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In the sengoku era in Japan, warlords and religious institutions vied for supremacy, with powerhouses such as the Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism fanning violent uprisings of ikko ikki, bands of commoners fighting for various causes. Tsang delves into the complex and often contradictory relationship between these groups.

The Tale of Genji has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to obscurity. The author calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light on this undervalued body of work and examining three representative texts as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji.

Park argues that the mukwa-Korea's state military examination-was not only the primary means of recruiting aristocrats as new members of the military bureaucracy, but also a way for the ruling elite to partially satisfy the status aspirations of marginalized regional elites, secondary status groups, commoners, and manumitted slaves.

The goal of Worldly Stage is to show how the theater acquired the figurative power to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. Conceptions of theatrical spectatorship, Sophie Volpp argues, helped shape a discourse on social spectatorship that suggested how a discerning person might evaluate the performance of status.

This study focuses on postwar Japan's foreign policy making in the political and security areas, the core UN missions. The intent is to illustrate how policy goals forged by national security concerns, domestic politics, and psychological needs gave shape to Japan's complicated and sometimes incongruous policy toward the UN since World War II.

This book presents two histories of the early Korean kingdom of Paekche (trad. 18 BCE-660 CE). The first, written by Best, is based largely on primary sources. This initial history serves, in part, to introduce the second, an extensively annotated translation of the oldest history of the kingdom, The Paekche Annals (Paekche pon'gi).

Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that hindered the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, native-place lodges fostered a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms in the early 20th century.

Nakamura argues that the study of Western medicine assembled doctors from all over the country in efforts to effect social change. By examining the social impact of Western learning at the level of everyday life, the book offers a broad picture of the way in which Western medicine, and Western knowledge, was absorbed and adapted in Japan.

Before the late 1980s Taiwan's successful exporters were overwhelmingly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). What accounts for their success and their benign neglect by the state? The author argues that it was an unintended consequence of the state's policy toward the private sector and its political strategies for managing societal forces.

Kokugaku, or nativism, was an important intellectual movement from the 17th-19th century in Japan, and its worldview remains influential. McNally's primary goal is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane's role in the creation and perpetuation of an enduring intellectual tradition.

What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.

Why does literature's voice still seduce us into reading? What is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? These essays on Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, visit the force of the scandalous to confront such questions.

Throughout history, Mount Tai has been a magnet for both women and men from all classes-emperors, aristocrats, officials, literati, and villagers. This book examines the behavior of those who made the pilgrimage to Mount Tai and their interpretations of its sacrality and history, as a means of better understanding their identities and mentalities.

This book examines the Chinese opium crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators.

This book examines the Nanjing decade of Guomindang rule (1927-1937) and the early post-Mao reform era (1980-1992) of Chinese history that have commonly been viewed as periods of state disintegration or retreat. And they were-at the central level. When reexamined at the local level, however, both are revealed as periods of state building.

Among the most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralized, compulsory educational system modeled after those in Europe and America. But with almost no support from the government, local officials, teachers, and citizens pursued alternative visions. Their efforts led to the growth and consolidation of a new educational system.

One of the most exciting developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of a rich, diverse tradition of women's writing of the imperial period. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women's writings not only in poetry but in essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.

Eyferth charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan, tracing the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men.

Buddhism in medieval Korea is characterized as "State Protection Buddhism," a religion whose primary purpose was to rally support (supernatural and popular) for and legitimate the state. This study is an attempt to specify Buddhism's place in Koryo and to ascertain to what extent and in what areas Buddhism functioned as a state religion.

Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power.

Informed by theories of nostalgia, collective memory, cultural nationalism, and gender, this book draws on the author's extensive fieldwork in probing the practice of identity-making and the processes at work when Japan becomes "Japan."

These chapters trace the biographical thread running through Nakagami's works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.

Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited for marketing. This book offers ethnographic case studies on the symbolic qualities of idols and how they relate to the conceptualization of self among adolescents.

In this cross-cultural study of "emotion management," the author argues that even though the goals of normative control in factories, offices, and shops may be similar across cultures, organizational structure and the surrounding culture affect how that control is discussed and conceived.

This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged.

By looking at how Tokyo Disneyland is experienced by employees, management and visitors, Aviad Raz shows that it is much more an example of successful importation, adaption, and domestication, and that it has succeeded precisely because it has become Japanese even while marketing itself as foreign.

A careful, factual account of the institutional forms and foreign relations in the Ch'ing dynasty after 1860.

Fogeltells the strange story of this cocky,indolent carouser who became adisciplined scholar and passionateadvocate of the worth of all humanity. Fogel examines Nakae's Sinological work in the context of hiswide reading in German philosophy, Western historiography, andclassical Chinese sources. He alsotranslates Nakae's wartime diary.

Kawai Eijiro was a controversial figure in Japan during the interwar years. Atsuko Hirai examines the family and school influences that contributed to the development of Kawai's thought, and analyzes the manner in which the ideas of Western philosophers and British labor ideologues were absorbed into a receptive and creative East Asian mind.