This text explores the issues of nation and modernity in China by focusing on the work of Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), one of the most controversial of modern Chinese intellectuals and brother of the writer Lu Xun. Zhou was radically at odds with many of his contemporaries and opposed their nation-building and modernisation projects. Through his literary and aesthetic practice as an essayist, Zhou espoused a way of constructing the individual and affirming the individual's importance in opposition to the normative national subject of most May Fourth reformers. Zhou's work presents an alternative...

The unique amalgam of prayer and play at the Sensoji temple in Edo is often cited as proof of the degenerate Buddhism of the Tokugawa period. This investigation of the economy and cultural politics of Sensoji, however, shows that its culture of prayer and play reflected changes taking place in Tokugawa Japan, particularly in the city of Edo. Play was an integral part of the business of religion at Sensoji, and the temple supplied both in equal measure to often rootless Edoites. Hur's reappraisal of prayer and play and their inherent connectedness provides a cultural critique of conventional...

What ties bound region to centre in the making of the modern Japanese state? What forces shaped these bonds? How did the local-centre relationship change over time? What is its current legacy? Focusing on the marginal region of Toyama, on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the Meiji Restoration. Lewis argues that in response to the demands of the centralising...

In this study, the author examines how archaeological finds from throughout Northeast Asia have been used in Korea to construct a myth of state formation. This myth emphasises the ancient development of a pure Korean race that created a civilisation rivalling those of China and Japan and a unified state controlling a wide area in Asia. Through a new analysis of the archaeological data, Pai shows that the Korean state was in fact formed much later and that it reflected diverse influences from throughout Northeast Asia, particularly the material culture of the Han China. Her deconstruction of...

Ayukawa Yoshisuke (1880-1967) was the founder of the Nissan conglomerate and the leader of the Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation, one of the linchpins of Imperial Japan's efforts to economically exploit its overseas dependencies. Despite his close association with the Japanese government from the 1920s to the 1950s, Ayukawa was a proponent of free trade and global economic interdependence. He sought to lessen state control of Japan's economy by trying to attract foreign - especially American - capital and technology in the years surrounding World War II. In the postwar era in...

In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, the construction of gender was never far from debates about ritual propriety, desire, and even cosmic harmony. Competing Discourses maps the aesthetic and semantic meanings associated with gender in the Ming-Qing vernacular novel through close readings of five long narratives: Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World, Dream of the Red Chamber, A Country Codger's Words of Exposure, Flowers in the Mirror, and A Tale of Heroic Lovers. Epstein argues that the authors of these novels manipulated gendered terms to achieve structural coherence. These...

In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin W. Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines...

In texts from the mid-Heian to the early Kamakura periods, certain figures appear to be marginal or removed from centres of power. But why do we see these figures in this way? This study first seeks to answer this question by examining the details of the marginalising discourse found in these texts. Who is portraying whom as marginal? For what reason? Is the discourse consistent? The author next considers these texts in terms of the predilection of modern scholarship, both Japanese and Western, to label certain figures marginal. She then poses the question: Is this predilection a helpful tool...

For much of the 20th century, the May Fourth movement of 1919 was seen as the foundational moment of modernity in China. Examinations of literary and cultural modernity in China have, however, led to a questioning of this view. By approaching May Fourth from novel perspectives, the authors of the eight studies in this volume seek to contribute to the ongoing critique of the movement. The essays are centred on the intellectual and cultural/historical motivations and practices behind May Fourth discourse and highlight issues such as strategies of discourse formation, scholarly methodologies,...