bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Japan's Wartime Labor Policy: A Search for Method
Authors: Notar Ernest J.
Published: April 2006

Abstracts

The industrial Patriotic Movement (Sampō) symbolized the suppression of labor unions in prewar Japan, but it also shaped the development of Japan's postwar system of industrial relations. When first launched by officials of the Home Ministry in 1938, Sampō was intended to be a constructive reform movement for reducing conflict and for maintaining an efficient labor market. With the support of the police and of some labor leaders, Sampō encouraged formation of factory committees with elected worker representatives for negotiating wages and working conditions. The resistance of business leaders led to the assertion of direct bureaucratic control over the movement, and with army interference in civil administration after 1940, Sampō eventually led to the suppression of unions. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid for the spread of enterprise unionism on a national scale in the postwar era even under military rule.
Recent Accounts of the Vietnam War—A Review Article
Authors: Moise Edwin E.
Published: April 2006

Abstracts

The Public Broadcasting Service series Vietnam: A Television History is generally sound, and commendably willing to present opinions and judgments on controversial issues.

Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History presents important new information but gives inadequate attention to some fundamental issues; James Harrison's The Endless War contains less original material but deals better with fundamental issues, including the nature and sources of Communist strength in Vietnam.

R. B. Smith, Revolution versus Containment, 1955–1961, volume 1 of An International History of the Vietnam War, tries to cover too much in a short book. Some of the conclusions are not adequately proven.

Ronald Spector's Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960 (the first volume of the United States Army's official history of the Vietnam War) is useful, especially for the periods 1944–1945 and 1956–1960. It slightly exaggerates the speed with which Communist guerrilla warfare developed in South Vietnam between 1957 and 1960.
Benevolent Societies: The Reshaping of Charity During the Late Ming and Early Ch'ing
Authors: Smith Joanna F. Handlin
Published: April 2006

During the late Ming an entirely new charitable institution, the benevolent society (t'ung-shan t'ang), emerged even though there were already in place channels for charity provided by lineage organizations, religious institutions, and the state. To account for the appearance of benevolent societies, this article attempts explanations in terms of worsening conditions and dynastic decline and then moves beyond such considerations for several reasons. Although China had long experienced much poverty and numerous periods of extreme social unrest, it was not until the late Ming that the responses to these maladies took the form of benevolent societies. Although the benevolent societies were sometimes founded in an atmosphere of social tension, they endured long after any sense of crisis had passed and thrived through periods of calm. The benevolent societies arose because they satisfied—in ways that existing forms of charity could not—the emotional and social needs of the sponsors in an environment altered by commerce. To achieve a harmonious society, officials and gentry acquiesced to the investment mentality of merchants, and by making charitable contributions toward a moral society, merchants justified their wealth. Highly visible and tolerated by the state, the benevolent societies expressed social alliances based on money and a spirit of civic pride.
Universities and Students in Wartime Japan
Authors: Shillony Ben-Ami
Published: April 2006

Japan possessed a sophisticated network of institutions of higher education before World War II. There was repression on the campuses of colleges and universities, but it was less severe than that in the totalitarian countries of the time. The war placed great demands on higher education and forced it to change. New universities, colleges, and research institutes were established; more students were enrolled; and more women entered colleges. The war also spurred a great shift toward science and technology, which was to be instrumental in Japan's economic recovery in the postwar era.

Mobilization for military duty or for work made the students feel that they were responsible for the fate of their country. However, their youthful outburst of patriotism came to an end with Japan's defeat. Feelings of betrayal and disillusionment nurtured the extreme patriotism and militancy of the postwar student movement.
Working the Revolution: Plantation Laborers and the People's Militia in North Sumatra
Authors: Stoler Ann Laura
Published: April 2006

Nationalist struggles are invariably civil as well as anticolonial wars. The processes of popular politicization are shaped as much by internal contests as by mobilized sentiments against foreign rule. Political engagement by the rural poor is typically influenced by local power struggles, ethnic conflicts, and class tensions that may deflect the poor's stakes in and concern for national liberation. To discover the quotidian contours of revolution, we must turn to these sorts of relationships and constraints. To understand the conditions that foster or discourage the active participation of subordinate groups in revolution, we must appreciate the local relations under which people labor as much as the political context in which they fight.
I'll Take It All the Way to Beijing: Capital Appeals in the Qing
Authors: Ocko Jonathan K.
Published: April 2006

Justice in chinese society was literally of cosmic importance. Traditional Chinese thinking considered man and nature organic elements of a seamless cosmic web. Injustice of any kind did not simply rend the web in one place but placed tension on the entire structure. To restore equilibrium, the injustice had to be perfectly redressed, no more, no less. To ignore the injury was to risk catastrophe. As one late-Qing official wrote, “The recent natural disasters and interferences with heavenly harmony [i.e., the droughts and famines of the late 1870s and early 1880s] are a product of the countless number of cases where no appeal could be made, where there were no impeachments of the delinquent officials, and where consequently the innocent suffer deep injustices in the underworld” (Xinzeng XAHL 1886, 50:5a).
From Betel-Chewing to Tobacco-Smoking in Indonesia
Authors: Reid Anthony
Published: April 2006

