When people create new societies, economies, and nations both now and in the past they create gods, rituals, and miracles to support them. Even what seem to be some of the most timeless and sacred sites in the world have been shaped, reshaped, and reinterpreted by countless people to produce oases of peace and nature today.
Using miracle tales, votive plaques, diaries, and newspapers, Sarah Thal traces such changes at one of the most popular Japanese pilgrimage sites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the shrine of Konpira on the island of Shikoku. This rich and fascinating...

At the periphery of the Chinese empire, a group of innovative entrepreneurs built companies that dominated the Chinese salt trade and created thousands of jobs in the Sichuan region. From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and one of the only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin recounts the history of the salt industry to reveal a fascinating chapter in China's history and provide new insight into the forces and institutions that...

This book examines major areas of late imperial Chinese culture, and their relation to Chinese culture today, focusing on the competence and sophistication of ordinary people. The work provides an overview of late imperial society and its responses to forces for change. Its ethnographically rich treatment of changes in family life under Communist rule is based on the author's fieldwork. Kinship beyond the family is treated through comparisons of the author's fieldwork sites in China and Taiwan. In dealing with the use of contracts and commodification within one community setting, it...

This book examines major areas of late imperial Chinese culture, and their relation to Chinese culture today, focusing on the competence and sophistication of ordinary people. The work provides an overview of late imperial society and its responses to forces for change. Its ethnographically rich treatment of changes in family life under Communist rule is based on the author's fieldwork. Kinship beyond the family is treated through comparisons of the author's fieldwork sites in China and Taiwan. In dealing with the use of contracts and commodification within one community setting, it...

Reluctant Pioneers describes the migration of Chinese to Manchuria, their settlement there, and the incorporation of Manchuria into an expanding China, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The expansion of Chinese state and society from the agrarian and urban core of China proper to the territories north and west of the Great Wall doubled the size of the empire, forming the "China" now so prominent on the map of Asia. The movement and settlement of people, clearing and cultivation of land, invasions of soldiers, circulation of merchants, and establishment of government...

This book highlights the importance of individuals in the shaping of postwar Japan by providing an historical account of how physicists constituted an influential elite. An history of science perspective provides insight into their role, helping us to understand the hybrid identity of Japanese scientists, and how they reinvented not only themselves, but also Japan. The book is special in that it uses the history of science to deal with issues relating to Japanese identity, and how it was transformed in the decades after Japan's defeat. It explores the lives and work of seven physicists, two...

This book highlights the importance of individuals in the shaping of postwar Japan by providing an historical account of how physicists constituted an influential elite.