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This is an English translation of one of Korea’s most celebrated historical works, a pre-modern classic so well known to Koreans that it has inspired contemporary literature and television. Written in 1821 by Chong Yagyong (Tasan), Admonitions on Governing the People (Mongmin simsŏ) is a detailed manual for district magistrates on how to govern better. In encyclopedic fashion, Here Chong Yagyong addresses the administration, social and economic life, criminal justice, the military, and the Confucian ritual system. He provides examples of past corrupt officials and discusses topics of the day such as famine relief and social welfare. A general call for overhauling the Korean ruling system, the book also makes the radical proposition that the purpose of government is to serve the interests of the people. This translation opens a new window on early-nineteenth century Korea and makes available to a wide audience a work whose main concerns simultaneously transcend national and cultural boundaries.

This wide-ranging study of Japanese cultural expression reveals how a particular, often seemingly innocent aesthetic sensibility—present in novels, essays, popular songs, film, and political writings—helped create an “aesthetic of fascism” in the years leading up to World War II. Evoking beautiful moments of violence, both real and imagined, these works did not lead to fascism in any instrumental sense. Yet, the book suggests, they expressed and inspired spiritual longings quenchable only through acts in the real world. The book traces this lineage of aesthetic fascism from its beginnings in the 1920s through its flowering in the 1930s to its afterlife in postwar Japan.

The Age of Irreverence tells why China’s entry into the modern age was not just traumatic but also uproarious. As the Qing dynasty slumped toward extinction, prominent writers compiled jokes into collections they called “histories of laughter.” During the first years of the Republic, novelists, essayists, and illustrators used humorous allegories to make veiled critiques of the new government. But political and cultural discussion repeatedly erupted into invective, as critics jeered and derided rivals in public. Farceurs drew followings in the popular press, promoting a culture of practical joking and buffoonery. Eventually, these expressions of hilarity proved so offensive to high-brow writers that the writers launched a campaign to transform the tone of public discourse, hoping to displace the old forms of mirth with a new one they called youmo (humor). Christopher Rea argues that this era—from the 1890s to the 1930s—transformed how Chinese people thought and talked about what is funny. Focusing on five cultural expressions of laughter—jokes, play, mockery, farce, and humor—he reveals the textures of comedy that were a part of everyday life during modern China’s first “age of irreverence.” This new history offers an unprecedented and up-close look at a neglected facet of Chinese cultural modernity and discusses its legacy in the language and styles of Chinese humor today.

Assimilating Seoul merges Korean history and Japanese history to uncover interactions obscured by conventional narratives centered on these two nation-states. The first monograph-length study of colonial Seoul in English, this book challenges nationalistic paradigms that still inform much of the research on this important city. Assimilating Seoul offers an alternative, transnational history by treating urban spaces as “contact zones.” Through micro-histories of Shintō festivals, industrial expositions, and hygiene campaigns, I show how the city's residents negotiated official pressures aimed at “assimilating” them. Unlike previous, top-down analyses, my book employs historical ethnography to investigate this organizing principle of Japanese rule as experienced from the bottom up. Although the colonial state did set broad policy goals for the cultural incorporation of Koreans, elite settlers and their subaltern brethren managed to redeploy government initiatives according to their own interests and thereby to reshape the speed and direction of assimilation. This approach also reveals the varied ways in which Koreans of different class and gender backgrounds rearticulated the terms of their incorporation into the Japan's multiethnic empire.