Indonesians, like other Southeast Asians, have been extensive users of mild narcotic analgesics throughout history. Until a century ago the most widespread narcotic was the chewed quid of betel, comprising the areca nut, betel leaves, lime, and sundry optional additives. Europeans introduced both tobacco and opium around 1600, and Indonesians quickly took up the growing of tobacco. Initially smoked by a relatively small elite, tobacco became used almost universally as part of the betel chew by the end of the eighteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century cigarette-smoking for men became associated with the transformation to “modern” attitudes, and it rapidly replaced betel-chewing. Today virtually all Indonesian men smoke and virtually none chew betel. Among women betel-chewing has no such substitute and is disappearing more slowly.

Tobacco has relaxant and sedative effects similar to betel. Whereas the betel ingredients were very cheap, tobacco now consumes about 5 percent of the incomes of Indonesian families, including the poorest. Although betel-chewing provided protection against tooth decay, intestinal parasites, and bacteria, tobacco-smoking is injurious to health in a variety of ways.
“A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971
Authors: Oldenburg Philip
Published: April 2006

The breakup of Pakistan in 1971 can be explained in pt by a failure of understanding on the part of the West Pakistani leadership of Pakistan, a seeming inability to recognize what the meaning of Pakistan was for Bengalis, and thus the cause of the demand for Bengali as a state language equal to Urdu. Exploration of the language issue in the period before and afterndependence helps to illuminate the divergence of belief about the form of the new state and the meaning of parity in representation between east and west wings of the country. The final tragedy of the attempted crushing of the movement for an autonomous Bangladesh is also in part an outcome of this pattern of belief, in particular the belief about the role of Hindus in the expression of Bengali identity.
A Principle of Text Coherence in Indonesian Languages
Authors: McGinn Richard
Published: April 2006

The logic of Indonesian subjectless and tenseless expressions appears to have cultural implications, just as the use of tenses in English scientific writing entails much more than grammatical minutiae. A. L. Becker has pointed out thattensein English functions in a “coherence system” that pervades and transcends grammar. A parallel coherence system is suggested for Indonesian, based not on tense but ontopic. Paul Ricoeur's distinction between LANGUAGE and DISCOURSE is the basis of the claim that Indonesian sentences cohere on the bond between grammatical subject and discourse topic. Examples are drawn from a number of contexts that call forth passive sentences in Indonesian. The article concludes on another suggestion by Becker. The Indonesian topic may be part of a larger deictic category ofperson, which may be related in discourse to orientation in space—both physical and social—of participants in the speech event. If this suggestion is correct, then the contrast between English and Indonesian coherence systems may be found in the opposition tense/time vs. person/space.
Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China
Authors: Mann Susan
Published: April 2006

In 1934 Liu Jihua, a classically trained feminist at Yanjing University, published an article on the history of the concept of chastity in China. Meticulously documented and lavishly illustrated with quotations from the classics (beginning with theBook of Changes), her long essay argued that, by the Qing dynasty, female chastity had “become a religion” (zongjiaohua): a prescriptive norm accepted as a matter of faith by most men and women.
Caste, State, and Ethnic Boundaries in Nepal
Authors: Levine Nancy E.
Published: April 2006

Models of ethnicity in Nepal stress, on the one hand, unlimited ethnic diversity and, on the other, a rather limited set of ethnic contrasts: Hindu versus Buddhist, tribe versus caste, mountain versus middle hills versus lowland Terai. However, ethnic relations in Humla District, in Nepal's far northwest Karnali Zone, are characterized more by interaction, interdependence, and mobility than contrasts and boundaries between groups.1In Humla, individuals and even entire villages readily change their ethnic affiliation and their position in the caste system. There, too, ethnic groups are linked by a regional economic and social system, and changes in a group's ethnic affiliations are coincident with changes in their economy and style of life. Finally, the case of Humla reaffirms what other scholars have noted: ethnic relations today are the outcome of a historical process of accommodation between regional ethnic systems and the policies of a centralizing state.
Charting Blank Spaces and Disputed Regions: The Problem of Sung Land Tenure
Authors: McDermott Joseph P.
Published: April 2006

