Tessa Morris-Suzuki

This text rethinks the contours of Japanese history, culture and nationality. Challenging the mythology of a historically unitary, even monolithic Japan, it offers a different perspective on culture and identity in modern Japan.

Time, Space, Nation

Re-inventing Japan

This compelling and engaging book takes readers on a unique journey through China and North and South Korea. Tessa Morris-Suzuki travels from Harbin in the north to Busan in the south, and on to the mysterious Diamond Mountains, which lie at the heart of the Korean Peninsula's crisis. As she follows in the footsteps of a remarkable writer, artist, and feminist who traced the route a century ago—in the year when Korea became a Japanese colony—her saga reveals an unseen face of China and the two Koreas: a world of monks, missionaries, and smugglers; of royal tombs and socialist mausoleums; a world where today's ideological confrontations are infused with myth and memory. Northeast Asia is poised at a moment of profound change as the rise of China is transforming the global order and tensions run high on the Korean Peninsula, the last Cold War divide. Probing the deep past of this region, To the Diamond Mountains offers a new and unexpected perspective on its present and future.

A Hundred-Year Journey through China and Korea

To the Diamond Mountains

Ranging from Geneva to Pyongyang, this remarkable book takes readers on an odyssey through one of the most extraordinary forgotten tragedies of the Cold War: the "return" of over 90,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward. Presented to the world as a humanitarian venture and conducted under the supervision of the International Red Cross, the scheme was actually the result of political intrigues involving the governments of Japan, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The great majority of the Koreans who journeyed to North Korea in fact originated from the southern part of the Korean peninsula, and many had lived all their lives in Japan. Though most left willingly, persuaded by propaganda that a bright new life awaited them in North Korea, the author draws on recently declassified documents to reveal the covert pressures used to hasten the departure of this unwelcome ethnic minority. For most, their new home proved a place of poverty and hardship; for thousands, it was a place of persecution and death. In rediscovering their extraordinary personal stories, this book also casts new light on the politics of the Cold War and on present-day tensions between North Korea and the rest of the world.

Shadows from Japan's Cold War

Exodus to North Korea

Tom Cliff

Shuge Wei

This collection elucidates the complexity of living politics in the 21st century, considering how self-help groups draw on shared regional traditions, and how they adapt their actions to the diverse formal political environments in which they operate. It considers the nexus between ideas and action in a world where the conventional ‘right-left’ divide has a decreasing hold on the political imagination. Examining grassroots self-help actions as responses to everyday life problems, it argues that whilst action may be initiated by encounters with ideas that come into the community from outside, often the flow of cause and effect works in the opposite direction. Focusing on countries both politically dynamic and with long-standing historical and cultural connections - China (including Inner Mongolia), Japan, Taiwan and Korea – this book fills a significant gap in the literature on social movements, demonstrating that survival itself is a political act.

The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia

Eun Jeong Soh

In Asia today, the grand ideologies of the past have lost their power over the popular imagination. Even in many of the region’s democracies, popular engagement in the political process faces profound challenges. Yet amidst this landscape of political disenchantment, groups of ordinary people across Asia are finding new ways to take control of their own lives, respond to threats to their physical and cultural survival, and build better futures. This collection of essays by prominent scholars and activists traces the rise of a quiet politics of survival from the villages of China to Japan’s Minamata and Fukushima, and from the street art of Seoul and Hong Kong to the illegal markets of North Korea. Introducing an innovative conceptual framework, New Worlds from Below shows how informal grassroots politics in Northeast Asia is generating new ideas and practices that have region-wide and global relevance.

Informal life politics and grassroots action in twenty-first-century Northeast Asia

New Worlds from Below

An intellectual tour de force, Re-Inventing Japan is a major effort to rethink the contours of Japanese history, culture, and nationally.

Vera Mackie

Carol Johnson

In this collection of essays, we reflect on what it means to practise the social sciences in the twenty-first century. The book brings together leading social scientists from the Asia-Pacific region. We argue for the benefit of dialogue between the diverse theories and methods of social sciences in the region, the role of the social sciences in addressing real-world problems, the need to transcend national boundaries in addressing regional problems, and the challenges for an increasingly globalised higher education sector in the twenty-first century. The chapters are a combination of theoretical reflections and locally focused case studies of processes that are embedded in global dynamics and the changing geopolitics of knowledge. In an increasingly connected world, these reflections will be of global relevance

The Social Sciences in the Asian Century

Jonathan Unger

This text describes and analyses how politics among the Chinese leadership has operated and evolved from the period of Mao' court up to 2002. Part I explores the politics of Mao and Deng. Part II explores and analyzes the ongoing changes in Chinese politics during Jiang's tenure.