In 1895 Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony after a resounding victory in the Sino-Japanese war. For the next fifty years, Japanese rule devastated and transformed the entire socioeconomic and political fabric of Taiwanese society. This book examines the formation of Taiwanese political and cultural identities under the dominant Japanese colonial discourse of assimilation (dôka) and imperialization (kôminka) from the early 1920s to the end of the Japanese Empire in 1945. It analyzes the ways in which the Taiwanese struggled, negotiated, and collaborated with Japanese colonialism during the cultural practices of assimilation and imperialization. The book chronicles a historiography of colonial identity formations that delineates the shift from a collective and heterogeneous political horizon into a personal and inner struggle of “becoming Japanese.” Representing Japanese colonialism in Taiwan as a topography of multiple associations and identifications made possible through the triangulation of imperialist Japan, nationalist China, and colonial Taiwan, the author demonstrates the irreducible tension and contradiction inherent in the formations and transformations of colonial identities. Throughout the colonial period, Taiwanese elites imagined and constructed China as a discursive space where various forms of cultural identification and national affiliation were projected. Bridging history and literary studies, the book rethinks the history of Japanese rule in Taiwan by expanding its approach to colonial discourses.

This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The chapters argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the chapters provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy. Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist chapters focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.

This book looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute “the city” took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide-ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining the impact of rapid industrialization and urban growth on four second-tier cities: Sapporo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and Okayama. As prefectural capitals, these cities were centers of their respective regions. All of the four, like the metropolitan giants, grew at an enormous rate in the interwar decades. In spite of such commonalities, however, diverse local conditions meant that policies of national development and the vagaries of the business cycle impacted individual cities in diverse ways. As their differences reveal, there is no single master narrative of twentieth-century modernization. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, but rather co-constituted through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and beyond.

In this study of the mapping and remapping of male-male sexuality over four centuries of Japanese history, the book explores the languages of medicine, law, and popular culture from the seventeenth century through the American Occupation. The book opens with fascinating speculations about how an Edo translator might grapple with a twentieth-century text on homosexuality, then turns to law, literature, newspaper articles, medical tracts, and other sources to discover Japanese attitudes toward sexuality over the centuries. During each of three major eras, it argues, one field dominated discourse on male-male sexual relations: popular culture in the Edo period (1600–1868), jurisprudence in the Meiji period (1868–1912), and medicine in the twentieth century.

This study explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. It demonstrates how French colonial rule in Indochina allowed for the transformation of Catholic missions in Vietnam into broad and powerful economic and institutional structures in which race defined both ecclesiastical, cultural prestige and control of resources and institutional authority. This, along with colonial rule itself, created a culture of religious life in which relationships between Vietnamese Catholics and European missionaries were less equal and more fractious than ever before. The colonial era, however, also brought unprecedented ties between Vietnam and the transnational institutions and culture of global Catholicism, as Vatican reforms to create an independent national church helped Vietnamese Catholics to reimagine and redefine their relationships to both missionary Catholicism and to colonial rule itself. Much like the myriad revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation, this revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life was ultimately ambiguous, even contradictory: it established the foundations for an independent national church, but it also polarized the place of the new church in postcolonial Vietnamese politics and society, and it produced deep divisions between Vietnamese Catholics themselves.

Three American missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and what Americans view as an appalling and tragic mistake, many Chinese see as a “barbaric” and intentional “criminal act,” the latest in a long series of Western aggressions against China. This book explores the roles of perception and sentiment in the growth of popular nationalism in China. At a time when the direction of China's foreign and domestic policies have profound ramifications worldwide, the author offers an in-depth look at the nature of China's new nationalism, particularly as it involves Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations: two bilateral relations that carry extraordinary implications for peace and stability in the twenty-first century. This new nationalism is traced through recent Chinese books and magazines, movies, television shows, posters, and cartoons. Anti-Western sentiment, once created and encouraged by China's ruling PRC, has been taken up independently by a new generation of Chinese. Deeply rooted in narratives about past “humiliations” at the hands of the West and impassioned notions of Chinese identity, popular nationalism is now undermining the Communist Party's monopoly on political discourse, threatening the regime's stability. The book analyzes the impact that popular nationalism will have on twenty-first century China and the world.

