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In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "e;total empire"e; met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions-one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines.Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.

In Mobilizing Japanese Youth, Christopher Gerteis examines how non-state institutions in Japan-left-wing radicals and right-wing activists-attempted to mold the political consciousness of the nation's first postwar generation, which by the late 1960s were the demographic majority of voting-age adults. Gerteis argues that socially constructed aspects of class and gender preconfigured the forms of political rhetoric and social organization that both the far-right and far-left deployed to mobilize postwar, further exacerbating the levels of social and political alienation expressed by young blue- and pink- collar working men and women well into the 1970s, illustrated by high-profile acts of political violence committed by young Japanese in this era.As Gerteis shows, Japanese youth were profoundly influenced by a transnational flow of ideas and people that constituted a unique historical convergence of pan-Asianism, Mao-ism, black nationalism, anti-imperialism, anticommunism, neo-fascism, and ultra-nationalism. Mobilizing Japanese Youth carefully unpacks their formative experiences and the social, cultural, and political challenges to both the hegemonic culture and the authority of the Japanese state that engulfed them. The 1950s-style mass-mobilization efforts orchestrated by organized labor could not capture their political imagination in the way that more extreme ideologies could. By focusing on how far-right and far-left organizations attempted to reach-out to young radicals, especially those of working-class origins, this book offers a new understanding of successive waves of youth radicalism since 1960.

Revolution Goes East is an intellectual history that applies a novel global perspective to the classic story of the rise of communism and the various reactions it provoked in Imperial Japan. Tatiana Linkhoeva demonstrates how contemporary discussions of the Russian Revolution, its containment, and the issue of imperialism played a fundamental role in shaping Japan's imperial society and state.In this bold approach, Linkhoeva explores attitudes toward the Soviet Union and the communist movement among the Japanese military and politicians, as well as interwar leftist and rightist intellectuals and activists. Her book draws on extensive research in both published and archival documents, including memoirs, newspaper and journal articles, political pamphlets, and Comintern archives. Revolution Goes East presents us with a compelling argument that the interwar Japanese Left replicated the Orientalist outlook of Marxism-Leninism in its relationship with the rest of Asia, and that this proved to be its undoing. Furthermore, Linkhoeva shows that Japanese imperial anticommunism was based on geopolitical interests for the stability of the empire rather than on fear of communist ideology.Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.

How the various, often contradictory, images of the Tokaido Shinkansen prompted a reimagination of identity on the levels of individual, metropolis, and nation in a changing Japan.

The Jahriyya Sufis-a primarily Sinophone order in northwest China-inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation.

Daniel Barish explores debates surrounding the education of the final three Qing emperors, showing how imperial curricula became proxy battles for divergent visions of how to restabilize the country. Through the lens of the education of young emperors, Learning to Rule develops a new understanding of the late Qing era.

In Resurrecting Nagasaki, Chad R. Diehl examines the reconstruction of Nagasaki City after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945. Diehl illuminates the genesis of narratives surrounding the bombing by following the people and groups who contributed to the city's rise from the ashes and shaped its postwar image in Japan and the world. Municipal officials, survivor-activist groups, the Catholic community, and American occupation officials interpreted the destruction and envisioned the reconstruction of the city from different and sometimes disparate perspectives. Each group's narrative situated the significance of the bombing within the city's postwar urban identity in unique ways, informing the discourse of reconstruction as well as its physical manifestations in the city's revival. Diehl's analysis reveals how these atomic narratives shaped both the way Nagasaki rebuilt and the ways in which popular discourse on the atomic bombings framed the city's experience for decades.

The field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional and philosophical understandings of the world. The author recounts how Japanese scholars developed a discipline of natural history analogous to Europe's but created independently, without direct influence.

Tao Wang offers a new account of Sino-American relations in the mid-1950s that situates the two great powers in their international context. He reveals how both the United States and China adopted a policy of attempting to isolate their adversary and explores how Chinese and American leaders perceived and reacted to each other's strategies.

Founded in 1676, Mindroeling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindroeling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics.

Socialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literary works from the Mao era that reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. As Nicolai Volland demonstrates, after 1949 China engaged with the world beyond its borders in a variety of ways and on many levels-politically, economically, and culturally. Far from rejecting the worldliness of earlier eras, the young People's Republic developed its own cosmopolitanism. Rather than a radical break with the past, Chinese socialist literature should be seen as an integral and important chapter in China's long search to find a place within world literature. Socialist Cosmopolitanism revisits a range of genres, from poetry and land reform novels to science fiction and children's literature, and shows how Chinese writers and readers alike saw their own literary production as part of a much larger literary universe. This literary space, reaching from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Moscow to Hanoi, allowed authors and texts to travel, reinventing the meaning of world literature. Chinese socialist literature was not driven solely by politics but by an ambitious-but ultimately doomed-attempt to redraw the literary world map.

Robert Culp explores the world of commercial publishing to offer a new perspective on modern China's cultural transformations. Culp examines China's largest and most influential publishing companies during the late Qing and Republican periods and into the early years of the People's Republic.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of corruption and change in the Chinese Communist Party, Cadres and Corruption reveals the long history of the party's inability to maintain a corps of committed and disciplined cadres.

By examining the manufacturing, commercial, and cultural activities of the maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940), Eugenia Lean illustrates how lettered men of early-twentieth-century China engaged in "vernacular industrialism," the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues.

Beauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive.

By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial youth become passionate supporters of Japanese imperial nationalism? And what happened to these youth after the war...

The origins and evolution of technocratic fascism in wartime Japan.

Passage to Manhood is a groundbreaking and beautifully written ethnography that addresses the intersection of modernity, heroin use, and AIDS as they intersect in a new "rite-of-passage" among young ethnic-minority males in contemporary China.

Reto Hofmann uncovers the ideological links between the fascist governments and cultures of Japan and Italy, shedding light on the formation of fascism's global...