Using both long forgotten and newly available steles from North China, this article looks at these ancient monuments to explore the rise and evolution of an epigraphic practice under Jurchen and Mongol rules (1127–1368). In particular it looks at steles erected to record genealogical information (called xianyingbei in general) in north China during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which was a new usage for the stele in the area. The article's main aim is to demonstrate how cultural integration among different social strata was triggered by the invasions of the Jurchen and Mongol conquerors, which in turn led to the formation of a new and legitimate way to compile family genealogies in north China.

Two major phenomena helped define Japan's foreign relations in the early modern period: the ban on international maritime travel and trading, and the Japanese adaptation of a Sinocentric rhetoric governing foreign relations with tributary states. In this article I will describe and analyze how these phenomena emerged and evolved, with special emphasis on the role they played in shaping Japan as an early modern nation state and forming for it a sense of “national identity.” My examination will focus on them especially in the context of Japan's relationship with its East Asian neighbours, and I place particular emphasis on four points.

This study aims to discuss the significant role of “peasant society” in understanding the economic history of both modern and early modern Japan.

Independent peasant households proliferated in Japan in the seventeenth century, and from around the turn of the eighteenth century onwards they underwent a transformation into entities called ie, which owned family properties and bore responsibility for conveying these properties to the next generation. Although the development of the market economy also contributed to maintaining and activating the peasant society, the function of the labour market was strongly influenced by the strategy of peasant households to pursue the optimal utilization of slack labour generated by the seasonally fluctuating labour demand from agriculture. Under these constraints, peasant households tended to deliver non-agricultural employment opportunities to their members, forming a kind of barrier against mobilizing family workers outside the household. These barriers were supported by region-based industrial development such as a weaving industry adopting the putting-out system most suitable to the requirements of peasant households. Rural-based capital accumulation together with the workings of the regional financial markets contributed to maintaining particular peasant household behaviours by supporting region-based industrial development, which featured in Japan's path of economic and social development from the early modern to the modern period.

This paper discusses the role of Indian merchants, especially Muslims, in the match trade between Japan and India, and situates the cooperative ventures set up in the middle of the 1920s between Indian merchants and Japanese manufacturers in the context of the economy of the Bengal Bay region. Their inter-regional networks and partnerships were important not just for trade, but also for manufacturing based on the flow of technology, ideas, information, and natural resources. The paper also shows that such ventures unexpectedly caused conflicts with movements in India to promote domestic industry and with the logic of territorial nationalism that lay behind them.

New areas of research and education are emerging under the banner of Global Asian Studies (GAS). This paper examines the intellectual background of the rise of GAS and proposes a research agenda for the further development of GAS to facilitate the extraction of globally relevant findings with the potential to restore an intellectual foundation for connectedness in an increasingly divided world. The paper examines the ongoing repositioning of Asia studies in relation to the Asianization of Asian studies, new methodologies for a new era, the increasing importance of multi-lingual research, and theorizes the potential of area studies “inside-out” in relation to trends in and studies of globalization. Proposing four focal themes as a platform from which a new GAS may depart, this manifesto paper aims primarily to open up a discussion to eventually serve as a foundation for sustained research and education in the field of GAS.

The origins of printing in East Asia have been the subject of lively debate over the last twenty years, and a constant point of reference has been the first recorded act of printing in Japan, which took place in the 760s. The term Hyakumantō Darani 百万塔陀羅尼 (hereafter HD) is commonly used in Japan to refer to this episode, and it denotes the Buddhist dhāraṇī or spells which are thought to have been printed in Nara and then inserted into wooden miniature pagodas, and which have for a century been regarded as the oldest printed texts in the world.1 They were printed, so the evidence suggests, in the closing years of the reign of Shōtoku 稱德 (718–770, r. 764–770), who was the last woman on the Japanese throne for nearly one thousand years and who had had an earlier reign under the name Kōken 孝謙 (r. 749–758).2

In this article I shall first examine the evidence relating to the HD and the origins of printing, since the whole question has long been clouded by hypotheses masquerading as fact. Second, I shall explore the origins of the practice of producing miniature pagodas and its transmission to Japan. Third, I shall argue that the established views on the motivation for the HD are inadequate, and shall identify the factors that demand a new explanation, particularly the pagodas themselves. Finally, I turn to the ideological and political factors underlying these events and suggest a new explanation. This new explanation focuses on the politics of Shōtoku's situation and the connection with empress Wu (Wu Zetian 武則天; 624–705, r. 690–705), and it goes some way towards explaining why printing was not resorted to again in Japan for several centuries.

