New Books in East Asian Studies

Rayna Denison’s Anime: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015) uses genre as a window into the evolving global phenomenon of Japanese animation. Denison’s wide-ranging analysis tackles the anime themselves – including classics such as Astro Boy, Akira, Urotsukidōji, Spirited Away, and Natsume’s Book of Friends – but also the mechanics behind anime production and distribution in Japan, the Unite...

Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin: Popular Culture, Masculinity, and Social Perceptions (Springer, 2021) explores how language ideologies have emerged for gangtaiqiang through a combination of indexical and ideological processes in televised media. Gangtaiqiang (Hong Kong-Taiwan accent), a socially recognizable form of mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin, has become a stereotype for many Chinese mainlanders...

Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan’s avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth centur...

Several high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault have helped the #MeToo movement in China continue to make impacts on a society that is highly controlled and surveilled. Most recently, tennis star Peng Shuai’s saga has accused former top Chinese Communist Party leader, Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Although Peng did not say that she is part of the #MeToo movement, her speaking out has...

China: Up Close and Personal is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Karl Gerth, Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies and Professor of History at UC San Diego. This wide-ranging conversation covers the emerging American-style consumer culture of China which is revolutionizing the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese, how it has transformed its economy...

Alisa Freedman's book Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost (Association for Asian Studies, 2021) explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining select...

COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme, discusses Southeast Asian countries’ key priorities going into the conference and the commitments they made in Glasgow, including climate finance, exit from coal and ending defore...

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread to Europe and other parts of the globe in spring of 2020, the Chinese government started reporting donations of Personal Protective Equipment as well as other medical supplies to areas experiencing severe shortage. Listen to Dr. Lauri Paltemaa and Dr. Hermann Aubié discuss their research on the exact nature of China's so-called Mask Diplomacy. How did the recent sit...

In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic notions of a free market economy emerged in China a century and half earlier than in Europe. In response to the commercial revolutions of the late 1500s, Chinese intellectuals and officials called for the end of state intervention in the market, recognizi...

Shao-yun Yang's The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China (University of Washington Press, 2019) challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of...

The second of three volumes of essays that engage Japanese philosophers as intercultural thinkers, this collection critically probes seminal works for their historical significance and contemporary relevance. Japanese Philosophy in the Making 2: Borderline Interrogations (Chisokudo, 2019) shows how the relational ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō serves as a resource for new conceptions of trust, dignity,...

“The Europeans raise all the cattle, but the Chinese get all the milk.” This joke, told in colonial Singapore, was indicative of the importance of the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia. Chinese migrants were miners, laborers, merchants and traders: the foundation of many colonial cities throughout Asia--while also making sure that their own communities back home benefited. Distant Shores:...

Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender formally ended the war in the Pacific and brought to a close one of the most cataclysmic engagements in history, one that had cost the lives of millions. VJ―Victory over Japan―Day had taken place two weeks or so earlier, in the wake of the dropping of the...

When faced with some of the complex identity questions which often arise in borderlands, Koreans in China – known as Chosonjok in Korean, Chaoxianzu in Chinese – have long seemed adept at navigating the shifting demands of being both Chinese and Korean. Sunhee Koo’s new book, Sound of the Border: Music and Identity of Korean Minority Nationality in China (U Hawaii Press, 2021), makes a strong case...

Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale (Routledge, 2020) is about the process that made it possible to film the 2011 Taiwanese blockbuster Seediq Bale in Seediq, an endangered indigenous language. Seediq Bale celebrates the headhunters who rebelled against or collaborated with the Japanese colonizers at or around a hill station called Musha starting on October 27, 1930...

What is digital vigilantism? How do Chinese citizens seek justice online? How does digital vigilantism reflect contemporary Chinese technological and socio-political development? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Qian Huang, lecturer and PhD Candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, explains the growing phenomenon of online coll...

Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy by James Garrison (SUNY Press 2021), argues that the tradition of Confucian philosophy can provide resources for theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault in understanding what it is to be a subject in the social world. Garrison’s interlocutors are intercultural, from Confucius to Kant, Arendt t...

Many Western entrepreneurs and businesses have foundered in trying to set up shop in China. Different expectations, different ways of doing business, different institutions and platforms—all come together to remove any pretensions that one can easily transplant a foreign business model into the Chinese market. One of these entrepreneurs was Xavier Naville, who moved to China in 1997 where he built...

In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites of work that were accessible to anyone. Enticed by the chance to build personally fulfilling careers, many young women entered Japan's digital economy by performing unpaid labor as photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone no...

What happened to the Buddhist scholars who stayed behind in Tibet and China after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled from the People’s Liberation Army in 1959? In Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China (Columbia University Press 2021), Nicole Willock discovers through the stories and writings of the “Three Polymaths” (Tib. mkhas pa mi gsum) of...

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017) by Hiromu Nagahara is the first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry. The book connects the rise of mass entertainment, epitomized by ryūkōka (“popular songs”), with Japan’s transformation into a middle-class society in the years after World War II. With the ar...

Japan's nationalist right have used the internet to organize offline activism in increasingly visible ways. Jeffrey J. Hall, investigates the role of internet-mediated activism in Japan's ongoing historical and territorial disputes. He explores the emergence of two right-wing activist organizations, Nihon Bunka Channel Sakura and Ganbare Nippon, which have played a significant role in pressure cam...

Today I spoke to Professor Andrew Kipnis about his book on social change in urban China from the perspective of funerals. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of...

Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town  (Viking, 2021) is memoir, ethnography, cookbook, and sketchbook rolled into one." This is the Princeton Independence's description of the polyvocal and artistic text, written by Hannah Kirshner. I cannot agree more with the following review they made on the creative quality of the book: "It evokes the best of...

In the past four hundred years, the cultural position of Taiwan has been undergoing a series of drastic changes due to constant political turmoil. From the early seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, the ruling power of Taiwan shifted from Spaniard and Dutch to the Late-Ming Zheng regime, then to the Qing court and imperial Japan, and finally to the Kuomintang (KMT) government from Ch...