The disciplinary dissection of Indian studies has divided Indologists into diverse academic unions, each with its own in-group jargon, research interests, and intellectual traditions. It has also created discontinuities in the units of analysis selected by scholars of different disciplines, which create in turn discontinuities between contemporary and historical studies of Indian society. Thus historians have generally not focused on caste or caste associations, while a central referent of anthropologists has been precisely the caste (jati) unit. Partly this reflects a difference in levels of analysis, the historian taking a more encompassing perspective while the anthropologist in the course of his fieldwork concentrates on the grass-roots social world of village India. Partly it reflects the bias of the historical discipline in general toward formal institutions and. toward political, as opposed to social, change.

This article explains why the Chosŏn government and the military in particular expanded state control over forests in the seventeenth century and analyzes the implications of forest administration in a preindustrial polity. From 1592 to 1598, the Chosŏn dynasty suffered invasions from Japan that displaced much of the Korean population and devastated the economy and environment. The crucial role of the navy during the war, along with a dire postwar situation, heightened government anxieties about deforestation and timber scarcity. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the Chosŏn government expanded administration over forests, particularly pine forests, across the coasts and islands of southwestern Korea. The key vehicle for the expansion was the military. Due to wartime and postwar exigencies, the military became the late Chosŏn state's primary organ for management of wood resources for state purposes. Furthermore, the growth of pine-centric state forests and shifts in military priorities would significantly reshape Korean ecologies.

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.

In recent years the glitter of modern economic growth has been dulled, as more attention has been focused upon the attendant dislocations and negative aspects that have accompanied it. One area that has received little attention, especially from economists, is crime. Many writings of criminologists suggest that crime is a negative attribute that accompanies economic growth, for levels of affluence and crime seem to move upward together. A pattern similar to that observed in other modern countries was reported for Japan in 1966 by Professors DeVos and Mizushima.

What relationship should be expected between growth and crime? The usual economic theories of criminal behavior, with crime a declining function of an individual's ability to obtain legal income, would seem to argue for a negative relationship. However, crime is also related to the potential for ill-gotten gains; thus, it might be expected to at least keep pace with levels of income, or perhaps surpass them. This paper represents an attempt to provide some answers to these issues by explaining some of the complex interplay between factors involved in labor market improvement and the degree of criminal activity in Japan.

In the context of the japanese colonial empire, debates about colonial identity have tended to focus on the relationship between Japanese rulers and non-Japanese colonial subjects. The main problems for analysis have been the development of assimilationist and/or discriminatory policies toward colonized peoples, and the way in which the colonized—Koreans, Taiwanese, Micronesians, and others—resisted or adapted to the pressures of those policies. It is perhaps for this reason that rather little scholarly work has been published, in Japanese or in English, about the history of the Japanese colony of Karafuto, which was, after all, overwhelmingly a settler colony. By the mid-1930s, the colony had just over three hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom the vast majority were recent migrants from Japan, though official statistics also record the presence of some two hundred Russians, around two thousand indigenous people—mostly Ainu, Uilta and Nivkh—and almost six thousand Koreans, a group whose numbers were to grow very rapidly from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s. Very recently, however, increasing attention has begun to be directed to the complex, contested, and paradoxical process of identity formation amongst various groups of Japanese colonizers, especially amongst those Japanese who were born or brought up in the colonies (Kawamura 1994; 2000; Tomiyama 1997; Young 1998; Tamanoi 2000). In this context, Karafuto—as a predominantly settler colony—has a particularly interesting story to tell.

These words were expressed by Gangzhen and Cizhu, two peasant women born in the early twentieth century who lived in two villages in Jiangyong County of Hunan Province in southern China. When confronted with the loss of their husbands, these women relied on local tools familiar to women in this area—nüge and nüshu—to articulate their thoughts and emotions. Nüge (literally, “female song”), which includes bridal laments and folk narratives, was widely practiced among peasant women in southern China, especially prior to the Liberation of 1949. Nüshu (“female writing”), in contrast, was used extensively by peasant women in Jiangyong. Moreover, it is one of the very few writing systems in the world that is mostly illegible to men. This male-illegible script,3 which is semiphonetic compared to the ideographs of Chinese hanzi,4 was used for centuries among hanzi-illitetate women, but it remained basically undocumented and unknown to the outside world until the 1980s, just as it was becoming extinct. Prior to Liberation, Jiangyong women had used nüshu to write sisterhood letters, biographic laments, wedding literature, folk stories, and other narratives in verse form. Combined with nüge, they documented peasant women's experiences and gave voices to their existence.

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.

