STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the “beautiful woman” (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period … [Read more...]
Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Cheehyung Harrison Kim (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. In North Korea in the decade following the Korean War, labor became the defining means of state control and national unity. In pursuit of rapid industrial growth, the North Korean state stressed order and consistency in … [Read more...]
Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Sayaka Chatani (Cornell University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial … [Read more...]
Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Kerim Yasar (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Long before karaoke’s ubiquity and the rise of global brands such as Sony, Japan was a place where new audio technologies found eager users and contributed to new cultural forms. In Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar traces the origins of … [Read more...]
The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Emily Baum (University of Chicago Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and … [Read more...]