The so-called hua niao yu chong (“flower, bird, fish, insect”) culture of China is a tradition related to the growth and raising of small and easy-to-care-for plants and animals. Typical of this culture is that of fighting crickets. Cricket fights, between two male crickets, is an amusement especially popular among urban dwellers. In the past it was followed by the emperor and the nobility, by the rich and by intellectuals such as the literati. Because of this, previous research into Chinese culture has tended to emphasize only the glamorous side of cricket fighting and paid scant attention to those who sustained it in the background. Nevertheless we cannot ignore those people in rural areas who go out to catch the crickets that will provide amusement for cricket-fight aficionados in the cities. In fact, both urban dwellers, as consumers, and farmers, as providers, sustain the culture of cricket fighting, but there are wide differences between them in terms of folk knowledge and skills. The knowledge and skills of the farmers who hunt crickets are concerned closely with the habits of crickets and resemble the type of knowledge that is based on observation, and so can be explained in terms of entomological ecology and behavioural science. Urban aficionados, on the other hand, care for crickets in terms of how they think crickets should live, quite differently from their natural habitat. They have anthropomorphized them, rearing them as if they were associating with other human beings, and in general have inserted human values into their lives.

In contrast to the currency issued for use in ancient and early modern Japan, a feature of the currency of that country's medieval period was that the Japanese state did not mint its own coinage but rather imported the entirety of its supply of copper coins from China. An economy based on Chinese coins therefore lasted for 650 years, from the middle of the twelfth century, through the upheavals of the sixteenth century, down to the seventeenth century when the Tokugawa Bakufu once again minted coins. This article outlines the situation of currency and its specific features during this period, paying particular attention to the trend towards the use of credit, in such forms as bills of exchange and promissory notes. In addition, it points out that the medieval Japanese state had absolutely no motivation, either financially or geopolitically, to issue its own currency.

This article addresses the broad question of the sense of community in traditional Chinese villages, through consideration of popular cults found throughout the most highly developed region in Late Imperial China: the Jiangnan Delta. A key clue is a large-scale tenant-farmer revolt in Zhaowen County in 1846. When the uprising was suppressed, not only were twenty human ringleaders executed, but images of four local gods from village temples, who were believed to have sanctioned the rebellion, were also seized by the authorities and exposed for one year at the gates of the Zhaowen County City God temple. All four had three characteristics in common: (1) they were anthropomorphic, with human names; (2) they had living descendants of the same surname; (3) all were associated with stories involving miraculous protection of tax grain transport to the North. The descendants of these gods, all possession-type spirit mediums, or shamans, based in the villages, created the gods in response to the needs of their clients, large-scale landlords who bore responsibility for sea transport of tax grain to the North. In the mid-sixteenth century, fundamental socio-economic changes took place in the Jiangnan Delta. The landlords disappeared from the villages, leaving only the farmers, who were turning to cottage industries for cash to supplement inadequate food crop yields. The spirit mediums responded to the changes and modified their gods for a new set of clients, resulting in the survival of these cults down to the present day.

While Indonesia's burgeoning private television industry has prospered through the country's democratic transition and the rise of popular Islam, it has remained ideologically constrained by many of the content restrictions established during Suharto's New Order era. One area in which producers have broken these norms is in the field of religious imagery, and the adaptation of religiously-themed narratives and tropes. This article – based on a long-term ethnographic study of television producers in Indonesia and the social institutions that influence them – explores the strategies and goals behind the industry's handling of the imagined religious audience. It asserts that the tension of appeasing cultural conservatives has been redirected by the industry into content that appeals to the much larger demographic of moderate Muslims, through the adaptation of narrative conventions and stylistic forms that draw on an array of global media traditions. It examines new genres and conventions invoked by producers in their efforts to both placate and mobilize religious sentiment among Indonesia's culturally heterogeneous population, arguing that these practices promote a successful, commercial Islam that largely comports with neoliberal subjectivity.

Through an examination of issues arising from mahjong playing, this article explores changes in daily life and popular culture at the turn of the twenty-first century and argues that these changes reflect political, economic, social, and cultural transformations, in which conflicts between individual rights and collective interests have become increasingly prominent. This study discusses issues relating to mahjong from stories at four different levels: individual, community, the city, and the nation, which, respectively, look at conflicts among neighbors, examine the role of the Residential Committee in the neighborhood, observe the responses of the municipal government and official media to the city's image, and reveal the dilemma when the socialist state confronts mahjong issues. From the specific issues arising from mahjong, we can see how the new culture of the market economy in today's China coexists with elements from a more traditional lifestyle.

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the reasons for which insane individuals who had committed patricide were systematically sentenced to dismemberment (lingchi 凌遲) under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the most severe form of capital punishment that could be called for in the state's administrative and penal Code. This extreme harshness ran contrary to several “theoretical” foundations of Chinese traditional law, first and foremost the principle of criminal intent. Through the study of such criminal cases, and others legally affiliated to patricide, spanning the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, it underlines the importance of the relationship between a parent and his child, which was prominent in China's moral and cultural context at the time. It also stresses the role of political issues related to the legitimacy of the imperial state and to the upholding of the legality of its judicial process. Even though legal tools existed in the Qing Code, which would have allowed for a more lenient approach, and notwithstanding the Qing authorities' ongoing effort at defining specific legal procedures for insane homicides, lingchi was systematically applied to insane patricides until the early twentieth century, when the far-reaching legal reforms implemented during the last years of the imperial regime progressively opened the way for the recognition of the legal irresponsibility of insane individuals.