As happened in Tokugawa Japan and British India, China under die Ching witnessed a relative decline in fiscal importance of die land tax although its absolute amount increased substantially. Between 1753 and 1908 China's annual land tax revenue grew from 74 million to 102 million taels but its percentage contribution in die total tax revenue decreased from 73.5 to 35 percent. The reasons for its relatively lessened importance in die Ch'ing tax structure are the creation of new taxes such as die maritime customs and die likin, die lack of income- and price-elasticity in die land tax system, the defects of die fiscal administration, and a strong tradition against land tax increase. Since the same period saw a rise in general prices by 150 percent, obviously die Manchu government had not even raised enough taxes from land to offset price inflations, leaving a 40 percent increase in land acreage and a moderate improvement in land yields totally untouched. Hence, die land tax burden was not, as some asserted, oppressive in die last decades of the Ching dynasty.

The Chinese Teahouse was one of a few traditional institutions of sociability whose wider social and cultural appeal overshadowed its primary business. Historically, it was closely woven into the fabric of Chinese life. In many communities the teahouse served as a center of information, a locus of leisure and social gatherings, an occasional office and marketplace for many practitioners, and an arena where various social forces competed for status and influence. Urbanization in the late Qing dynasty further contributed to the growth of teahouses, especially in the Yangzi River region (Suzuki 1982; Yan 1997, 17). However, while teahouses continued to flourish in the early Republic, teahouse culture became a target—a constant target in some areas— of social critics. Why this tempest over teapots?

Scholars in china and chinese studies commonly think of culture as an autonomous and transcendental force that defines agents and institutions and determines the outcome of events. They often conclude that China's allegedly illiberal authoritarian culture inevitably generates authoritarian politics. In this article we will bring culture down to earth by arguing that it is not transcendental but entangled in reciprocal relationships with various social institutions, not the least of which are politics and political institutions. If culture is not fixed in a realm beyond everything else, then rehearsing traditional accounts of traditional culture is not enough to distinguish the range of possible futures. Instead, we have to look at why people have the ideas they have and how they can and might change.

The Chinese Communist program of szu-hsiang kai-tsao or “thought reform”is unique both as a social experiment and as a laboratory for cross-cultural psychiatric study. Applied to Westerners and Chinese, to professors, students, and peasants, it combines a remarkably widespread dissemination with impressive emotional force and depth.

The data of village and farm business surveys in India are too inaccurate to be of use in the analysis of the rural economy or the changes therein. This unsatisfactory nature of the data stems from the difference in outlook and interests of the cultivator and the investigator, the problem of memory, the problem of indifference in a context of hierarchical loyalties and conflicts, and the problem of motivation toward accurate replies on the part of the respondent when he has many reasons to mislead in many directions and few, if any, reasons to be conscientiously helpful. Some data, those which can be gathered by counting or by limited observation, are usable, but the gathering of quantitative data on farm operations will require a great effort over an extended period of time on a village at a time. Otherwise, the foreign scholar or visiting expert must restrict himself to employing the small amount of the bench-mark data as a base from which to work in constructing a description of the structure of aspects of the rural economy without hope of being able to employ quantitative methods on any but the most limited scale.

In the Boane district of Mozambique, about halfway between Maputo and the border with Swaziland, the National Agrarian Research Institute in Umbeluzi hosts two experiments in development cooperation provided by fellow developing countries. Behind a gated wall, the Agricultural Technology Demonstration Center—built in record time by China—experiments with different techniques of vegetable cultivation. Barely 500 meters away, technicians from the Brazilian Corporation of Agricultural Research, known as EMBRAPA, work with Mozambican counterparts from a food security program, installing an irrigation system along an open field. Taken together, the two projects are emblematic of an emerging tension within Brazil's and China's presence in Africa: does development cooperation in Boane represent competition or complementarity between these providers of development cooperation? In addition, does their proximity suggest a possibility of collaboration between these two providers?

After more than thirty years of economic reforms, China appears to have settled into a form of state capitalism that is likely to endure as long as the Communist Party retains power. This essay provides a critical overview of some of the key features and contradictions that characterize this particular form of capitalism and reviews some recent influential critiques of this system. Many observers have viewed the resurgence of the state-controlled economy as a shift away from policies more hospitable to both indigenous entrepreneurs and foreign capital in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the author's own research with entrepreneurs in China, however, this essay argues for the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of the controlling state and the free market.

One year has passed since the earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku. How should we as scholars approach, think about, and teach about the disaster? In generations hence, will 2011 be treated as a historical turning point on a par with 1945? Will it appear more significant than the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, despite the far greater loss of life in that event? We have a long process of analysis and contextualization ahead before the traumatic events of March 2011 have sedimented into history. Meanwhile, the nuclear disaster continues. When the Japanese government announced in December that complete decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors would take forty years, it became clear that even in the most optimistic scenario the world would be living with this disaster for a long time to come.

