Bøger udgivet af NORDIC INST OF ASIAN STUDIES

With some 20,000 or more people killed instantly in the atomic bombing of 9 August 1945, an additional 40,000 or more dying from radiation and related illnesses in the coming days and weeks, and with myriad others exposed to radiation effects, Nagasaki today is a city that remembers and reminds. But this was not always the case--in contrast with Hiroshima as the first atom bombed city, Nagasaki long stood out for the piety of its significant and historically persecuted Catholic population. New voices and new narratives would eventually emerge, however, especially among the surviving victims or hibakusha, as well as among local politicians, one who famously dared to challenge national myths surrounding war culpability. Remembrance, the struggle for recognition on the part of the victims, and the even greater struggle waged by City Hall in Nagasaki to bring to world attention the threat of nuclear weapons, comes to the heart of this book. This we term the Nagasaki peace discourse. Yet, other narratives vie with the 'idealist' view, namely that of the 'realists' and, specific to Japan, the 'nationalists'. Essentially the realists welcome the nuclear umbrella provided by the US-Japan Treaty system and have eagerly embraced civilian nuclear power under the 'atoms-for-peace' slogan. On their part, the nationalists perceive Japan's 'peace constitution' as ripe for revision, looking ahead to a legal Self Defense Force and, for some, a 'normal' and even a nuclear-armed Japan. In the light of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011, however, City Hall in Nagasaki cannot ignore the risks of civilian nuclear power or even the nation's mounting stockpile of plutonium. With Nagasaki prefecture host to the second largest US naval base in Japan, as became apparent with the 2017-18 Korean missile crisis, neither can the city insulate itself from international politics. Seventy and more years on from the atomic bombings, Hiroshima and, in subtly different ways, Nagasaki, have a sombre message to convey. This is in no better way encapsulated than in the popular civil society slogan, 'No! More! Hibakusha!'

Contact between Asia and the Nordic countries goes back at least 500 years. Scholarly interest and exchange between the two regions took time to develop, however; for many years Nordic scholars were more focused on the Biblical world than on the Far East or Subcontinent. The explosion in academic learning from the 1960s dramatically changed this picture and by the end of the decade Asia was studied at more than 100 institutions scattered across the Nordic region. In response, an institute was established now known as NIAS (the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies), tasked to support and provide focus to this fragmented scholarly environment. The institute opened its doors in 1968.>In celebration of 50 years of publishing at NIAS, this volume offers a selection of Nordic writing on Asia. The excerpts span the decades and the myriad fields within Asian Studies, with context and relevance offered by commentaries from present-day scholars. Readers from all areas and disciplines will find much to tempt them in this smorgasbord of Asia learning.

For well over a century, Chinese fengshui, or "geomancy," has interested Western laymen and scholars. Today, hundreds of popular manuals claim to use its principles in their advice on how people can increase their wealth, happiness, longevity, and so on. This study is quite different, approaching fengshui from an academic angle. The focus is on its significance in China, but the recent history of its reinterpretation in the West is also depicted. The author argues that fengshui serves as an alternative tradition of cosmological knowledge, which is used to explain a range of everyday occurrences in rural areas, such as disease, mental disorders, accidents, and common mischief. The study includes a historical account of fengshui over the last 150 years augmented by the results of anthropological fieldwork on contemporary practices in two Chinese rural areas.

Laos, 1900 - a frontier land caught in a power struggle between Eastern kingdoms and Western colonial powers, a fertile place teetering between an ancient pastoral existence and the modern machine age. Alfred Raquez's Laotian Pages vividly describes his exploration of the diverse kingdoms of Laos at the turn of the last century with the same Parisian verve and ironic turn of mind that he brought to his first travel book, In the Land of Pagodas. Raquez's keen eye and sensitivity to the exotic in both nature and human culture, combined with a mastery of the genre and his hallmark conversational style, transport the reader to the largely unexplored frontier of fin-de-siècle Indochina. Long known only to specialists on the history and ethnography of the region, this new work presents a scholarly translation into English together with Raquez's original photographs that will finally allow a wide audience to experience the joys and hardships of travel in a land that is both timeless and forever changing. In addition, a wide-ranging introduction and extensive footnotes provide historical context and 'then-and-now' perspectives on the cultures and landscape that have undergone massive change in the past century. In the Land of Pagodas, a scholarly translation by William L. Gibson and Paul Bruthiaux of Alfred Raquez's book of travels through China in 1899, was published in 2017 by NIAS Press.

This mammoth study is a major contribution to the study of Chinese literature, making available to scholars a genuine storyteller's script from China's Yangzhou oral tradition, dated to the late Qing period (1880-1910). This rare script is published in its complete form (all 367 pages), both in facsimile and transcription, with an English translation also made. Its publication is of high importance not only to preserve knowledge about one of the famous oral traditions of China, but also as a unique documentation of the interplay between orality and literacy in Chinese storytelling. The book is also the first translation into a European language of the popular 'Western Han' narrative, one of a corpus of Chinese semi-historical romances brought to life in recent decades after the discovery in 1974 of the terracotta army commemorating the life and achievements of the first Chinese emperor. Moreover, this storyteller's version is unique and entertaining. The work is an ideal classroom book for students studying Chinese history, literature, oral literature, storytelling, etc.

The worldwide search for new and secure supplies of energy is especially visible in Asia where rapid industrialization in states such as China and India has fomented a scramble for energy resources. Due to entrenched societal inequities and widespread authoritarian governance, however, the pursuit of national energy security through transnational energy projects has had a devastating impact on the human and environmental security of local populations. This is especially so in Thailand and Myanmar, countries that are increasingly engaged in the cross-border energy trade. Based on extensive fieldwork and theoretical analysis, this ground-breaking book proposes a new critical approach to energy and environmental security. It also explores the important role that local and transnational environmental movements play, in the absence of effective and democratic governments, by providing 'activist environmental governance' for energy projects throughout the region. By comparing the nature of this activism under two very different political regimes, it delivers crucial theoretical insights with both academic and policy implications for the sustainable and equitable development of the South's natural resources. First published in hardback in 2014, this new, updated paperback edition offers much to scholars, professionals, policy-makers, NGOs, businesses, journalists and others working or concerned with energy issues.