New Book Announcement: “Japan from Anime to Zen: Quick Takes on Culture, Art, History, Food … and More”
This friendly guide offers concise but detailed demystifications of more than 85 aspects of ancient and modern Japan.
New Book Announcement: “Tokyo Love Story: A Manga Memoir of One Woman’s Journey in the World’s Most Exciting City” by Julie Blanchin Fujita
A funny and intimate travelogue of one woman’s unexpected adventures in Japan. French illustrator Julie Blanchin-Fujita arrived in Tokyo for what she thought would be a one-year stint, and ended up never leaving.
New Book Announcement: “Chiru Sakura: Falling Cherry Blossoms” by Grace Eiko Thomson
At 8 years old, Grace Eiko Nishikihama was forcibly removed from her Vancouver home and interned with her parents and siblings in the BC Interior. Chiru Sakura—Falling Cherry Blossoms is a moving and politically outspoken memoir written by Grace, now a grandmother, with passages from a journal kept by her late mother, reflecting on their…
New Book Announcement: “Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving” by L Joyce Zapanta Mariano
Many Filipino Americans feel obligated to give charitably to their families, their communities, or social development projects and organizations back home. Their contributions provide relief to poor or vulnerable Filipinos, and address the forces that maintain poverty, vulnerability, and exploitative relationships in the Philippines. This philanthropy is a result of both economic globalization and the…
New Book Announcement: “Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm” by Olga V Solovieva and Sho Konishi
The Russian cultural presence in Japan after the Meiji Revolution was immense. Indeed, Japanese cultural negotiations with Russian intellectuals and Russian literature, art, theology and political thought, formed an important basis for modern Japanese transnational intellectual, cultural, literary, and artistic production.
New Book Announcement: “Prisoner of Wars: A Hmong Fighter Pilot’s Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life” by Chia Youyee Vang
Retired Captain Pao Yang was a Hmong airman trained by the US Air Force and CIA to fly T-28D aircraft for the US Secret War in Laos. However, his plane was shot down during a mission in June 1972. Yang survived, but enemy forces captured him and sent him to a POW camp in northeastern…
New Book Announcement: “Writing Poetry, Surviving War: The Works of Refugee Scholar-Official Chen Yuyi (1090-1139)” by Yugen Wang
The book is a study of the works of the Northern Song Chinese poet Chen Yuyi (1090–1139) as he fled the invading Jurchen soldiers in the political throes of a dynastic transition. Author Yugen Wang demonstrates how Chen’s poems epitomize the new style of writing in the Song that is markedly different from that of…
New Book Announcement: “Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Transpacific” by Clara Iwasaki
The texts that are examined in this study move in and out of different languages or are multilingual in their origins. Texts and authors do not move randomly; rather, they follow routes shaped by the history of contact between different nations of the transpacific.
New Book Announcement: “Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea” by Ksenia Chizhova
The lineage novel flourished in Korea from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. These vast works unfold genealogically, tracing the lives of several generations. New storylines, often written by different authors, follow the lives of the descendants of the original protagonists, offering encyclopedic accounts of domestic life cycles and relationships. Elite women transcribed…
New Book Announcement: “In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty” by Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari, translated by David Brophy
In the first half of the 18th century, rival dynasties of Naqshbandi Sufi shaykhs vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. In the 1750s, the collapse of the Junghar Mongol state gave one branch of this family an opportunity to assert their independence in the oasis cities of Kashgar and Yarkand….
New Book Announcement: “Setsuko’s Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration” by Shirley Ann Higuchi
As children, Shirley Ann Higuchi and her brothers knew Heart Mountain only as the place their parents met, imagining it as a great Stardust Ballroom in rural Wyoming. As they grew older, they would come to recognize the name as a source of great sadness and shame for their older family members, part of the…
New Book Announcement: “My Heart Sutra: A World in 260 Characters” by Frederik L Schodt
The Heart Sutra, beloved by millions in East Asia for over 1,400 years, is used as solace, protection, and a gateway to another mode of thinking. Schodt realized that it could also be his entry into a world of faith.
New Book Announcement: “Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture” by Shengqing Wu
Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world?
New Book Announcement: “Confucianism and Sacred Space: The Confucius Temple from Imperial China to Today” by Chin-shing Huang
Temples dedicated to Confucius are found throughout China and across East Asia, dating back over two thousand years. These sacred and magnificent sanctuaries hold deep cultural and political significance.
New Book Announcement: “Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War” by Sunny Xiang
Why were US intelligence organizations so preoccupied with demystifying East and Southeast Asia during the mid-20th century? Sunny Xiang offers a new way of understanding the American cold war in Asia by tracing aesthetic manifestations of “Oriental inscrutability” across a wide range of texts. She examines how cold war regimes of suspicious thinking produced an…