This book examines the devastating impact of Japan's invasion and occupation of the lower Yangzi on China's emerging modern-business community. Arguing that the war gravely weakened Chinese capitalists, the author demonstrates that in occupied areas the activities of businessmen were closer to collaboration than to heroic resistance. He shows how the war left an important imprint on the structure and culture of Chinese business enterprise by encouraging those traits that had allowed it to survive in uncertain and dangerous times. Although historical memory emphasizes the entrepreneurs who followed the Nationalist armies to the interior, most Chinese businessmen remained in the lower Yangzi area. If they wished to retain any ownership of their enterprises, they were forced to collaborate with the Japanese and the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing. Characteristics of business in the decades prior to the war, including a preference for family firms and reluctance to become public corporations, distrust of government, opaqueness of business practices, and reliance on personal connections (guanxi) were critical to the survival of enterprises during the war and were reinforced by the war experience. Through consideration of the broader implications of the many responses to this complex era, the book contributes to larger discussions of the dynamics of World War II and of Chinese business culture.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, China's sovereignty was fragile at best. In the face of international pressure and domestic upheaval, young urban radicals—desperate for reforms that would save their nation—clamored for change, championing Western-inspired family reform and promoting free marriage choice and economic and emotional independence. But what came to be known as the New Culture Movement had the unwitting effect of fostering totalitarianism. This book examines how the link between family order and national salvation affected state building and explores its lasting consequences. The author argues that the replacement of the authoritarian, patriarchal, extended family structure with an egalitarian, conjugal family was a way for the nation to preserve crucial elements of its traditional culture. Her research shows that in the end, family reform paved the way for the Chinese Communist Party to establish a deeply intrusive state which undermined the legitimacy of individual rights.

In exploring the career of Seki Hajime (1873–1935), who served as mayor of Japan's second-largest city, Osaka, this book traces the roots of social progressivism in prewar Japan. Seki, trained as a political economist in the late 1890s, when Japan was focused single-mindedly on “increasing industrial production,” distinguished himself early on as a people-centered, rather than state-centered, national economist. After three years of advanced study in Europe at the turn of the century, during which he engaged with Marxism and later steeped himself in the exciting new field of social economics, Seki was transformed into a progressive. The social reformism of Seki and others had its roots in a transnational fellowship of progressives who shared the belief that civilized nations should be able to forge a middle path between capitalism and socialism. This book permits us not only to weave social progressivism into the modern Japanese historical narrative, but also to reconceive it as a truly transnational movement whose impact was felt across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic.

This book focuses on the colonial prison system in French Indochina and its role in fostering modern political consciousness among the Vietnamese. Using prison memoirs, newspaper articles, and extensive archival records, the book presents a wealth of significant new information to document how colonial prisons, rather than quelling political dissent and maintaining order, instead became institutions that promoted nationalism and revolutionary education.

This cultural history of baseball in Taiwan traces the game's social, ethnic, political, and cultural significance since its introduction on the island more than one hundred years ago. Introduced by the Japanese colonial government at the turn of the century, baseball was expected to “civilize” and modernize Taiwan's Han Chinese and Austronesian Aborigine populations. After World War II, the game was tolerated as a remnant of Japanese culture and then strategically employed by the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), even as it was also enthroned by Taiwanese politicians, cultural producers, and citizens as their national game. In considering baseball's cultural and historical implications, the book addresses a number of societal themes crucial to understanding modern Taiwan, the question of Chinese “reunification,” and East Asia as a whole.

This is an anthology of autobiographical essays of the Chinese diaspora. Written by ethnic Chinese who were born or raised outside of China, these pieces, full of the details of everyday life, describe the experience of growing up as a visible minority and the subsequent journey each author made to China. The authors—whose diverse backgrounds in countries such as New Zealand, Denmark, Sri Lanka, England, Indonesia, and the United States mirror the complex global scope of the Chinese diaspora—describe in particular how their journey to the country of their ancestors transformed their sense of what it means to be Chinese. The collection as a whole provides important insights into what ethnic identity has come to mean in our transnational era. Among the pieces is Brad Wong's discussion of his visit to his grandfather's poverty-stricken village in China's southern Guangdong province. Wong describes working with a few of the peasants tilling vegetables and compares life in the village with his middle-class upbringing in a San Francisco suburb. In another essay, Milan Lin-Rodrigo tells of her life in Sri Lanka and of the trip she made to China as an adult. She describes the difficult and sometimes humorous cultural differences she experienced when she met her Chinese half-sister and her father's first wife. Josephine Khu's afterword provides background information on the Chinese diaspora and gives a theoretical framework for understanding the issues raised in the essays.

