STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Travis Workman (University of California Press, 2015) For information from the publisher, please click here. Imperial Genus begins with the turn to world culture and ideas of the generally human in Japan’s cultural policy in Korea in 1919. How were concepts of the human’s genus-being operative in the discourses of the Japanese empire? … [Read more...]
The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Christopher Rea (University of California Press, 2015) For information from the publisher, please click here. Winner, 2017 Joseph Levenson Post-1900 Book Prize (China), Association for Asian Studies The Age of Irreverence tells the story of why China’s entry into the modern age was not just traumatic, but uproarious. As the Qing … [Read more...]
The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Federico Marcon (University of Chicago Press, 2015) For information from the publisher, please click here. Honorable Mention: 2017 John Whitney Hall Book Prize (Japan), Association for Asian Studies Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the … [Read more...]
The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy: 1915-1952
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Reto Hofmann (Cornell University Press, 2015) For information from the publisher, please click here. During the interwar period, Japanese intellectuals, writers, activists, and politicians, although conscious of the many points of intersection between their politics and those of Mussolini, were ambivalent about the comparability of … [Read more...]
Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Akiko Takenaka (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) For information from the publisher, please click here. This is the first extensive English-language study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It explores the controversial shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and, in particular, building Japan’s modern … [Read more...]
