The cults and ritual practices of the Sino-Thai communities of southern Thailand are a distinctive aspect of a region in which Chinese heritage has a high degree of social significance. Chinese came to the Malay Peninsula in several waves; many settlers arrived as early as the sixteenth century, and others flooded into the region to work in tin-mines and rubber plantations in the nineteenth century. Although now “Thai” in many respects, the descendants of Chinese immigrants in the south retain a distinctive identity, visibly expressed in the annual ritual cycle focused on specific rites and temples. These events provide a sense of connection to ancestral origins, but also make important statements about the contemporary position of Chinese descendants in a complex multiracial context. Tourism, both national and transnational, has played an important role in the expansion of ritual performance. During the capitalist boom years of the 1990s, elements of Chinese identity became a valued social marker in Thailand and some aspects of the southern cultural and ritual practices were adopted more widely, although most of the Sino-Thai descendants outside the south had little or no understanding of the origins or meaning of the practices. This paper examines rites performed annually in two southern Thai towns, investigating how they reflect complex negotiations of ethnic identity vis-à-vis national and regional contexts.

The 1950s in Japan are usually considered to be marked by pacifism or a “victim consciousness” related to World War II, together with a rejection of war and of the military. Yet attention to the popular press and other sources designed to reflect and appeal to a mass audience, rather than magazines carrying debates among intellectuals, shows that throughout the 1950s the recent war was a much more dynamic issue than typically has been recognized, and that former soldiers were far from universally reviled. Connections with the war, in turn, remained an integral part of the evolving sense of nation in Japan. This article examines the vitality of the war as a major and direct theme in political, social and cultural discourse in the 1950s, focusing on soldiers' involvement in politics, issues relating to Class B and C war criminals, films about the war, and the emergence of a new cultural hero in the form of Kaji, the soldier who is the central figure in the novel and film The Human Condition.

The discovery in 1526 of the Iwami Ōmori silver deposits enabled Japan to become, by the 1540s, China's largest supplier of silver. This status was surpassed only in the 1570s, when large amounts of South American silver began to be delivered to southeast China via Manila. Despite the popularity of silver in the conduct of foreign trade, until the end of the sixteenth century it rarely played a part in Japanese domestic transactions. Even in Kyoto, capital of medieval Japan, it was gold, not silver, that was used for gifts and remittances. When for political reasons the Mōri clan donated the Ōmori silver mine to the court and Muromachi Bakufu, the flow of silver into Kyoto commenced in earnest. During the late 1560s gold assumed the characteristics of a fully functional currency, a development that paved the way for silver too, by the end of that decade, to become a major form of currency for domestic transactions involving imported items. During the 1570s usage of silver expanded to include other types of transactions. The 1580s and 1590s witnessed its firm establishment as currency, thus laying the foundation for the role of Kyoto in the early modern sphere of silver currency usage.