A remodeled city awaits Shanghai's visitors this summer. As always, tourists will crowd the famous Bund and enjoy the classic architecture erected by the International Settlement's foreign powers during an earlier day of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Recently, Shanghai's city planners have undertaken a major project in remodeling the urban landscape that surrounds the Bund, with its old Hong Kong and Shanghai banks, Custom House, and grand hotels built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, planners have effectively transformed this waterfront symbol of China's former semicolonial status into a breezy park, sightseeing plaza, and high-end shopping district, all rolled into one. The classic architecture of the treaty port era has become the backdrop for a new day's consumerism, perfectly suited to the Chinese state's own celebration of the successes of a reform economy.

If Shanghai has the World Expo 2010, Delhi has the Commonwealth Games 2010.

The hoopla, the sparkling “new clothes” for the host city, the chest-thumping sense of nationalism that pervades the event: there is much about Shanghai in 2010 that is reminiscent of Beijing in 2008.

South Africans see themselves as a nation that loves sport, but with the World Cup in football imminent, there appears to be a sense of exhaustion both in the media and among the population. One important reason is that football does not dominate the public imagination of sport, as cricket and rugby do. The game is played and loved in the black townships, the fortunes of African football-playing nations are followed devotedly, and players such as Didier Drogba have a larger-than-life standing in the country. But football has not become a metaphor for the nation, as rugby and cricket have become. Whether this reflects a racial affiliation alone is hard to get at, because the local team, Bafana (which could be genially translated as “the boys”), are eighty-eighth in the FIFA rankings, without a ghost of a chance of winning the Cup, while at rugby and cricket, South Africa are world beaters.

According to standard reference works, the Meiji leader Saigō Takamori committed ritual suicide in 1877. A close reading of primary sources, however, reveals that Saigō could not have killed himself as commonly described; instead, he was crippled by a bullet wound and beheaded by his followers. Saigō's suicide became an established part of Japanese history only in the early 1900s, with the rise of bushidō as a national ideology. By contrast, in the 1870s and 1880s, the story of Saigō's suicide was just one of many fantastic accounts of his demise, which also included legends that he ascended to Mars or escaped to Russia. Remarkably, historians have treated Saigō's suicide as an unproblematic account of his death, rather than as a legend codified some four decades later. This essay links the story of Saigō's suicide to the rise of modern Japanese nationalism, and examines other Saigō legends as counternarratives for modern Japan.

Different methods of communication imply different social and political relations. Generally, mass media are distributed through centralized broadcast stations or presses and controlled by the elite. Face-to-face communications, which circulate through physically close contact between people, have more subversive potential. The author analyzes rumors spread in the press and by word of mouth during October and November 1998 in East Java, Indonesia. Conspirators and ninjas were suspected of killing many alleged sorcerers and persecuting the traditionalist Muslim majority. In response, local residents established guards against, attacked, and even killed suspected ninjas. Suspicion also was directed against the government, elites, and the armed forces. This subversive content is attributed to the interaction of two forms of communication: oral rumors became written rumors, and vice versa.

Although Manchukuo is easily dismissed as a puppet of Japan, at the time of its founding, it was one of many examples of a partially sovereign state. Specific compromises of Manchukuo's sovereignty shaped the formation of its domestic institutions, such as the legal sphere, in tangible ways. Manchukuo handed over to Japan the power to staff and ideologically mold its judiciary, while the tutelary attitude that Japan took toward the state was concretely manifested in aspects of Manchukuo penal and civil law, and a surprisingly contentious path to the abrogation of Japanese extraterritoriality. With the outbreak of war, Manchukuo effectively surrendered its national sovereignty to the needs of the Japanese empire, sacrificing its jurisdictional integrity as well. While not denying the deliberate attempt made by Japan to misrepresent the independence of Manchukuo, this article also seeks to understand more precisely how Manchukuo's architects assumed certain limits to state sovereignty, and how this understanding systematically crippled the new state's legal institutions.

Postcolonial states responded differently to the group-specific personal laws that were recognized in many colonial societies. While some retained most colonial personal laws (e.g., Lebanon) and others introduced major changes (e.g., Tunisia), most introduced modest yet significant changes (e.g., Egypt, India, Indonesia). Indian policy makers retained personal laws specific to religious groups, and did not change the minority laws, although minority recognition did not rule out culturally grounded reform. They changed Hindu law alone based on their values, as they saw Hindu social reform as the key to making nation and citizen. Reform proposals drew from the modern Western valuation of the nuclear family, and from Hindu traditions that were reformed to meet standards of modernity. As Hindu nationalists and other conservatives defended lineage authority, legislators retained much of the lineage control over ancestral property. But they provided limited divorce rights, reduced restrictions on mate choice, and banned bigamy. The visions driving the initial proposals influenced many later changes in India's family laws.

The article critiques the “Kerala model,” which holds up Kerala State, India, as a model that may be emulated by other developing countries, on account of its remarkable advances in social development. The dominant left in Kerala has often claimed credit for such achievements, leading to its glorification as a model for social democracy. This uncritical adoration, which has acquired the status of national commonsense in Kerala, has reduced marginalized people in Kerala, particularly the lower-caste Dalits and tribals, to a state of abjection. The present effort seeks to show how the marginalization of these social groups and their confinement to governmental categories was not a historical accident, but the effect of political strategies on the left that led to their exclusion from productive resources, and of the assertion of upper-caste agency in left-led anticaste struggle.

Wakimura Yoshitarō, a prominent Japanese economics professor and art collector, helped establish or sustain at least eight art museums in postwar Japan. He did so to create important institutions of democratic empowerment rather than nationalist displays of power. The crucial context was defeat in World War II, which left many Japanese, including Wakimura, committed to taming capitalism. Wakimura was particularly interested in creating new practices of art appreciation that could mediate relations between potentially antagonistic groups of Japanese, and in building museums as fresh spaces to house these newly egalitarian relationships. He emphasized the value to society created when individuals developed their aesthetic and thus political judgment. His efforts help explain the proliferation of both public and private art museums in postwar Japan as well as the nature of postwar political culture.

In a performance of Ōdaiko, arguably the most iconic and widely performed piece in Japanese taiko drumming, a loincloth-clad man pounds furiously on a huge Japanese drum to the point of near exhaustion. Although this piece often is assumed to descend from Japan's rich heritage of folk drumming, this article argues instead that Ōdaiko was inspired by a fictional representation of festival drumming in the mid-century Japanese film The Rickshaw Man (Muhōmatsu no isshō). In addition, the revealing clothing worn in the performance derives not from Japanese custom but from the input of the French designer Pierre Cardin. Tracing the emergence of Ōdaiko in the influential taiko ensemble Ondekoza, this article sheds light on the potent mixture of folkloric instrumentation and modern sensibility that distinguishes contemporary taiko drumming.