Other than a few remarkable exceptions, and because of their lack of social, educational, and political rights, women of the early Meiji period (1868–1890) have often been regarded as powerless actors in the formation and expansion of the bourgeoning Japanese public sphere. Following the research that feminist scholars have developed over the past twenty years on the redefinition of Jürgen Habermas' concepts of “public” and “private” in relation to Western women's lives, I would like to demonstrate how, even when lacking the possibility of changing their lives, some groups of Japanese women during the 1880s were nevertheless able to gather together, bring forth demands in public settings, and make public topics of discussion that had hither to been considered unworthy of public debate and pertaining only to the private lives of Japanese male citizens. In order to do so, I will take into consideration some of the activities organized by the women belonging to the Tōkyō Fujin Kyōfūkai, the Japanese branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.).

In medieval Japan the household became the basic social unit among all classes. In the process, a division of roles also came about: the household head and husband represented the ie to the outside world, while the wife was in charge of its running. The wife's role was highly regarded in the medieval period, but its details have yet to be fully examined. This paper attempts to shed light on how medieval women lived by studying the role of wives and their integral place in ie management. To do this, it is also necessary to examine the relationship between the father's wife and the son's wife, in other words, the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. I will look at women from various classes, to the extent the documentation allows, utilizing the diaries of the court nobility, literary works and other documentary, graphic and material evidence.

The development of transit trade between China and Russia after the eighteenth century led to the growth of prosperous Chinatowns in Mongolia. These maimaicheng (lit. “trade towns”) along a Chinese merchant network that reached Siberia and Turkestan displayed distinctive urban spaces, where a multicultural mixture of people – Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan and Hui Moslem – created new architectural styles and produced unique streetscapes. Unlike urban formations before the eighteenth century, these new towns absorbed nomadic and religious elements into their residential and secular spaces. This did not however imply assimilation. The landscape of northern Chinese towns clearly shows how different cultures were able to preserve their original styles and simultaneously adapt themselves to coexist with others.

It has long been recognized that, within traditional Chinese law and down to the present, civil disputes have had the potentiality of developing into criminal cases. This essay attempts to draw a dynamic picture of how legal troubles, both civil disputes and minor criminal cases, accelerated into major criminal ones. Section One discusses the pattern of such legal troubles in traditional and modern China. Section Two describes the mode by which such troubles were resolved, arguing that the resolution process is a kind of role-play between a third party, such as mediators, conciliators and judges, and those who are subject to their reasoning, such as plaintiffs and defendants. Section Three studies the conditions under which this operates. Third parties were not trusted, in terms of their fairness or competence, and thus they did not necessarily have the ability to settle disputes. Section Four examines the relation between crime and penalties in relation to these legal troubles, focusing particularly on how terms of punishment favoured lesser options.

Iriye, Akira. After Imperialism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965, and New York: Atheneum, 1973, paperback; “Preface to the New Edition.” In the republished edition. Chicago: Imprint Publications, Inc, 1990.

Samuel Hideo Yamashita. Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005; pp. xi + 331.