One would hardly expect extreme political theories like anarchism to be popular in Japan, where there is a strong tradition of obedience to political authority, and where those in control of the government do not hesitate to use police power to check what they consider to be “dangerous thoughts.” In fact had it not been for the famous Taigyaku Jiken or the high treason incident in 1910, anarchism might have been relegated to obscurity, having made but an imperceptible ripple in die course of Japanese thought. As a result of this incident, however, there are probably not many among the older generation in Japan today who have not heard about Kōtoku Shūsui, the leader.

This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

In the seventeenth century, at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Ch'ing dynasties, China produced three outstanding scholars: Huang Tsung-hsi (1619–95), Ku Yen-wu (1613–82), and Wang Fu-chih (1619–92), all great thinkers, voluminous writers, and ardent patriots. The social and political chaos, economic deterioration, excess of Wang Yang-ming's intuitionism, and, above all, the conquest of China by the Manchus must have stimulated the best minds to develop their ideas in a more practical direction. They were contemporaries of René Descartes 1596–1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and only slightly earlier than Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Confined by their cultural tradition and living in a vast but largely isolated empire, these men naturally developed ideas different from those of their European contemporaries. But they had enough challenges of their own to meet. The originality in their ideas bespeaks the intellectual vigor of late imperial China.

Japanese within the Manchukuo education bureaucracy stood out from their contemporaries in other Japanese colonies in their opposition to including militaristic and Japanese emperor-centered materials in the schools. As late as 1943, they published textbooks that focused on the students' daily lives rather than on encouraging respect for the military or reverence for the Japanese imperial family. Here, the author discusses how the congruence of an attempt by Manchukuo authorities at gaining authenticity and the progressive background of leading Japanese educators in the region brought about an education system that was unlike any other in the Japanese empire. Using Manchukuo textbooks, education journals, and postwar memoirs, the author examines a school of thought among Japanese colonial language educators, referred to as “reform optimists,” who held that whole language education could solve the contradiction between Manchukuo's stated ideal of ethnic equality and the reality of Japanese domination.

This article explores critical shifts in the governance of religion amid massive urbanization and technological advances in contemporary China. Since the turn of the millennium, along with rapid urban transformation, the Chinese state has greatly expanded its reach into and surveillance of religious communities. At the same time, tensions between state initiatives and religious communities have come to the forefront of public attention. So far, scholarly attention has mostly focused on the repression of religious communities, especially Christians. The goal of this article is to highlight broader transitions in the ways religion is governed in China and to reflect on how these transitions should be understood alongside the government's social and political agendas. The advancement of technologies and the extension of the bureaucratic system to maintain control of a rapidly urbanizing society, I argue, have brought about a “technological turn” of secularism in China, which will have a far-reaching impact on religious life.

This essay attempts an exploration of the historical and historiographical implications of the interplay of individual, local, “national,” and global forms of memory in the music of Rabindranath Tagore. Produced at a time of crises in the Indian postcolonial subjectivity, this music offers a critique of the Eurocentric discourses of “World-history” and nationalism, by invoking alternative Indian discourses of “Itihāsa” and “samāj”. At the same time, Tagore departs from the contemporary Hindu cultural nationalist revivalist approach of the tradition of North Indian (Hindustani) classical music and subjects it to a creative regenerative endeavor by reconnecting the tradition with its original subaltern roots. Skeptical of several kinds of homogeneous impulses, this music offers an alternative idea of universalism that is as much human as a specific civilizational concept. Tagore's musical program thus offers an aesthetic blueprint of a more inclusive indigenous modernity in the subcontinent.