STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Hikari Hori (Cornell University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. In Promiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese … [Read more...]
Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Laura Hein (Bloomsbury Press/SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. In late 1945 local Japanese turned their energies toward creating new behaviors and institutions that would give young people better skills to combat repression at home and coercion abroad. They … [Read more...]
Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Geoffrey Barstow (Columbia University Press, 2017) For information from the publisher, please click here. Tibetan Buddhism teaches compassion toward all beings, a category that explicitly includes animals. Slaughtering animals is morally problematic at best and, at worst, completely incompatible with a religious lifestyle. Yet … [Read more...]
Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Diana Fu (Cambridge University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Winner, 2018 Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book on Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association (APSA) When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take the streets, what do they do? … [Read more...]
The Chinese Typewriter: A History
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Thomas S. Mullaney (The MIT Press, 2017) Winner, 2018 John K. Fairbank Prize, American Historical Association For information from the publisher, please click here. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered … [Read more...]