Due to the inadequacies of the surviving sources, this study of the highly controversial issue of Sung land tenure focuses on variations in land tenure practices in six regions of South China during the Southern Sung. It finds that large private landholdings predominated in only a few areas of South China, that they usually did not possess the contiguity and size some have attributed to a supposed Sung manorial order, and that most peasant households owned some land. Of those who worked another's land, three types are studied in detail—the land guest, the field servant, and the tenant guest. Normally the land guest was bound to the land, the field servant hired as a temporary indentured servant, and the tenant guest obliged to provide little more than rent. Working conditions south of the Yangtze generally grew less subservient the closer the area was located to the Lower Yangtze Valley.
Marxism and National Socialism in Taishō Japan: The Thought of Takabatake Motoyuki
Authors: Hoston Germaine A.
Published: April 2006

Takabatake Motoyuki was one of several prewar Japanese socialists who combined the Marxian ideal of proletarian socialism with nationalism. The first to produce a full Japanese translation of Karl Marx'sCapitalin 1919, Takabatake formulated a doctrine of national or state socialism that same year and dedicated the rest of his life to the promotion of that ideal. While Takabatake continued to call himself a Marxist, he criticized Marx's understanding of the state and drew on the work of Western political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes to construct his own functionalist interpretation of the state. Takabatake's work not only exposes some important lacunae in Marxist-Leninism, but his continued appeal to Marxism while embracing an ideology usually associated with the political Right defies analysis on the basis of conventional Left-Right distinctions. As his treatment of contemporary domestic and international problems demonstrates, both socialist and nationalist movements of this era constituted impassioned responses to social, economic, and political crises that were already apparent in the Taishō years.
British versus Princely Legacies and the Political Integration of Gujarat
Authors: Wood John R.
Published: April 2006

The political integration of British India and princely India is generally assumed to be an accomplished fact, but in contemporary Indian states that contain both ex-British and ex-princely territory and population the different legacies of British and princely rule remained influential long after independence and merger. Analysis of the de facto political integration of Gujarat between 1943 and 1969 reveals five stages of bargaining between ex-British and ex-princely nationalist elites. At each stage the interests of these elites—schooled in contrasting historical-political traditions—had to be consulted and compensated; the results can be discerned in the differential electoral behavior of the ex-British-dominated Mainland and ex-princely Saurashtra regions. Eventually, the political resources and training of Mainland politicians proved more appropriate for universal franchise politics than did those of the exprincely Saurashtrians. However, as of. 1969, the objective of an integrated political community in Gujarat was still to be achieved.
The Formation of the Concept of Nation-State in Nepal
Authors: Burghart Richard
Published: April 2006

At the turn of the nineteenth century three different indigenous concepts were central to the Nepalese understanding of their polity. These were the possessions (muluk) of the king, the realm (deśa), and the countries (alsodeśaordes) of a people. Each of these concepts specified a different relationship between ruler, land, and people, and each was legitimated with reference to a different kind of authority: proprietary, ritual, or ancestral. When the East India Company gained politicoeconomic control of the Ganges basin, the Nepalese found that they had to accommodate themselves to a powerful neighbor with alien views on the structure and boundary of the polity. In order to preserve its political autonomy on the subcontinent, the Nepalese government began to reconceive the nature of its polity from a foreign point of view. This article considers reinterpretations by the Nepalese government over a period of one hundred and fifty years of the concepts of possessions, realm, and country in order to form the modern concept of the nation-state.
Islamizing Java? Religion and Politics in Rural East Java
Authors: Hefner Robert W.
Published: April 2006

Scholarly discussion of Javanese society has consistently linked variation in Islamic orthodoxy to differences of socioeconomic class, political behavior, and social conflict. In the most widely known sociological formula, Clifford Geertz distinguished three varieties of Javanese Islam and correlated each with a particular social class.Abangan, or Javanist Muslim, tradition was described as a syncretic blend of animist, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic elements that was predominant among the mass of rural Javanese.Santritradition was identified as a more orthodox variant of Islam, especially widespread among merchants and wealthier peasants. Finally,priyayitradition was identified as an elite heritage strongly influenced by the Hindu-Buddhist values of earlier Javanese courts and linked to Java's traditional gentry and the administrative bureaucracy that replaced it in the modern era (Geertz 1956; Geertz 1960:5–6).
Islam, the Chinese, and Indonesian Historiography—A Review Article
Authors: Kumar Ann L.
Published: April 2006

In 1984 two publications appeared that were designed to make available little known source material—archaeological and paleographic in one case, textual in the other—important for the historiography of the eastern Islamic world over the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. These publications are based on relics from port cities on the northern and southern shores of this world—Quanzhou (Zaitun) on the China coast, Semarang and Cirebon on the north coast of Java. Along with many other emporia old and new, these cities were incorporated into an extensive and thriving network of maritime exchange in the fields of commerce, religion, and civilization. The continued development of this network was threatened and ultimately forestalled by the antagonism of the conservative inland states of both Java and China on the one hand and the hostility of European maritime power on the other. But its legacy is not a trivial one.
Secularism in Its Place
Authors: Madan T. N.
Published: April 2006

This is the text, with a few verbal modifications, of a lecture delivered by T. N. Madan at the President's Panel in Honor of the Fulbright Fortieth Anniversary Program, on the occasion of the 1987 meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Boston. T. N. Madan has invigorated the social sciences in India for many years by his research, writing, and teaching. As an author he has written on such themes as Hindu culture, culture and development, ethnic pluralism, family and kinship, and the professions. As editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology, he has attracted to its pages distinguished research and writing from an international pool of contributors. This achievement is related to his capacity to combine discriminating intellectual taste with a friendly capacity to insinuate the journal into the publishing program of outstanding social scientists. It is also related to the fact that his anthropological understanding is combined with a wide-ranging methodological sympathy for other social sciences as well as the humanities.
Chinese Painting Studies in the West: A State-of-the-Field Article
Authors: Silbergeld Jerome
Published: April 2006

The contemporary study of Chinese painting history varies considerably according to cultural locus, be it mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, or the West, making broad generalization about the state of the field quite difficult. Where the intellectual and social context of traditional East Asian culture remains most intact, the study of painting has perpetuated the concerns and modes of the thousandplus years of traditional historiography, yet this has become increasingly rare. In the People's Republic, innovation has come largely through Marxist influence, bringing a focus on social aspects of the art, but no systematic Marxist analysis has ever emerged and the influence of ideology is now noticeably on the wane. In the West, where most of those who study Chinese painting cannot themselves paint, do more than dabble in calligraphy, or lay claim to being part of the Chinese cultural elite, and where an understanding of the Chinese context cannot be taken for granted, the need for cross-cultural explanation has generated studies unique in character, blending sinology with Eurocentric art-historical questions and methods. This Western approach, with its skeptical analysis and egalitarian perspective, has provided new techniques of stylistic analysis for reevaluating the traditional dates and attributions of paintings and yielded a new, more objective basis for examining the theory, content, and sociocultural basis of Chinese painting.
Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century China
Authors: Wakeman Frederic
Published: April 2006

The rigors of the transition from Ming to Qing imposed harrowing moral choices upon Chinese elites during the 1600s. Some chose to collaborate uneasily with their Manchu conquerors. Others remained loyal to the Ming, even after all hope was lost for a restoration in the South. Yet a third group transferred its support from the fallen dynasty to the rising one, becoming so fiercely attached to the new rulers that its members were willing to endure martyrdom rather than turn against the Manchus during the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. Although such choices were often situational and not always mutually exclusive, they were associated in contemporaries' eyes with distinct aesthetic tastes, specific philosophical positions, and particular political commitments. This essay attempts to identify those distinctions in the biographical trajectories of several eminent seventeenth-century literati, scholar-officials, and military statesmen.
Municipal Reform and Urban Social Conflict in Late Ming Jiangnan
Authors: von Glahn Richard
Published: April 2006

Hilistorians seeking the stirrings of urban social and political consciousness in China usually have turned to the convulsive century between 1550 and 1650, when the rapid pace of commercial growth and urbanization began to generate new economic tensions fraught with political implications. This period witnessed an unprecedented series of urban protests in the commercial and industrial centers of China, in Jiangnan in particular. Some scholars have viewed these protests as evidence of a nascent urban consciousness which united “bourgeois” intellectuals and urban workers against the panoply of feudal obligations imposed by the Ming state (Fu Yiling 1957:109–21; Tanaka 1984:189–91; Yuan 1979:296, 310). Others have stressed the accelerating trend toward absolutism in the late Ming and the emergence of a cross-class alliance opposed to the arbitrary exercise of state power (Miyazaki 1957:351–56). Common to both of these interpretations is a blurring of class lines and a polarization between state and society—or, more precisely, between the state and urban communities—which fostered urban political solidarity.
A Social History of Language Change in Highland East Java
Authors: Smith-Hefner Nancy J.
Published: April 2006

Throughout east and southeast asia multilingual speech communities are the norm rather than the exception. In most countries in the region, nonstandard dialects and ethnic languages survive and even thrive despite the introduction of national languages and their utilization in government, business, and education. Where communicative isolation is not the cause of their survival, the persistence of such regional languages often signals the continuing importance of distinctive infranational identities, operating within (and sometimes across) the boundaries of the modern nation state. Although surely not the only important marker of ethnic or social distinctiveness, language is a particularly rich medium for the expression of social identity. Conversely, the adoption of a new linguistic standard often requires the resolution of what are perceived as competing social identities. In much of developing Asia, therefore, researchers on language history regularly encounter some variant of the same question: what social and historical conditions determine the ways that speakers in multilingual communities resolve problems of language and identity? More specifically, what mix of cultural and political forces ensures that some linguistic varieties persist while others decline or even disappear?
The View from the Ghats: Traditional Exegesis of a Hindu Epic
Authors: Lutgendorf Philip
Published: April 2006