Fantan 番攤 is a Chinese gambling game based on a draw from a random number of hidden coins or tokens, requiring the player to guess a number out of one, two, three or four. It currently survives only in Macao, but during the Late Qing and Republican periods, fantan was one of the most popular games in South China. Through the investigation of a wide range of sources, this article challenges the bias of standard accounts of gambling, which emphasize its corrupting influence and depict players as powerless victims cheated by the unscrupulous operators of gambling houses.

The reality was less negative. Cheating by proprietors was by no means common and fantan was considered a socially acceptable leisure activity. For many people, it was part of daily life, and tanguan 攤館, the establishments where it was played, were popular venues both enjoyable and secure. They generated a specific kind of conviviality derived from complex interactions among participants. By underestimating the role of fantan (and gambling more generally), one risks overlooking a socially significant activity, something that influenced the way not only heavy gamblers but also ordinary people perceived their own lives and destinies.

This paper investigates the framework of Islamist politics of Jama'at e Islami in Indian-administered Kashmir. Even though Jama'at e Islami creates the notion of “other” in the Indian state and challenges it but Kashmir's provincial relationship with India also forces it to work within the limits set up by the same state. This paper, thus, conceptualizes the relationship between Indian state and Islamists in a Muslim Majority region that demands the right to self-determination. In doing so, the paper interrogates Jama'at e Islami's rhetorical opposition to the political doctrine of Indian secularism and raises queries about minority rights and their place in the Islamist project.

This article examines available narratives and modes of representation concerning “civilization” and “savagery” in the early Meiji proto-colonial discursive sphere. It focuses on a major event in the 1874 Taiwan Expedition: Japan's capture and attempted assimilation of an orphaned aboriginal girl. Through an analysis of Japanese newspaper reports, woodblock prints, illustrated books, and commercial photography, this article argues that alongside the well-characterized “rhetoric of aboriginal savagery” that exaggerated the otherness of Taiwanese indigenes, there developed a synergistic “rhetoric of aboriginal civilization” that emphasized the indigenes' capacity for transformation. This mode of representation stressed not the aboriginals' alterity but rather their latent affinity to Japan. According the aboriginal a measure of temporality, the rhetoric of aboriginal civilization formed an indispensable counterpart to the rhetoric of aboriginal savagery: one that affirmed the campaign's “civilizing” component by demonstrating its viability.

As major Asian trading centres and former British colonies, Singapore and Hong Kong inevitably have parallel histories. Although their destinies diverged in the latter part of the twentieth century, comparisons between the two places are useful in developing an understanding of the historical circumstances of each city, and also in developing regional perspectives. The burden of the present article lies in three arguments. First, while the Japanese occupation is often seen as a climactic event in Asian history that destroyed the colonial world and set in motion the transition to independence, the economic policies that defined the post-war era were initiated by colonial regimes during the 1930s and continued by nationalist governments after 1945. Second, the political trajectories followed by Singapore and Hong Kong in the first post-war decades were largely determined by unanticipated developments relating to the cold war, and did not follow logically from the situation that existed in the 1930s, or even when the war ended in August 1945. Third, while both places were seen as colonial relics in post-war Southeast Asia and had to contend with nationalist policies that were incompatible with their social make-up and business practices, efforts to assimilate them within national states were unsuccessful, and they continued to flourish as global city states.

From 1989 onwards, the People's Republic of China's use of the Qiaoban, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, has burgeoned notably in regard to attracting investment and loyalty from overseas Chinese outside mainland China. This article analyses the impact of the Qiaoban and the PRC influence upon “diasporic Chinese” living along the northern Thai border, particularly ethnic Chinese (e.g. Teochiu, Hakka, Hainanese) and Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang-KMT). It finds that, while the Qiaoban has largely succeeded in the engagement with the ethnic Chinese of northern Thailand, the active efforts of the PRC to engage the Nationalist Chinese have been notably unfruitful. However, the Qiaoban's efforts have caused increasing tension between different generations in Nationalist Chinese communities.

In the conduct of prewar Japanese foreign relations, political associations (seiji kessha) – we might also call them pressure groups – exerted considerable political influence, particularly on Japan's relations with China and other Asian nations. One of the best known of these political associations is the Kokuryūkai (the “Amur Society,” also known as the “Black Dragon Society”), which was founded in 1901 and, in 1946, was banned as an ultranationalist association by the American occupation authorities. The Kokuryūkai was also identified as the center of an expansionist conspiracy to steer Japan towards war with the Western powers.

In the absence of detailed studies of the Kokuryūkai, this article aims to clarify the organization's political views and activities and to demonstrate its influence on Japanese foreign relations and involvement in East Asia in the early twentieth century. Drawing on primary sources such as the association's publications and its leaders' memoranda and letters, I show that the Kokuryūkai engaged in intensive networking activities and the accumulation of social capital involving not only Japanese but also Chinese and Korean politicians and diplomats. Nevertheless, I conclude that the association's influence on the origins of the Asia-Pacific War should not be overstated, since its activities reached a climax in the late 1910s and effectively ended with the death of founder Uchida Ryōhei in 1937.