The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AI

Muslims and Matriarchs is a history of an unusual, probably heretical, and ultimately resilient cultural system. The Minangkabau culture of West Sumatra, Indonesia, is well known as the world's largest matrilineal culture; Minangkabau people are also Muslim and famous for their piety. In this book, Jeffrey Hadler examines the changing ideas of home and family in Minangkabau from the late eighteent...

Japan was the only non-Western nation to industrialize before 1900 and its leap into the modern era has stimulated vigorous debates among historians and social scientists. In an innovative discussion that posits the importance of physical well-being as a key indicator of living standards, Susan B. Hanley considers daily life in the three centuries leading up to the modern era in Japan. She conclud...

Much of the world’s population inhabits the urban fringe, an area that is neither fully rural nor urban. Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, epitomizes one of those places. In Saigon’s Edge, Erik Harms explores life in Hóc Môn, putting forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts the people who live at the intersecti...

Many Japanese people consider themselves to be part of an essentially unchanging and isolated ethnic unit in which the biological, linguistic, and cultural aspects of Japanese identity overlap almost completely with each other. In its examination of the processes of ethnogenesis (the formation of ethnic groups) in the Japanese Islands,  Ruins of Identity  offers an approach to ethnicity that diffe...

In this episode, we explore the revolutionary ways in which big data and digital humanities are transforming the study of East Asian history. Drawing insights from scholars and the latest research, including groundbreaking work from the Lee-Campbell Research Group, we delve into how large-scale datasets, digital tools, and computational analysis are unlocking new understandings of historical pheno...

A groundbreaking exploration of US-China relations as seen through the lens of international finance Rising tensions between China and the United States have kept the financial markets on edge as a showdown between the world’s two largest economies seems inevitable. But what most people fail to recognise is the major impact that the financial markets themselves have had on the creation and acceler...

In this ground-breaking new study, Teren Sevea reveals the economic, environmental and religious significance of Islamic miracle workers (pawangs) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Malay world. Through close textual analysis of hitherto overlooked manuscripts and personal interaction with modern pawangs readers are introduced to a universe of miracle workers that existed both in the past an...

Korea Between Empires  chronicles the development of a Korean national consciousness. It focuses on two critical periods in Korean history and asks how key concepts and symbols were created and integrated into political programs to create an original Korean understanding of national identity, the nation-state, and nationalism. Looking at the often-ignored questions of representation, narrative, an...

In the West, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel is a thinker of unusual prominence. In China, he’s a phenomenon, greeted by vast crowds.  China Daily  reports that he has acquired a popularity “usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars.”  China Newsweek  declared him the “most influential foreign figure” of the year. In Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by...

Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea...

In this path breaking book, Eiko Ikegami uncovers a complex history of social life in which aesthetic images became central to Japan's cultural identities. The people of premodern Japan built on earlier aesthetic traditions in part for their own sake, but also to find space for self-expression in the increasingly rigid and tightly controlled Tokugawa political system. In so doing, they incorporate...

In this fine scholarly work, Lopez (Asian Languages and Cultures/Univ. of Michigan) warns his readers away from romanticized visions of Tibet, which ultimately harm that beleaguered nation's prospects for independence. Buddhism, the religion of enlightenment, takes as its task the dispersal of human misconceptions of reality. It is only fitting that, in the wake of heightened popular interest in T...

Seventeenth-century Korea was a country in crisis―successive invasions by Hideyoshi and the Manchus had rocked the Chosòn dynasty (1392-1910), which already was weakened by maladministration, internecine bureaucratic factionalism, unfair taxation, concentration of wealth, military problems, and other ills. Yu Hyòngwòn (1622–1673, pen name, Pan’gye), a recluse scholar, responded to this time of cha...

Winner of the 2012 John Whitney Hall Prize.  Hokkeji, an ancient Nara temple that once stood at the apex of a state convent network established by Queen-Consort Kōmyō (701-760), possesses a history that in some ways is bigger than itself.  Its development is emblematic of larger patterns in the history of female monasticism in Japan. In  Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Pre...

In this important new study, Charles Keith explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. By demonstrating how French colonial rule allowed for the transformation of Catholic missions in Vietnam into broad and powerful economic and institutional structures, Keith discovers the ways race defined ecclesiastical and cultural prestige and control of resources and in...

The Choson state (1392–1910) is typically portrayed as a rigid society because of its hereditary status system, slavery, and Confucian gender norms. However,  The Emotions of Justice  reveals a surprisingly complex picture of a judicial system that operated in a contradictory fashion by discriminating against subjects while simultaneously minimizing such discrimination. Jisoo Kim contends that the...

Lost in Transition tells the story of the “lost generation” that came of age in Japan’s deep economic recession in the 1990s. The book argues that Japan is in the midst of profound changes that have had an especially strong impact on the young generation. The country’s renowned “permanent employment system” has unraveled for young workers, only to be replaced by temporary and insecure forms of emp...

Mollier surveys a few of the 40,000-odd manuscripts found in a sealed chamber at Dunhuang, with a particular eye to the relations between Taoism and Buddhism. Against a background of interfaith rivalry (in which Taoists could depict Lao-tzu reincarnating as Buddha to convert the foreigners, whilst Buddhists had Lao-tzu as Buddha's disciple) she unpicks some interesting stuff about similar doctrine...

This captivating ethnography explores Vietnam’s sex industry as the country ascends the global and regional stage. Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists.  Dealing...

In 2012, Cambodia-an epicenter of violent land grabbing-announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban's Unwritten Rule focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a polit...

Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War's enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and between the civil and the so...

Nuclear power has been a contentious issue in Japan since the 1950s, and in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, the conflict has only grown. Government agencies and the nuclear industry continue to push a nuclear agenda, while the mainstream media adheres to the official line that nuclear power is Japan's future. Public debate about nuclear energy is strongly discouraged....

A transpacific history of clashing imperial ambitions, Contraceptive Diplomacy turns to the history of the birth control movement in the United States and Japan to interpret the struggle for hegemony in the Pacific through the lens of transnational feminism. As the birth control movement spread beyond national and racial borders, it shed its radical bearings and was pressed into the service of lar...

Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy--but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo's sex i...

The Japanese provincial city of Ichijōdani was destroyed in the civil wars of the late sixteenth century but never rebuilt. Archaeological excavations have since uncovered the most detailed late medieval urban site in the country. Drawing on analysis of specific excavated objects and decades of archaeological evidence to study daily life in Ichijōdani, Reading Medieval Ruins in Sixteenth-Century J...