, religion designated a cognitive and social pluralism that resisted direct state control. It also provided the state with a means to contain, regulate, and neutralize that plurality.

The first full-length biography of a premodern Japanese nun, The Princess Nun is the story of Bunchi (1619-1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshoji. The study incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi's ascetic practice to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion.

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 sacred mountain Oyama (literally, "Big Mountain") has loomed over the religious landscape of early modern Japan. Ambros provides a narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the Oyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts.

Compiled in 940 at the court of the kingdom of Shu, the Huajian ji is the earliest extant collection of lyrics by literati poets. Shields examines the influence of court culture on the anthology's creation and the significance of imitation and convention in its lyrics, situating the work within larger questions of Chinese literary history.

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.

Using the new tools of GIS and social network analysis, Nicolas Tackett shows that the great Tang aristocratic families were more successful than previously believed in adapting to social and economic changes in the seventh and eighth centuries. Tang political influence waned only after many of them were killed during the three decades after 880.

Wai-yee Li examines the discursive space of women in seventeenth-century China. Using texts written by women or by men writing in a feminine voice, as well as writings that turn women into signifiers of lamentation or nostalgia, Li probes the emotional and psychological turmoil of the Ming-Qing transition and subsequent moments of national trauma.

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown focuses on a Chinese immigrant community in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. It tells the story of how Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state during periods of war and peace.

Rojas focuses on visuality and gender tropes to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-20th century, and contemporary periods.

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.

This volume analyzes the representation of gender and desire in elite, male-authored literary texts in China dating from roughly 200 B.C. until 1000 A.D.