From Mao to Jiang

The Nature of Chinese Politics

What happens when history is interpreted and disseminated by movies, TV, comic books and other popular media? An impassioned and original analysis of rival transmissions of the past. Despite predictions of the "death of the past" and the "end of history," the past refuses to go away. In fact, the start of the twenty-first century has seen an upsurge of interest in popular representations of history on the large and small screen, and of impassioned political conflicts over rival understandings of the past. Historical responsibility and apology have become contentious topics of domestic politics and of international diplomatic relations, and memory a profitable commodity for sale to mass markets. Against this background, how do historians deal with the problems of the search for "historical truth"? The Past Within Us approaches these issues by examining the problems of representing history in the popular media. Drawing on examples from East Asian and American as well as European history, it poses the question: What happens when accounts of history are transferred from one medium to another? How far does the medium shape the message? How can historians deploy contemporary media in ways which evoke and develop the historical imagination? From the romances of Walter Scott to Steven Spielberg blockbusters, from online Irish nationalism to Japanese revisionist comic books, The Past Within Us explores some of the more dramatic modern popular representations and reflects on the key challenges and possibilities for the communication of history in a multimedia age. From The Past Within Us: "To understand how knowledge of the past is communicated in an age of mass media, it becomes necessary to understand something of the way in which conventions have been formed, and the way in which they shape the stories that can be told about the past. Each medium has its own history, its own conventions, its own store of memories. Our understandings of events like the rise of Hitler or the outbreak of the Korean War depend not just on who is telling the story but also on whether we encounter the story in a history textbook, as a historical novel, a collection of photographs, a TV documentary or a feature film."

Media, Memory, History

The Past Within Us

Nation, Culture, Identity

Re-inventing Japan: Nation, Culture, Identity

Mark Hudson

Gavan McCormack

Donald Denoon

This book challenges the conventional view of Japanese society as monocultural and homogenous. Unique for its historical breadth and interdisciplinary orientation, Multicultural Japan ranges from prehistory to the present, arguing that cultural diversity has always existed in Japan. A timely and provocative discussion of identity politics regarding the question of 'Japaneseness', the book traces the origins of the Japanese, examining Japan's indigenous people and the politics of archaeology, using the latter to link Japan's ancient history with contemporary debates on identity. Also examined are Japan's historical connections with Europe and East and Southeast Asia, ideology, family, culture and past and present.

Palaeolithic to Postmodern

Multicultural Japan

This landmark book is the first general English-language history of technology in modern Japan.

From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century

The Technological Transformation of Japan

Timothy Y. Tsu

Morris Low

Leonid Petrov

East Asia is now the world’s economic powerhouse, but ghosts of history continue to trouble relations between the key countries of the region, particularly between Japan, China and the two Koreas. Unhappy legacies of Japan’s military expansion in pre-war Asia prompt on-going calls for apologies, while conflicts over ownership of cultural heritage cause friction between China and Korea, and no peace treaty has ever been signed to conclude the Korean War. For over a decade, the region’s governments and non-government groups have sought to confront the ghosts of the past by developing paths to reconciliation. Focusing particularly on popular culture and grassroots action, East Asia beyond the History Warsexplores these East Asian approaches to historical reconciliation. This book examines how Korean historians from North and South exchange ideas about national history, how Chinese film-makers reframe their views of the war with Japan, and how Japanese social activists develop grassroots reconciliation projects with counterparts from Korea and elsewhere. As the volume’s studies of museums, monuments and memorials show, East Asian public images of modern history are changing, but change is fragile and uncertain. This unfinished story of East Asia’s search for historical reconciliation has important implications for the study of popular memory worldwide. Presenting a fresh perspective on reconciliation which draws on both history and cultural studies, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in the fields of Asian history, Asian culture and society as well as those interested in war and memory studies more generally.

Confronting the Ghosts of Violence

East Asia Beyond the History Wars

This book takes a fresh look at the Korean War by considering the conflict from a Northeast Asian regional perspective. It highlights the connections of the war to earlier conflicts in the region and examines the human impact of the war on neighboring countries, focusing particularly on the ways in which the Korean War shaped regional cross-border movements of people, goods, and ideas (including hopes and fears). It also considers the lasting consequences of these movements for the region’s society and politics.

A Hidden History

The Korean War in Asia

Showa, Japanese for 'radiant peace', was the name given to Emperor Hirohito's reign at his accession in 1926. This was the beginning of a significant period of growth of militarism, the Pacific war and the phenomenal post-war economic expansion of Japan. The first book to present modern Japanese history through the eyes of individuals, Showa presents the experiences of three individuals born at the beginning of this age, giving a unique inside view of Japan's recent history. Their experiences include training as a suicide pilot, being a draft evader during the Pacific War, a leader in the Communist Party, and a colonist in Korea, turned overnight in August 1945 from a member of the ruling elite into a refugee. First published in 1984, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki

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