The theme of this paper, a theme close to the heart of the geographer, was in a slightly varied form the title of an international symposium organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1955. This symposium on “Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” provided ample opportunity for fruitful dialogues between scholars representing the full range of disciplines from the natural sciences through the humanities to the social sciences. In this truly interdisciplinary symposium of some seventy-five scholars, no less than thirty percent represented the discipline of geography.

During the Cambodian Genocide (1975–79), about 12,272 to 20,000 people were jailed in the infamous Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison. Only a handful survived. This study focuses on how former S21 perpetrators relate today to their role in the genocide. Through a vast network of fear and torture, the Khmer Rouge instituted a program of “thought reform” in order to accomplish total obedience. Based on court testimonies, archival material, and semi-structured interviews with surviving S-21 guards and interrogators, this study shows how the former S-21 personnel manifest a lingering obedience orientation toward authority, limited reflection about the past, and little empathy toward their victims. The study demonstrates the long-lasting implications of the mindset that was established by the Khmer Rouge. More needs to be done to face the past and to “remove the guards from their prisons” in Cambodia.

This essay examines Japanese-Chinese arranged cross-border marriages and investigates the ways in which participants legitimate and render such marriages comprehensible in light of national and local histories. Marriageability in this context is produced not through conceptions of “exotic difference” but instead distinct discourses of “familiarity.” On the one hand, Chinese participants tactically narrate “blood ties” (xueyuan guanxi 血缘关系) to interpret current marriage migration as following relational bonds and thus a “natural” phenomenon. On the other hand, Japanese participants stress Chinese women's “familiarity” (shinkin kan 親近感) with Japan, a familiarity that is claimed to stem from positive historical ties forged by colonialism, and thus effaces Japanese wartime culpability. In short, multiple layered notions of familiarity, shaped by the colonial legacy in East Asia, are at work in rendering these transnational intimate relations possible.

The year 2012 was fascinating for domestic politics and international relations in Northeast Asia. Perhaps most notably, every country in the region experienced a change of leadership. China, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan all saw new leaders begin their tenure. In addition, regional relations took a turn for the worse, with numerous countries engaging in territorial and maritime disputes, disagreeing over interpretations of their shared histories.

In popular Buddhist practice in rural northern Vietnam, moral personhood does not merely belong to the self but is embedded in the intersubjective relationship among individuals, the gods, and the community. The inner moral person, characterized as heart/mind (tâm), is constituted in the very process of becoming visible in the social world through virtuous action (đức) subject to the intentional acts of being witnessed for (chứng cho) by the gods and one's peers. Drawing upon popular Buddhist practice of the female followers of a ritual specialist in Bathing Buffalo Village, this article argues that the act of being witnessed for bridges the gap between the invisible and deeply felt experience of moral selfhood and the visible manifestation of that self in the social realm through acts of altruism and filial piety and reveals the inherently social nature of moral personhood.

In a particularly influential paper in the critique of development literature in anthropology, Arturo Escobar once suggested that an underlying cause of the “crisis in developmentalist discourse” is our inability to imagine an alternative (1992, 21). The problem, he explains, is not a shortage of critics but, rather, a plethora who are content to operate within the “epistemological and cultural space” defined by the development discourse itself. Yet, he goes on in a subsequent work, “[t]he alternative is, in a sense, always there” (1995, 223), if not in the work of development professionals and critics, then in hybridizations constructed by local people to protect and to improve themselves (218–19). This paper is about such hybridized alternatives as they have developed over the past century among a group of pottery makers in rural Sri Lanka. These are not, however, the mass social movements to which Escobar was referring. Rather, they are everyday and, more important, ongoing refashionings of economic and social assistance programs as these local people select from, remake, and reject opportunities that come their way. While Escobar describes grassroots resistance to the very discourse of “Third World development,” the Sri Lankan potters neither resist consistently nor accept consistently the developers' views of the world and the development gifts on offer. Instead, the potters work toward their own goals and make choices accordingly, both influenced by and influencing the shifting external discourses in which they participate (Woost 2000, 769).

