Books published by Harvard University, Asia Center

The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire at the turn of the twentieth century created numerous literary contact nebulae. This book analyzes three of them: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

Before the late 1980s Taiwan's successful exporters were overwhelmingly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). What accounts for their success and their benign neglect by the state? The author argues that it was an unintended consequence of the state's policy toward the private sector and its political strategies for managing societal forces.

Kokugaku, or nativism, was an important intellectual movement from the 17th-19th century in Japan, and its worldview remains influential. McNally's primary goal is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane's role in the creation and perpetuation of an enduring intellectual tradition.

What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.

Why does literature's voice still seduce us into reading? What is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? These essays on Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, visit the force of the scandalous to confront such questions.

Throughout history, Mount Tai has been a magnet for both women and men from all classes-emperors, aristocrats, officials, literati, and villagers. This book examines the behavior of those who made the pilgrimage to Mount Tai and their interpretations of its sacrality and history, as a means of better understanding their identities and mentalities.

By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.

This book examines the Nanjing decade of Guomindang rule (1927-1937) and the early post-Mao reform era (1980-1992) of Chinese history that have commonly been viewed as periods of state disintegration or retreat. And they were-at the central level. When reexamined at the local level, however, both are revealed as periods of state building.

Among the most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralized, compulsory educational system modeled after those in Europe and America. But with almost no support from the government, local officials, teachers, and citizens pursued alternative visions. Their efforts led to the growth and consolidation of a new educational system.

One of the most exciting developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of a rich, diverse tradition of women's writing of the imperial period. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women's writings not only in poetry but in essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.

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.

Buddhism in medieval Korea is characterized as "State Protection Buddhism," a religion whose primary purpose was to rally support (supernatural and popular) for and legitimate the state. This study is an attempt to specify Buddhism's place in Koryo and to ascertain to what extent and in what areas Buddhism functioned as a state religion.

Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power.

In the early 20th century, China began to import and then to manufacture thousands of consumer goods. Politicians feared trade deficits. Intellectuals feared loss of national sovereignty. And manufacturers wondered how they could survive a flood of cheap imports. Gerth argues that the responses of these groups helped foster modern nationalism.

These chapters trace the biographical thread running through Nakagami's works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.

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.

In this cross-cultural study of "emotion management," the author argues that even though the goals of normative control in factories, offices, and shops may be similar across cultures, organizational structure and the surrounding culture affect how that control is discussed and conceived.

This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged.