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Drawing on a decade of research, Erin Brightwell analyzes eight Mirrors and related medieval Japanese texts recounting the history of that time and place. Downplayed and obscured by previous scholars, the mirrors emerge as a once-dominant genre of historical writing-a means by which authors brought order to the chaos of the period.

This work provides a history of the Rinzai Zen monastic institution in Medieval Japan.

The political fragmentation and constant warfare of medieval Japan did not necessarily inhibit economic growth. Rather, as this book shows, these conditions created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization, laying the groundwork for Japan's transformation into an early modern society.

The central argument of this study of the development of a communications network linking the far-flung parts of the Japanese imperium is that modern telecommunications not only served to connect these territories but, more important, made it possible for the Japanese to envision an integrated empire in Asia.

One Belt One Road argues that the largest global infrastructure development program in history is not the centralized and systematic project that many assume. Rather, Eyck Freymann suggests, the campaign aims to build the cult of Chinese President Xi Jinping while exporting an ancient model of patronage and tribute.

In Varieties of State Regulation, Yukyung Yeo explores how the Chinese central party-state continues to oversee the most strategic sectors of its economy, and how the form of central state control varies considerably across leading industrial sectors, depending on the dominant mode of state ownership, conception of control, and governing structure.

Earthquake Children is the first book to examine the origins of modern Japan's infrastructure of resilience. Janet Borland vividly demonstrates that Japan's contemporary culture of disaster preparedness-and its people's ability to respond calmly in times of emergency-are the results of learned and practiced behaviors inspired by earlier tragedies.

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown focuses on a Chinese immigrant community in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. It tells the story of how Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state during periods of war and peace.

Seth Jacobowitz rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture, presenting the first systematic study of the ways that media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

In Wings for the Rising Sun, scholar and former airline pilot Jurgen Melzer tells the history of Japanese aviation as a story of international cooperation, competition, and conflict. He details how Japan absorbed technologies from abroad, fostered public enthusiasm for aviation at home, and eventually crafted boldly original flying machines.

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting chronicles the life of a modern art form. In the late 1910s Chinese painters began working outdoors. They also adopted linear perspective and Cartesian optics. Yi Gu reflects on the complex interaction of local and Western aesthetics within the new form and on the nature of visual modernity in China.

With the ascension of a new emperor and the dawn of the Reiwa Era, Kenneth J. Ruoff expands upon and updates The People's Emperor, his study of the monarchy's role as a political, societal, and cultural institution in contemporary Japan.

Adam Kern offers a close reading of the vibrant popular imagination through kibyoshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction from late-eighteenth-century Japan. Illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the student of Japanese cultural history.

Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema's persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Lewis offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the "age of the mass society" in Japan.

Famine Relief in Warlord China explores relief efforts during the greatest ecological crisis of the pre-Nationalist Chinese republic. Pierre Fuller details how indigenous action from the household to the national level, not international intervention, sustained the lives of millions of the destitute in Beijing.

"For over a century, voting has been a surprisingly common political activity in China. This book re-examines China's experiments with elections from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history"--Provided by publisher.

Based on the author's thesis, issued under the title: Subaltern speak: imperial multiplicities in Japan's empire and post-war colonialisms ( Ph. D.--University of California, Santa Barbara, 2011).

Michael A. Fuller's innovative textbook for learning classical Chinese poetry moves beyond the traditional anthology of poems translated into English and instead brings readers-including those with no knowledge of Chinese-as close as possible to the texture of the poems in their original language.

This study of Japan's transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and Tokyo policymakers. Smith sheds light on how average Japanese responded to problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.

Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as mere propaganda, not only was liked in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. Considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art from the point of view of its longue duree, Mittler suggests that it built on a tradition of earlier art works, which allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory.

Where does Neo-Confucianism fit into the story of China's history? This book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support.

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.

Assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) - commonly called the Tokyo trial - established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This title explores some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions.

From his birth in the lowest stratum of the samurai class to his assassination at the hands of right-wing militarists, Takahashi Korekiyo (1854-1936) lived through tumultuous times that shaped the course of modern Japanese history. This biography underscores the profound influence of Korekiyo on the political and economic development of Japan.

Following the end of WWII in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia. This title analyzes how the human remnants of empire served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of the national identities in Japan.

Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture. Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity.

Dancing the Dharma examines the theory and practice of allegory by exploring a select group of medieval Japanese noh plays and treatises. Understanding noh's allegorical structure and paying attention to the localized historical context for individual plays are key to recovering their original function as political and religious allegories.

An extensively researched history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry, Red Silk compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution, and how their actions compelled the party-state to adjust its policy that ultimately proved disastrous.

Edith Sarra radically rethinks the Tale of Genji by focusing on the figure of the house-both the narrative's images of aristocratic mansions and its representation of their inhabitants. Unreal Houses opens new perspectives on the architectonics of the Genji and the feminine milieu that midwifed what has been called the world's first novel.

Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), a historical tale that covers 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings of late Heian society, a golden age of Japanese court literature.