The rural credit system in traditional agrarian societies has long been associated with “usury,” and therefore often considered a hindrance to rural development. Three aspects of the traditional rural credit system are used to substantiate this assertion. First, traditional rural credit often entailed interest rates above the ceiling set by law. As early as 1790 b.c., the Laws of Hammurabi established annual interest ceilings of 33.3 percent for grain loans and 20 percent for cash loans. Any loan charging interest beyond the ceiling was illegal (Sowards 1983, 5). To many contemporary scholars, even a ceiling of 20 to 30 percent seems exorbitant: given the low return of traditional farming, peasants could hardly afford to borrow at such high interest rates. Second, from a socioeconomic perspective, high interest rates suggest unequal relations between debtors and creditors. According to Rao, the origin of this unequal relationship lies in market imperfection, or so-called “connectedness”—the link between wealth inequality and the failure-of-markets mechanism (1986). A fragmented and noncompetitive market, this view maintains, facilitates personalized credit transactions which not only extract surplus but also perpetuate peasants' credit dependency on the landlord. This credit dependency, in turn, creates a situation in which compulsive indebtedness gradually deprives the peasantry of the means of production (Bhaduri 1983, chaps. 4, 5). Finally, it is asserted, traditional rural credit had little to do with production. Most peasants used rural credit for consumption purposes, which had destructive effects on agricultural production. Rural credit, in these views, is a siphon that draws resources out of the rural sector, locks peasants into a vicious cycle of debt, creates rural inequality, and hinders production. Scholars who have studied the Chinese peasant economy agree, by and large, that that was the nature of Chinese rural credit system.

The anthropologist Victor Turner has proposed a new theory of religious pilgrimage, holding that people on pilgrimage have entered into a social modality that contrasts sharply with the one they ordinarily experience at home; roles, ranks, and social hierarchy have all been left behind, and what Turner calls communitas has come into being en route. Studies in Japanese by Eiki Hoshino confirm the cross-cultural applicability of Turner's theory, and show that it most adequately explains an ancient and famous pilgrimage tradition in Japan, that to the eighty-eight sites on Shikoku. It especially helps us account for the unusual tensions between pilgrims and government during the Tokugawa era. These materials and analyses are used, then, to suggest that in his study of the Kataragama pilgrimage, Bryan Pfaffenberger has misinterpreted Turner's theory and has overlooked ways in which it does, in fact, explain the materials from Sri Lanka.

Change, or impending change, can often inspire the creation of myths, for it both threatens and promises. It threatens the security of the established, while providing hope to the disestablished. Change thus produces anxiety and discomfort on the one hand, euphoria and optimism on the other. Those in a position to be harmed by the change often create “negative” myths about the potential implications of that change; those not, glorify it. To misquote Claude Levi-Strauss, myths are created to control the present, hence, by implication, also the future (Levi-Strauss 1979).

Peasant movement studies based solely on economic and political data may miss important social and cultural elements in the constellation of forces that generate those movements. The process of leadership entry—that is, the legitimation of the outside organizers to the peasants—has seldom been a subject of systematic investigation. However, I suggest that examination of what makes peasants accept as leaders persons who are in many respects different from themselves may yield important insights into the nature of the problems of organizing peasants.

The institutional foundations of the Tokugawa daimyo have been obscured by the lack of insight which historians have traditionally shown into the history of the Ashikaga period and, in particular, into the late Ashikaga, or Sengoku, age. Like the Dark Ages in Europe, this chapter of Japanese history has been accepted in historiography as a dark and formless era of war and trouble. Japanese historians have dismissed the Sengoku period as a time of ge-koku-jō when the political order was capriciously turned upside down by unworthy leaders. The colorful Western historian, James Murdoch, has heaped his most caustic invectives upon the main figures in Ashikaga history. Of the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate he claimed, “Takauji may indeed have been the greatest man of his time, but that is not saying very much, for the middle of the fourteenth century in Japan was the golden age, not merely of turncoats, but of mediocrities.”1 To Murdoch the Sengoku period was a “vile” age when the Japanese people showed, as he put it, a “lust for war and slaughter … utterly beyond human control,” and only the timely arrival of the “great trio” of daimyo, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, saved the day for Japan.

