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When Kannon (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) appears in multiple manifestations, the compassionate Buddhist deity’s magnificent powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This book examines the development of sculptures, paintings, and prints associated with the cult of the Six Kannon, which began in Japan in the tenth century and remained strong until its transition, beginning in sixteenth century, to the still active Thirty-Three Kannon cult. The complete set of Six Kannon made in 1224 and housed at the Kyoto temple Daihōonji is an exemplar of the cult’s images. With a diachronic approach, beginning in the eleventh century, individual case studies are employed to reinstate a context for the sets of Six Kannon, the majority of which have been lost or scattered, in order to clarify the former vibrancy, magnitude, and distribution of the cult and enhance knowledge of religious image-making in Japan. While Kannon’s role of assisting beings trapped in the six paths of transmigration is a well-documented catalyst for the selection of six, there are other significant themes at work. Six Kannon worship includes worldly concerns like childbirth and animal husbandry, strong ties between text and image, and numerous cases of matching with Shinto kami groups of six.

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. This book is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film. The book argues that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. The seven in-depth studies include a diverse array of forms (cinematic adaptation of literature, literary adaptation of film, auto-adaptation, and non-narrative adaptation) and a variety of genres (martial arts, melodrama, romance, autobiography, documentary drama). Complementing this formal diversity is a geographical range that far exceeds the cultural, linguistic, and physical boundaries of China. The directors represented here also work in the United States and Europe and reflect the growing international resources of Chinese-language cinema.

This collection of essays examines the production of racial difference and its affects in East Asia under Japanese empire and the postwar geo-political order. The contributors turn to materials that demonstrate how race becomes visible or audible in the processes of inclusion and exclusion. From travelogues and records of speech to photographs, radio, plastic surgery, tattoos, postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks, these explorations of diverse media demonstrate the links between the apprehension of racial difference, the formation of social and political hierarchies, and the experience of everyday culture under an expanding bio-political realm of imperial sovereignty. By demonstrating the ways in which the politics of inclusion and exclusion worked through explicitly racialized modes of representation, this collection sheds light on affective strategies common to the creation and maintenance of subjectivity across imperial formations. It also resituates theoretical and historical discussions of race and empire within an East Asian context, complicating the history of this region in provocative ways.

This book explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the Suharto-era's neoliberal ideology of development. Analyzing a spectrum of urban agendas from waterfront city to green environment and housing for the poor, the book deepens our understanding of the spatial mediation of power, the interaction between elite and populist urban imaginings, and how past ideologies are integral to the present even as they are newly reconfigured. The book examines the anxiety over the destiny of Jakarta in its efforts to resolve the crisis of the city. The first group of chapters consider the fate and fortune of two building types, namely the city hall and the shop house, over a longue duree as a metonymy for the culture, politics, and society of the city and the nation. Other chapters focus on the intellectual legacies of the Sukarno and Suharto eras and the influence of their spatial paradigms. The final three chapters look at social and ecological consciousness in the post-Suharto era.

Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for the exceptional scope and richness of their oral performance traditions. This book provides a study and English translation of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin'yoshu, the first written transcription of Ainu oral narratives by an ethnic Ainu. The thirteen narratives in Chiri's collection belong to the genre known as kamuiyukar, said to be the most ancient performance form in the vast Ainu repertoire. In it, animals (and sometimes plants or other natural phenomena) assume the role of narrator and tell stories about themselves. Along with critical contextual information about traditional Ainu society and its cultural assumptions, the book brings forward pertinent information on the geography and natural history of the coastal southwestern Hokkaido region where the stories were originally performed. It also offers the first extended biography of Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) in English. The story of her life, and her untimely death at age nineteen, makes clear the harsh consequences for Chiri and her fellow Ainu of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the Meiji and Taisho governments' policies of assimilation. Chiri's receipt of the narratives in the Horobetsu dialect from her grandmother and aunt (both traditional performers) and the fact that no native speakers of that dialect survive today make her work all the more significant. The book concludes with a full, integral translation of the text.

