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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.

This book documents an Islamic-Confucian school of scholarship that flourished-mostly in the Yangzi Delta-in the 17th and 18th centuries. Drawing on previously unstudied sources, it reconstructs the network of Muslim scholars responsible for the creation and circulation of a large corpus of Chinese Islamic written material-the so-called Han Kitab.

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.

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 book deals with the poetic configurations of the private garden in cities from the ninth to the eleventh century in relation to the development of the private sphere in Chinese literati culture.

The "Analects" is one of the most influential texts in human history. This is an analysis of four key works dating from the late 2nd century to the mid 19th century: the commentaries of He Yan, Huang Kan, Zhu Xi and Liu Baonan and Liu Gongmian.

In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan's military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book.

Despite Taiwan's rise as an economic force in the world, modernity has not led to a Weberian process of disenchantment or curbed religiosity. To the contrary, other factors-social, economic, political-have stimulated religion. How and why this has happened are central issues in this book.

Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape changers who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, they were immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, tricksters and Confucian paragons. Huntington investigates the fox as alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human.

For 1,300 years, Chinese calligraphy was based on the elegant art of Wang Xizhi (A.D. 303-361). But the emergence in the 17th century of a style modeled on the rough, broken epigraphs of ancient artifacts led to the formation of the stele school. Eminent calligrapher and art theorist Fu Shan (1607-1685) was a dominant force in this school.

The authors analyze the social, cultural, and political meaning attached to the cult of Confucius; its history; the legends, images, and rituals associated with it; the power of the descendants of Confucius; the main temple in the birthplace of Confucius; and the contemporary fate of temples to Confucius.

In this comprehensive study of the rhetoric, narrative patterns, and intellectual content of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, David Schaberg reads these two collections of historical anecdotes as traces of a historiographical practice that flourished around the fourth century BCE among the followers of Confucius.

Scholars have often taken Shinkokinshu (1205) to represent a nostalgia for greatness presumed to have been lost in the wars of the late 1100s. The author argues that the compilers of this anthology of waka poetry instead saw their collection as a "new" beginning, a revitalization and affirmation of courtly traditions, and not a reaction to loss.

By approaching May Fourth from novel perspectives, the authors of the eight studies in this volume seek to contribute to the ongoing critique of the movement.

Investigating the late 16th through the 19th century, this work looks at the shifting boundaries between the Choson state and the adherents of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and popular religions. It counters the static view of the Korean Confucian state and elucidates its relationship to the wider Confucian community and religious groups.

The twelve essays in this volume underscore the similarities between Chinese and American approaches to bilateral diplomacy and between their perceptions of each other's policy-making motivations.

In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming-Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives.

This study links two sets of concerns--the focus of recent studies of the nation on language, culture, education, and race; and the emphasis of diplomatic history on international developments--to show how political, diplomatic, and cultural concerns work together to shape national identity.

Free trade proponent Ayukawa Yoshisuke (1880-1967) was founder of the Nissan conglomerate and leader of the Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation, a linchpin of Japan's efforts to economically exploit its overseas dependencies. Through exploring the reasons for Ayukawa's failure, Iguchi illuminates many of Japan's current economic problems.

Hyung Il Pai examines how archaeological finds from Northeast Asia have been used in Korea to construct a myth of state formation emphasizing the ancient development of a pure Korean race that created a civilization rivaling those of China and Japan. He shows that the Korean state was formed far later with influences from throughout Northern Asia.

Focusing on the marginal region of Toyama, on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the Meiji Restoration.