The most popular book in northern India is a Hindi retelling of the ancient tale of Prince Rām and his wife, Sītāa, composed in about A.D. 1574 by the poet-saint Tulsīdās of Banaras. Throughout a vast region with a population of more than three hundred million people, this epic of some fourteen-thousand lines has come to be regarded not only as a great masterpiece of literature but also as a religious work of the highest inspiration—a status recognized by nineteenth-century British scholars who labeled it "the Bible of North India." To its audience it is known by several names: simply the Rāmāyaṇ(borrowing the title of the Sanskrit archetype that, for Hindi speakers, it has largely supplanted); the Tulsī Rāmāyaṇ(invoking its author); and also the Mānas(The lake), which is a condensation of its true title, Rāmcaritmānas(The lake of the acts of Rām). Encountering the last name for the first time, a reader from another culture might be puzzled by its central metaphor: why should the image of a lake be so closely associated with this celebrated saga of virtue, heroism, and devotion?
Sahibs, Babus, and Banias: Changes in Industrial Control in Eastern India, 1918–50
Authors: Goswami Omkar
Published: April 2006

The history of industrialization of many developing countries in Asia is related to conflicts between foreigners and a growing local bourgeoisie over industrial ownership and control. This article analyzes one such country—India—from the end of World War I until a few years beyond independence.
Political, Social, and Cultural Reproduction via Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China
Authors: Elman Benjamin A.
Published: April 2006

Most previous scholarship about the civil service examination system in imperial China has emphasized the degree of social mobility such examinations permitted in a premodern society. In the same vein, historians have evaluated the examination process in late imperial China from the perspective of the modernization process in modern Europe and the United States. They have thereby successfully exposed the failure of the Confucian system to advance the specialization and training in science that are deemed essential for nation-states to progress beyond their premodern institutions and autocratic political traditions. In this article, I caution against such contemporary, ahistorical standards for political, cultural, and social formation. These a priori judgments are often expressed teleologically when tied to the “modernization narrative” that still pervades our historiography of Ming (1368–1644) and Ch'ing (1644–1911) dynasty China.
Rational-Choice Models and Asian Studies
Authors: Little Daniel
Published: April 2006

The rational-choice paradigm has been attractive to many area specialists in their efforts to arrive at explanations of social and political behavior in various parts of the world. This model of explanation is simple yet powerful; we attempt to explain a pattern of social behavior or an enduring social arrangement as the aggregate outcome of the goal-directed choices of large numbers of rational agents. Why did the Nian rebellion occur? It was the result of the individual-level survival strategies of north China peasants (Perry 1980). Why did the central places of late imperial Sichuan conform to the hexagonal arrays predicted by central-place theory? Because participants—consumers, merchants, and officials—made rational decisions based on considerations of transport cost (Skinner 1964–65). Why was late imperial Chinese agriculture stagnant? Because none of the actors within the agricultural system had both the incentive and the capacity to invest in agricultural innovation (Lippit 1987).
Reconciling Universalism and Relativism in Political Culture: A View Based on Economic and Psychological Perspectives
Authors: Wilson Richard W.
Published: April 2006

The concept of political culture was formulated in the postwar period as a way of bringing human motivation more sharply into account in cross-cultural analyses of behavior. A persistent difficulty, however, has involved validating its theoretical premises and methodological criteria. So frustrating has this problem proved to be that many have relegated political culture to a residual category of explanation. Indeed, a major reason for the popularity of the rational-actor paradigm is its effort to circumvent these difficulties by utilizing a value-maximizing dimension for motivation.
Headhunting, History, and Exchange in Upland Sulawesi
Authors: George Kenneth M.
Published: April 2006

A few weeks after the rice harvest of 1985, drums, song, and loud cries echoed through the headwaters of the Salu Mambi, celebrating the ambush of seven victims in regions downstream. Several bands of headhunters had returned with their bloodless trophies to renew the fertility of their terraces and the prosperity of their households. If such forays appear to be troubling anachronisms in Indonesia's aging New Order, they also display the surprising tenacity of those mythical realities that shape local history. What makes these annual headhunts so unusual and so instructive is the absence of real violence: no enemy actually is slain, no human head is taken. Instead, a village sends out a cohort of weaponless headhunters to get a surrogate head—;usually a coconut bought in a nearby market town. Upon the cohort's return, the community launches into a weeklong ceremony of music, feasting, and speechmaking to honor the headhunters and to glorify the village. Yet the ceremony also commemorates the past, especially with songs and liturgical chants that depict scenes from the ritual headhunts of an earlier era. In short, what takes place is not a headhunt, but something staged to look like one.
Shaping and Reshaping the Tasaday: A Question of Cultural Identity—A Review Article
Authors: Yengoyan Aram A.
Published: April 2006

The twenty years during which the Tasaday of the southern Philippines have drawn the attention of anthropologists and social scientists can be divided into two major periods. The first is the “discovery” of the Tasaday in the early 1970s, followed by nearly fifteen years of relative neglect. The second is the eruption in the late 1980s of charges that the Tasaday were an instance of fraud, deception, and political corruption by the Marcos regime.