Alegal reveals modern Okinawa to be suspended in a perpetual state of exception: it is neither an official colony of Japan or the U.S., nor an equal part of the Japanese state. Today it is the site of one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases globally—a truly exceptional condition stemming from Japan’s abhorrence toward sexual contact around bases in its mainland that factored into securing Okinawa as a U.S. military fortress. This book merges Foucauldian biopolitics with Japanese Marxist theorizations of capitalism to trace the formation of a Japanese middle class that disciplined and secured the population from perceived threats, including the threat of miscegenation. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and autobiography, it reveals how this threat came to symbolize the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, was met with great ambivalence in Okinawa. As a borderland of the Pacific, racial politics internal to the U.S. collided with colonial politics internal to the Asia Pacific in base towns centered on facilitating encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women. By examining the history, debates, and cultural representations of these actors from 1945 to 2015, this book shows how they continually failed to “become Japanese.” Instead, they epitomized Okinawa’s volatility that danced on the razor’s edge between anarchistic insurgency and fascistic collaboration. What was at stake in their securitization was the attempt to contain Okinawa’s alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the law.

Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. This is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. It examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. It also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shöyö, Japan's most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. The book devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. It also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Öshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. The final chapter analyzes the travel writing of Murakami Haruki.

In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. This book traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafū to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Ōshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience. The book draws on diverse sources, including trial transcripts and verdicts, literary and film theory, legal scholarship, and surrounding debates in artistic journals and the press. It demonstrates how legal arguments are enmeshed in a broader web of cultural forces. The book offers an original, interdisciplinary analysis that shows how art and law nurtured one another even as they clashed and demonstrates the dynamic relationship between culture and law, society and politics in postwar Japan.

This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, and the struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality, and the ways in which different norms line up and become synonymous with one another, in order to build situated knowledge in strengthening the discursive power of non-normative sexual-subjects-in-alliance. This book showcases the work of scholars working mostly outside Euro-America and focuses on cities including Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. It is a sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English. It highlights the various ways in which different individuals and communities — including male sex workers, transsexual subjects, lesbians, and Indonesian migrants — negotiate with notions of normativity and modernity, fine-tuned according to the different power structures of each context, and making new and different meanings.

The migrations of Manilamen, Bengali Muslim peddlers, and Chinese merchants and coolies extend the history of Asian Americans in the South into the early nineteenth and twentieth century. Between 1950 and 2000, the Asian American population in the American South increased more than one hundred times, much higher than the national average and the greatest increase among all regions of the United States. Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black–white relations, this book explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South, and discusses the formation of past and emerging Asian American communities in the region. As the chapters illustrate, Asian Americans have remade the Southern landscape with a visible, vital presence in many towns, suburbs, and cities. Avoiding the usual focus on the East and West Coasts, the book examines the historical and contemporary significance of Asian American migration, religious identities, and racial formations in the South. several chapters attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region, reintroducing the South within a historical web of global networks across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic.

This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents.

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of their heritage to ancient India and China. This volume brings together for the first time studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation as well as material on scientific approaches to meditation. It delves deeply into the individual traditions while viewing each of them from a global perspective, examining both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from numerous historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent. It seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of Asian schools of meditation while recognizing basic features of meditative practice across cultures, thereby taking the first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation. The book, accessibly written by scholars from several fields, opens with chapters that discuss the definition and classification of meditation. These are followed by contributions on Yoga and Tantra, which are often subsumed under the broad label of Hinduism; Jainism and Sikhism, Indian traditions not usually associated with meditation; Buddhist approaches found in Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China; and the indigenous Chinese traditions, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism. The final chapter explores recent scientific interest in meditation, which, despite its Western orientation, remains almost exclusively concerned with practices of Asian origin.

Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would readily associate the Japanese film industry with either imperialism or the domination of world markets, the country's film culture developed in lockstep with its empire, which, at its peak in 1943, included territories from the Aleutians to Australia and from Midway Island to India. With each military victory, Japanese film culture's sphere of influence expanded deeper into Asia, first clashing with and ultimately replacing Hollywood as the main source of news, education, and entertainment for millions. This book is an examination of the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as represented in its film culture. It traces the development of Japanese film culture from its unapologetically colonial roots in Taiwan and Korea to less obvious manifestations of empire such as the semi-colonial markets of Manchuria and Shanghai and occupied territories in Southeast Asia. The book provides close readings of individual films and analyses of Japanese assumptions about Asian ethnic and cultural differences. It highlights the place of empire in the struggle at legislative, distribution, and exhibition levels to wrest the “hearts and minds” of Asian film audiences from Hollywood in the 1930s as well as in Japan's attempts to maintain that hegemony during its alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Through highlighting and telling the story of some real cases of wrongful conviction, this book introduces the present situation in the Chinese criminal justice system, and makes deep analysis of its problems and loopholes. Enlivened with a literary style, it is a treatise of critical legal study. Based on the case analysis and the empirical studies, the author summarizes the causes for wrongful convictions and analyzes the ten misleading zones that most affect this outcome. The author also provides update information about the changes and reforms as well as challenges of the criminal justice in China.

From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. This book offers an interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. The beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, this book understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.

This pioneering social history of Little Saigon examines the institutionalization and preservation of a Southern California ethnic enclave and its people through the politics of rescue. It argues that Little Saigon’s emergence and growth was fuelled by American guilt over losing the war and Vietnamese gratitude for being rescued from communism. Thus the largest of diasporic Vietnamese communities, along with most of its counterparts nationwide, was framed as the least a guilt-ridden country could do to atone for its Cold War failures. The politics of rescue helps to explain why Little Saigon enjoyed a level of mainstream moral, economic, and political support historically unknown to most other Asian Americans. As for the Vietnamese exiles, the politics of rescue placed extreme pressure on them to act like model minorities in order to justify an unpopular war that killed 58,000 Americans and nearly invalidated American Exceptionalism. By becoming Refugee American, the losers of the Vietnam War could cast themselves as winners of the postwar, whereby Vietnamese and Americans, rather than forgetting, could mutually affirm a tragic past by rewriting it.

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it was Uzawa Kanako, a young Ainu activist, who signaled the necessity of moving beyond the historical legacy of “Ainu studies.” Mired in a colonial mindset of abject academic practices, Ainu Studies was an umbrella term for an approach that claimed scientific authority vis-à-vis Ainu, who became its research objects. As a result of this legacy, a latent sense of suspicion still hangs over the purposes and intentions of non-Ainu researchers. This book seeks to re-address the role of academic scholarship in Ainu social, cultural, and political affairs. Placing Ainu firmly into current debates over Indigeneity, the book provides a broad yet critical overview of the history and current status of Ainu research. With chapters from scholars as well as Ainu activists and artists, it addresses a range of topics including history, ethnography, linguistics, tourism, legal mobilization, hunter-gatherer studies, the Ainu diaspora, gender, and clothwork. The book aims to reframe the question of Ainu research in light of political reforms that are transforming Ainu society today.

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.

This book demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. It illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. The book argues that in the age of emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. It situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts alongside Black Atlantic texts. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution's “slavery clauses,” the book recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. It demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, the book challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.

Transnational economic integration has been described as an opportunity for all participants to achieve greater prosperity through a combination of political cooperation and capitalist economic competition. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has championed such rhetoric in promoting the integration of China, Southeast Asia's formerly socialist states, and Thailand into a regional project called the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). But while the GMS project is in fact hastening regional economic integration, the book shows that the approach belies the ADB's idealized description of “win-win” outcomes. The process of “actually existing globalization” in the GMS does provide varied opportunities for different actors, but it is less a rising tide that lifts all boats than an uneven flood of transnational capitalist development whose outcomes are determined by intense class struggles, market competition, and regulatory battles. The book makes the case for adopting a class-based approach to analysis of GMS development, regionalization, and actually existing globalization. First it analyzes the interests and actions of various Thai participants in GMS development, then the roles of different Chinese actors in GMS integration. It provides two cases illustrating the serious limits of any notion that GMS integration is a relatively egalitarian process—Laos' participation in GMS development and the role of migrant Burmese workers in the production of the GMS. The final chapter blends geographical-historical analysis with an assessment of uneven development and actually existing globalization in the GMS.