Current chinese activity along the northern frontier of India, and Peking's claims to much of this area, have focused attention on a remote and sparsely populated region whose arid reaches, blanketed by perpetual snow, have never held a central position on the stage of world history. The history of Ladakh, where controversy currently rages over conflicting claims to Aksaichin, the Chang Chenmo Valley, Kurnak Fort, Spangur, and Demchok, has been characterized by instability and turmoil. Squeezed between Tibet, India, Kashmir, and the autonomous Muslim Rajahs of Baltistan, Ladakh as an independent entity suffered a precarious existence.

The notion that democracy, as the West understands democracy, is meeting a crucial test in the conflict of ideas that agitate the minds and emotions of Indians, is everywhere receiving greater attention. It is a notion as commonly understood by the Indian intellectual as it is popularly appreciated by those who would observe the process from the West. That the Indian view of China plays a significant role in this process is readily apparent.

In response to US plans to withdraw troops from South Korea in the 1970s, the Park Chung Hee administration (1961–79) leveraged all defense-related civilian industries to build an independent system of weapons production. In keeping with Park's advancement of military modernization driven by strong private-sector growth, an agenda that he promoted with his banner slogan “rich nation, strong military,” large Korean companies known as chaebŏl were transformed to serve as government contractors that drove both national economic development and military modernization. A case study of one such company, Hanwha, illustrates how the state's hyper-militarization of Korean industries determined the distinct course and character of South Korea's national development. The study highlights the dynamic interplay that occurred between state actors and private-sector CEOs, managers, and laborers in shaping the chaebŏl-centered economic and defense industrialization.

Structural upgrading and industrial dynamism in Pacific Asia—initially Japan, then the Asian NIEs (Newly Industrializing Economies: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) following closely behind, and most recently, ASEAN 4 (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines)—have been unprecedentedly phenomenal. This regional supergrowth in industrial activities has become the center of attention, but the evolving changes in the political systems and societal structures of the Pacific Asian nations have been, no doubt, equally important, although rather subtle and not so dramatic in appearance.

This article examines why the “history issue” continues to hinder Japanese-Korean relations after nominally successful negotiations such as the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea and the 2015 comfort women agreement. It contends that leaders put off and quite possibly sacrificed reconciliation in order to achieve treaties and agreements that addressed more immediate security, economic, and political needs. However, because agreements were not transparently negotiated, partly due to the lack of a neutral third-party mediator, Koreans believe the treaties were not fair nor final settlements. Additionally, the reconciliation process has been flawed because it haphazardly tackles disagreements and does not consider time. A third-party such as the United States should mediate a settlement between Japan and South Korea to ensure adequate confidence building measures. Such measures will lower the costs of giving and accepting an apology, increasing the chances of an enduring and legitimate treaty.

Among more than 100,000 prisoners captured by United Nations forces in the Korean War, there was just one Japanese prisoner of war (POW). Matsushita Kazutoshi, Prisoner Number 600,001, had served in the Japanese army in China, both Nationalist and Communist armies in the Chinese Civil War, and in the Chinese People's Volunteers in North Korea, and was to end his military career in the ranks of the South Korean army. Using his forgotten story as a prism, this article explores neglected transborder dimensions of the Korean War. It argues the need to pay closer attention to the historical continuities linking the Asia-Pacific War and Chinese Civil War to the Korean War; it reconsiders the nature of Japan's connections to the conflict in Korea and reconceptualizes the UN POW camps as sites of ongoing Chinese and Korean civil wars.

This article introduces the 1952–56 hiropon crisis, Japan's sole major domestic experience with illegal drugs, and the world's first methamphetamine “epidemic.” In the early postwar years, hiropon addiction came to symbolize the dependent, traumatized state of a defeated Japan. This ideological significance made the eradication of hiropon a leading public issue, mobilizing the Japanese government, medical establishment, and social actors such as educators, parents, neighborhood associations, the media, and others. The process of eliminating methamphetamine restored public confidence and agency, and created a new identity for Japan as a cosmopolitan, independent nation. Unlike drugs in other contexts, hiropon was not embedded in the postwar political economy or culture, making possible its swift suppression. However, resolution of the methamphetamine crisis also sowed the seeds of its recrudescence in the 1970s. The ongoing “second stimulants epidemic,” reflecting consumption patterns typical of developed nations, has proven resistant to solution.