As key components of the “peculiar metaphysic of modernity,” geographers in nineteenth-century Japan began to remap the world in the name of science and “civilization” (Mitchell 1991, xii). What is often overlooked in this equation of the map with modernity, however, is Japan's history of mapmaking before the modern period. Although the earliest imperial governments in Japan practiced administrative mapmaking on a limited scale beginning in the seventh century, it was only during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) that comprehensive land surveying and mapmaking by the state were standardized and regularized. The Tokugawa ordered all daimyo to map their landholdings in 1605; these edicts were repeated numerous times, such that by the early nineteenth century the bakufu had organized five countrywide mapmaking and surveying projects, and produced from those surveys four comprehensive maps of Japan.

The civil examination system in the Confucian state of Yi Dynasty Korea was an important channel of recruitment for government officials and the graduates of the civil examinations carried enormous power and prestige. The determination as to who participated in these examinations will shed more light on the nature of Yi society. Contrary to the prevailing belief that the civil examinations were open only to men of yangban birth and closed to the commoners, there is strong evidence suggesting commoners' participations in the examinations. Legally, there was no statutory restriction against commoners. The state educational system that trained the future examination candidates not only did not discriminate against commoners but even encouraged qualified commoners to enroll in schools. Moreover, certain social groups whose social status was clearly lower than that of commoners were also allowed in the examinations. There were also individual cases in which men of non-yangban origin rose through the civil examinations to become government officials, some holding high ranking posts. In view of such evidence, the notion that the yangban status was wholly hereditary is no longer tenable. Instead, what distinguished yangban from commoners was one's determination and commitment to pursue Confucian scholarship by enrolling in a Confucian school, for student status exempted him from burdensome military duty.

The mythologized past is the past that predominates in the minds of most people. Therefore, even as historians strive to counter it, it behooves us to study it with care. Although any aspect of the past has the potential to live on as myth in the present, certain events and persons, because they resonate with themes of broader historical scope and importance, have this potential to an especially high degree. Thus, in American history, where racism has been such a pervasive historical pattern, figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King who helped to ameliorate the condition of blacks are often treated in larger-than-life terms. To take a more complex case, in China in the twentieth century, where the West has been by turns hated as an imperialist aggressor and admired for its mastery of the secrets of wealth and power, the Boxers, because they attacked both the West and its modern secrets, have been alternately praised and reviled.

This article takes the case of the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion to examine how Asian religious leaders and translators, in a context of colonial modernity, invested a European language with their own cosmologies and discourses, building both a national identity and an alternative spiritual universalism. Studies of translation in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the processes and impact of translating European texts and ideas into the languages of the colonized. This article discusses the inverse process, examining how Caodai textual production used French spiritist language and tropes to occult its Chinese roots, translating Daoist cosmology into a universalist and anti-colonial spiritual discourse rooted in Vietnamese nationalism. These shifts are examined through a close examination of translingual practices in the production and translation of the core esoteric scripture of Caodaism, the Đại Thừa Chơn Giáo 大乘真教 (The True Teachings of the Great Vehicle), rendered in its 1950 Vietnamese-French edition as The Bible of the Great Cycle of Esotericism. This study demonstrates how colonial religious institutions and networks of circulation in Asia stimulate the emergence of new movements and textual practices that mimic, invert, jumble, and transcend the cosmologies of both the Chinese imperium and the European colonial regime.

The literature on nationalism ascribes a pivotal role to schools in creating what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community,” through the formation and dissemination of a common national identity and a shared national consciousness where none existed before (e.g., Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Smith 1991). It is not unusual to find Japan cited as a prime example of this process, not only among theorists of nationalism, but among Japan specialists, as well (e.g., Beauchamp 1988, 226–29; Cummings 1980, 17–25; Hunter 1989, 192–97; Ienaga 1978; Pyle 1996, 125–30; Rohlen 1983, 46–57; Schoppa 1991, 29–31; Thomas 1996, 254–62). In general, they portray the first two decades of the Meiji period, between 1868 and 1890, as the era when a modern national consciousness merged with a revivified nativist identity to form an “emperor-centered nationalism” that was institutionalized and propagated by the state, chiefly through a newly established compulsory, centralized school system. Frequently, this assertion is supported by citing the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), which begins, “Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof.” This distinctive brand of Japanese nationalism is also regarded as a factor contributing to the subsequent development of Japanese imperialism and the country's pursuit of a colonial empire abroad, which began with its victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and concluded fifty years later with its defeat in the Pacific War.