Bøger i Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University serien

Fighting for Virtue investigates how Thailand's judges were tasked by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) in 2006 with helping to solve the country's intractable political problems-and what happened next. Across the last decade of Rama IX's rule, Duncan McCargo examines the world of Thai judges: how they were recruited, trained, and...

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...

Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from Japan's intensive urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s. He maps the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation.

How do modern states emerge from the turmoil of undergoverned spaces? This is the question Reo Matsuzaki ponders in Statebuilding by Imposition. Comparing Taiwan and the Philippines under the colonial rule of Japan and the United States, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he shows similar situations produce different outcomes...

Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformation of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.

Fixing Landscape reconsiders China's Three Gorges Dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Gorges region over more than two millennia, thereby offering radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China.

By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial youth become passionate supporters of Japanese imperial nationalism? And what happened to these youth after the war...

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...

Kerim Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity. Electrified Voices is a far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound film in Japan.

Margaret Mih Tillman offers a novel perspective on the political and scientific dimensions of experiments with early childhood education. Raising China's Revolutionaries is an important work of institutional and transnational history that illuminates the evolution of modern concepts of childhood in twentieth-century China.

From 1868-1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China.Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes.In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.

Robert Tuck offers a groundbreaking study of the connections among traditional poetic genres, print media, and visions of national community in late nineteenth-century Japan. Structured around the work of Masaoka Shiki, Idly Scribbling Rhymers reveals poetry's surprising yet fundamental role in emerging forms of media and national consciousness.

In eighteenth-century China, a remarkable intellectual transformation took place, centered on the ascendance of philology. In China's Philological Turn, Ori Sela foregrounds the polymath Qian Daxin to reconstruct the history of eighteenth-century Chinese learning and its long-lasting consequences.

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...

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.

Geoffrey Barstow explores the tension between Buddhist ethics and Tibetan cultural norms to offer a novel perspective on the spiritual and social dimensions of meat eating within Tibetan religiosity. Barstow offers a detailed analysis of the debates over meat and vegetarianism from the tenth century through the Chinese invasion in the 1950s.

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.

Offers the first extensive English-language study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It explores the controversial shrine's role in waging war, promoting peace, honouring the dead, and, in particular, building Japan's modern national identity. It traces Yasukuni's history from its conceptualization in the final years of the Tokugawa period and Japan's wars of imperialism to the present.

The field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional and philosophical understandings of the world. The author recounts how Japanese scholars developed a discipline of natural history analogous to Europe's but created independently, without direct influence.

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.

Tells the story of how Chinese medicine was transformed from the antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol of and vehicle for China's exploration of its own modernity half a century later.

Passage to Manhood is a groundbreaking and beautifully written ethnography that addresses the intersection of modernity, heroin use, and AIDS as they intersect in a new "rite-of-passage" among young ethnic-minority males in contemporary China.

This is an anthropological exploration of the roots of China's modernity in the country's own tradition, as seen especially in economic and kinship patterns.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of corruption and change in the Chinese Communist Party, Cadres and Corruption reveals the long history of the party's inability to maintain a corps of committed and disciplined cadres.

From the Korean War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this book shows how, despite its objective weakness, North Korea has managed for much of its history to deal with the outside world to maximum advantage.

Yukiko Koshiro reassesses the role that Eurasia played in Japan's diplomatic and military thinking from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of the war.

At the periphery of the Chinese empire, a group of innovative entrepreneurs built companies that dominated the Chinese salt trade and created thousands of jobs in the Sichuan region. This book challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.