Qiaopi is the name given to the “silver letters” Chinese emigrants sent home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These letters-cum-remittances, which were entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013, document the changing history of the Chinese diaspora in different parts of the world and in different periods, as well as its linkages to China. The qiaopi trade played a big part in making China transnational. This book, the first in English on qiaopi and on the origins, structure, and operations of the qiaopi trade, makes an important contribution to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration. It examines the culture, business, geography, and politics of the qiaopi phenomenon, both in China and abroad, as well as the special features of the qiaopi trade in each of its Chinese regions. It traces the history of the trade, including the shift from individual couriering to large-scale enterprise, and its role in China’s difficult transition from an agrarian bureaucracy under the Qing to capitalism and the start of modern statehood under the Kuomintang and then to collectivism and full statehood under the communists. The study argues that the qiaopi trade was indispensable to modern China’s economic and social modernization and the basis for one of China’s earliest excursions into the modern world. The changes that it wrought were built initially on primordial ties of locality, kinship, and dialect, and it later joined or created national, transnational, and international networks based on trade, finance, and general migration.

Looking beyond the familiar trappings of the cult of female chastity — such as hagiographies of widows and chastity shrines — in late imperial China, this book explores the cult's political significance and practical ramifications in everyday life during the eighteenth century. This book examines a vast number of laws, legal cases, regulations, and policies to illustrate the social and political processes through which female virtue was defined, enforced, and contested. Along the way, it provides rich details of social life and cultural practices among ordinary Chinese people through narratives of criminal cases of sexual assault, harassment, adultery, and domestic violence.

This book describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture in Republican era China. Providing an interesting look into the lives of some of the opera's key actors, it explores their methods for earning a living; their status in an ever-changing society; the methods by which theaters functioned; the nature and content of performances; audience make-up; and the larger relationship between Peking opera and Chinese nationalism. Propelled by a synergy of the commercial and the political patronage from the Qing court in Beijing to modern theaters in Shanghai and Tianjin, Peking opera rose to national prominence. The genre's star actors, particularly male cross-dressing performers led by the exquisite Mei Lanfang and the “Four Great Female Impersonators” became media celebrities, models of modern fashion and world travel. Ironically, as it became increasingly entrenched in modern commercial networks, Peking opera was increasingly framed in post-May fourth discourses as profoundly traditional. This book demonstrates that the process of reforming and marketing Peking opera as a national genre was integrally involved with the process of colonial modernity, shifting gender roles, the rise of capitalist visual culture, and new technologies of public discipline that became increasingly prevalent in urban China in the Republican era.

Accelerating seismic activity in late Meiji Japan climaxed in the legendary Great Nobi Earthquake of 1891, which rocked the main island from Tokyo to Osaka, killing thousands. Ironically, the earthquake brought down many “modern” structures built on the advice of foreign architects and engineers, while leaving certain traditional, wooden ones standing. This book considers the cultural and political ramifications of this and other catastrophic events on Japan's relationship with the West, with modern science, and with itself. The book argues that seismicity was both the Achilles' heel of Japan's nation-building project — revealing the state's western-style infrastructure to be surprisingly fragile — and a new focus for nativizing discourses which credited traditional Japanese architecture with unique abilities to ride out seismic waves. Tracing the subject from the Meiji Restoration to the Great Kant Earthquake of 1923 (which destroyed Tokyo), the book shows earthquakes to have been a continual though mercurial agent in Japan's self-fashioning; a catastrophic undercurrent to Japanese modernity. This study moves earthquakes nearer the center of modern Japan change — both materially and symbolically — and also shows how fundamentally Japan shaped the global art, science, and culture of natural disaster.