Initially, the Tasaday were portrayed as exotic in their isolation, their hunting and gathering lifestyle, their nakedness, their existence in caves, and their gentleness. Exotic “others” have been similarly characterized by descriptive (usually one-word) labels that emblemize what the people and the society are thought to be about. Thus, Kalinga are litigious, Samoans are sexually liberated, Tikopians are hierarchical, Javanese are patient, Balinese are theatrical, and Yanomamo are fierce.
Hiroshima and the Place of the Narrator
Authors: Treat John Whittier
Published: April 2006

In ōta yōko's (1903?–63) novel Han-ningen (Half-Human, 1954) the heroine, named Oda Atsuko, is like author Ōta herself a famous A-bomb writer suffering from severe depression. She enters the hospital in an attempt to cure an addiction to tranquilizers whose intemperate use derives from very real, but to the medical profession opaque, neuroses ultimately due to the trauma of Hiroshima. No treatment proves totally effective. Medicine can only hope to counter illness, not history, and Oda's deepest torments remain chronic. She continues to be plagued by a frustration linked in the novel's fifth chapter with the choices she has faced in the seven years since the end of the Second World War: suicide, flight, or the writing of a “good work of literature.” Throughout the novel Oda dismisses suicide as not in her nature; Ota, in her essay “Ikinokori no shinri” (The psychology of survival, 1952), concludes that no Japanese writer can abandon Japan, and her heroine here concurs. Of Oda's three alternatives all that is left is the writing of a good work, but that too seems elusive. What constitutes “good” is unclear. Just how she might recognize such a work (ii sakuhin to wa nanimono ka) is a literary problem inextricably bound with Oda's physical and psychological problems, and all have arisen from her presence at Hiroshima's destruction on August 6, 1945.
Death and the Emperor: Mishima, Ōe, and the Politics of Betrayal
Authors: Napier Susan J.
Published: April 2006

In japan in the late 1980s, a society that is arguably one of the most modern, pragmatic, and materialist in the world, the problem of the emperor system initially seems almost irrelevant. And yet the imperial house continues to excite controversy and concern, as is clear in the full-scale media coverage given to an imperial visit or an imperial illness, and this controversy is on a far deeper and more divisive level than would be the case for such ostensible equivalents as the British royal family. The reasons behind this excitement are both obvious and problematic: the emperor is of course tied to the war and the whole complex of emotions that middle-aged Japanese feel toward it, but on a broader level the imperial house is also tied to modern Japanese history as a whole and thus to the conception that Japanese have of themselves in the postwar period.
Lineage Organization in North China
Authors: Cohen Myron L.
Published: April 2006

North china heretofore has been only minimally involved in the modern anthropological analysis of Chinese patrilineal kinship. In this region, lineage organization prior to the Communist era comprised a social structure, symbolism, and arrangement of ritual that call into question the line of anthropological inquiry that has focused almost exclusively on the linkages between a lineage's corporate resources and its social cohesion. The characteristics of lineages in Yangmansa, a village approximately seventy-five kilometers south of Beijing, appear to have been typical of this broader north China pattern considerably different from those associated with the southeastern Chinese model that has dominated the anthropological literature. Although many elements of northern lineage organization are found also in the southeast and elsewhere in China, they are combined in the north into a distinctive arrangement of cemeteries, graves, ancestral scrolls, ancestral tablets, and corporate groups linked to a characteristic annual ritual cycle. I deal first with the expression in Yangmansa of key features of the north China pattern, but also draw on other sources to fill out the picture and establish its broader regional relevance.
Presidential Address: Toward the Complete Asianist
Authors: Murphey Rhoads
Published: April 2006

I appreciate being here in this role, remembering those, including my teachers, who have stood here before me, and remembering the role of the AAS in providing the commonality from which all Asianists benefit, the freemasonry of shared learning. Most of us prefer to work individually as scholars, but none of us really works or writes alone. We are sustained by our links, in print and in person, with generations of fellow scholars. That vital nexus is greatly enhanced through our common enterprise in the Association, and we owe it and its dedicated staff a profound debt. This is our fortieth annual meeting, and we have much to celebrate: our sound organizational and financial position and—the object of all our collective efforts—a vigorous community of scholars of Asia.
Playing or Praying: A Sufi Saint's Day in Surat
Authors: Van Der Veer Peter
Published: April 2006

In surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, a multiplicity of meanings is attached to the cult of the Rifa'i saint by different groups of Muslims, such as the holy man (pir) and his family, his lay followers, the Rifa'i faqirs, and the Tablighis (Reform Muslims who are the main opponents of the cult), as well as by Hindus. It is argued that none of these meanings have come to dominate and entirely marginalize the others. This article will describe a local arena in which debate about Muslim ritual practice is largely an “internal” one among Muslims about such Islamic issues as the relation between God and believer and the sources of authoritative knowledge and behavior. The concept of hereditary, saintly power is paramount in shaping the Rifa'i forms of celebration or “playing” on the saint's day. In discourse about Rifa'i ritual, it is contrasted with “praying” to God.
Marriage, Divorce, and Revolution: Reading between the Lines of theBook of Changes
Authors: Shaughnessy Edward L.
Published: April 2006

The enigmatic images contained in theBook of Changes(Yijing or Zhouyi) have been interpreted, since shortly after the final redaction of the text, to refer to universal themes, transforming a text that was originally used in divination into a repository of wisdom for the ages. While this tradition continues strong more than twenty-five-hundred years after its first emergence, it has been challenged in the present century by a new historiographical approach that has attempted to return ancient Chinese texts to the immediate historical contexts of their composition and to interpret their language within the strictures of that context.
Squaring Accounts: Commercial Bookkeeping Methods and Capitalist Rationalism in Late Qing and Republican China
Authors: Gardella Robert
Published: April 2006

Accounting has been defined as “the art of classifying, recording, and reporting significant financial events to facilitate effective economic activity” (Davidson 1968:14). The description, terse as it is, evokes the image of accounting's role as overseer in the global formation of mercantile and industrial capitalism. According to the historical sociologists Werner Sombart and Max Weber, methodical accounting methods were basic attributes of the development of modern capitalism in the West, and in the West alone. Yet, as Gary Hamilton observes, “uniqueness is a comparative claim, as well as a presumption underlying much historical research” (1985:66–67). In other words, claims of singularity should be redocumented by sound historical comparisons, rather than continually inferred on the basis of conventional wisdom.
Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation
Authors: Subrahmanyam Sanjay
Published: April 2006

The idea of trader communities spread across the shores of the Indian Ocean, or along the caravan routes of the Asian heartland, is a familiar one. Once designated as the ubiquitous “pedlars” of the “traditional trade of Asia,” these traders have more recently been described using the term “diaspora”—a term not restricted in its application, needless to add, to the Asian context. In the hands of Philip D. Curtin, the idea of traders in a diaspora has become a simple but powerful tool to analyze the phenomenon of what he terms “cross-cultural trade.” What, then, is a diaspora? To Curtin, a diaspora is “a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities,” that are, moreover, separated from their “host societies” in each locus in which they are situated (Curtin 1984:5). He continues: “The traders were specialists in a single kind of economic enterprise, whereas the host society was awholesociety, with many occupations, class stratification and political divisions between the rulers and the ruled” (Curtin 1984:5).
Presidential Address: Something Old, Something New—Tradition and Culture in the Study of Japan
Authors: Smith Robert J.
Published: April 2006

The privilege of addressing this audience is one I never expected to have. That it contains so many of my teachers and students, as well as past, present, and perhaps future colleagues, makes the occasion a particularly happy one for me. Something of a summing up seems in order. I shall make it brief.
Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army
Authors: Steinhoff Patricia G.
Published: April 2006

A tiny, radical student group seems at first glance to be an unlikely vantage point from which to evaluate continuity and change in the social organization of Japan. Yet social scientists often study extremes and misfits in order to gain new perspective on the conventional and normative. Whatever the people on the margin share unquestioningly with the rest of the society hints at the breadth and power of social norms; whatever they question, or have trouble doing, points to the inevitable cracks in the social order. Moreover, when a society seems to emphasize harmony and order, it is particularly important to examine the points and processes of conflict. Points of conflict are the harbingers of social change, and processes for managing conflict reveal the price that is paid for order.
Justices andPaṇḍitas: Some Ironies in Contemporary Readings of the Hindu Legal Past
Authors: Lariviere Richard W.
Published: April 2006

India's history provides one of the best documented examples of colonialism. The British kept meticulous records of their attempts to improve, govern, and even exploit the people and institutions of the subcontinent. Improvement and government often occurred at the expense of traditional institutions, especially in the area of the legal tradition. The British are responsible for the decline and eventual demise of the livingdharmaśāstra(science of orthodox behavior) tradition. The tradition has not been resuscitated in independent India. Nevertheless, even though the office ofPaṇḍita(traditional expert) has long been abolished from the courts and the very training of modernPaṇḍitashas become rare, the texts of thedharmaśāstratradition continue to be used in a very “paṇḍitic” fashion by the courts of modern India. The justices function asPaṇḍitas, and the texts they cite are mere window dressing for the interpretations of Hindu law they seek to promulgate.
Northeast Asia Centered Around Korea: Ch'oe Namsŏn's View of History
Authors: Allen Chizuko T.
Published: April 2006

Ch'oe namsŏn (1890–1957) was a leading Korean intellectual during the era of Japanese control (1910–1945). His activities included publishing Korea's first popular modern magazine, pioneering modern poetry in Korean, drafting the Declaration of Independence for the 1919 March First Independence Movement, and publishing numerous articles on Korean culture. He was also a leading Korean historian at a time when Japanese scholars monopolized Korean studies.
The Material Basis for Separatism: The Tamil Eelam Movement in Sri Lanka
Authors: Shastri Amita
Published: April 2006

The Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has aroused increasing international attention. The demands of the Sri Lankan Tamil ethnoregional movement for greater independence from the Sinhalese-dominated center developed through various stages into a call for a separate state in the mid-1970s. This was followed by an increase in the use of organized violence by both sides in the conflict. Most recently, the continued resistance of core Tamil militants to Indian attempts to institute a solution within a united SriLanka has emphasized the independent indigenous roots and powerful motivating vision of the call for a separate state.
Presidential Address: Contending Narratives—The Political Life of the Indian Epics
Authors: Miller Barbara Stoler
Published: April 2006

Unlike edward cameron dimock, Henry David Thoreau never traveled to India, but he imagined Yankee merchant ships transporting ice blocks from Walden Pond to New Orleans and Calcutta, where the pure Walden water would mingle with the sacred water of the Ganges. Less romantically, one can imagine the Walden ice mingling with British gin and tonic in clubs of the East India Company. In our own time, Ed Dimock has brought America and India together in more significant ways. I'm delighted that he is in New Orleans today—honoring him seems a wonderful way of celebrating ourselves on this fiftieth anniversary of the Association for Asian Studies.
Chinese Hierarchy in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Taylor Romeyn
Published: April 2006

How are we to understand the history of a nonmodern civilization without refracting and distorting what we see through the prism of the ostensibly individualistic and egalitarian modern culture in which most of us live and which we tend to take as normative? In this article I invite other modern-minded readers to turn our worldview upside down and look at Chinese society over the long term from the perspective of its official ideology and not from the perspective of a universalized modern worldview in which economic relations are privileged above all others.
Buddhist Allegory in theJourney to the West
Authors: Bantly Francisca Cho
Published: April 2006

The narrative richness of the Chinese Ming (1368–1644) novel known as theHsi-yu chi,orThe Journey to the West, presents a daunting challenge to the interpreter. The bewildering array of cultural lore—especially from the three major religious traditions of China (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism)—is so diverse and boldly interwoven that it almost appears as “simply furniture thrown in to impress, or mock, the reader” (Plaks 1977:181). Thus any interpretation faces the danger of exaggerating the importance of these cultural and religious elements, only to discover that the author offered them in jest.
Dai Li and the Liu Geqing Affair: Heroism in the Chinese Secret Service During the War of Resistance
Authors: Yeh Wen-Hsin
Published: April 2006

The nationalist military intelligence service has long been a controversial topic in the history of the Chinese Republic (1912–49). This organization, known as the Military Bureau of Statistics and Investigation (Junshi Weiyuanhui Tongji Diaocha Ju, or Juntong), first impinged on civilian society in the 1930s, when it carried out violent deeds against urban-based intellectuals critical of the Nationalist party's rule. Newspaper writers and editors subsequently compared Juntong to the infamous Eastern Depot and Embroidered Guards of the despotic Ming emperors, denouncing the “feudal” and “fascist” nature of Nationalist rule in political tracts and assemblies. During the Pacific War the image of Juntong's chief, General Dai Li (1897–1946), was blackened when he was compared to the Nazi Heinrich Himmler by the Western press. In the bitter and protracted civil struggles between the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD) after 1941, the Communists focused sharply on the atrocities committed by Juntong and portrayed Dai Li as a monstrous instrument of Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship.
Scripture and Society in Modern Muslim Asia—A Symposium Introduction
Authors: Bowen John R.
Published: April 2006

Since the latenineteenth century, Muslim movements for religious and social reform have underscored the value of making scripture accessible to a broad public. Scholars and activists alike have urged ordinary Muslim men and women to study and follow the Qur'ān and the hadīth (the reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds), and to do so they have rendered these scriptural writings and commentaries on them into the vernaculars of Asia, Africa, and Europe. They have also framed a wide range of appeals—to study the sciences, to modernize society, to stage a revolution—in the language and format of scriptural commentary. Vernacular writings (and, more recently, audio and videocassettes) based on scripture provide the foundations of popular religious education (Shahrani 1991), figure prominently in political movements (Fischer 1980; Kepel 1985), and serve as guides for living for Muslims traveling outside their homelands (Kepel 1987). The modern period has seen an explosion in the range of languages, genres, and contexts in which Muslims have authoritatively deployed scripture.