The death of Emperor Hirohito on 7 January 1989, followed more recently by the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, has indeed incited a degree of historical awareness among Japanese from all walks of life. In the wake of an enigmatic period of social self-restraint (jishuku) during the final months of the Shōwa period (1926–89), fettered reflections of Shōwa Japan inundated the media. Despite a few outspoken critics at the margins, retrospectives appearing on Japanese television and in mainstream print media after Hirohito's death have largely glossed over touchy subjects such as war atrocities, war responsibility, and the continued existence of the emperor system in the postwar era. No doubt that threats of right-wing terrorism aimed at even the mildest of critics of Japan's involvement in the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45) have done their share in encouraging such self-censorship. By most accounts, such efforts have proved effective in diffusing critical public opinion and in pruning public memory. Yet, the ending of the era has provided an extra impetus and a rhetorical rationale for a reckoning of everyday life in Shōwa Japan by the masses whose lives coincided with it: it is over, so now we can tell its story.

Tamil Hindu and Sinhalese Buddhist pilgrims gather each year at Sri Lanka's most important polyethnic shrine, Kataragama, where they worship the deity Skanda (or Murukanṉ). The remarkable tone of ecumenism and tolerance there stands in clear contrast to the mutual mistrust which has recently characterized Tamil-Sinhalese interaction in other social institutions. Does Kataragama help to quell mistrust and to create a bond of common identity between Hindus and Buddhists? The role of Kataragama in Sri Lanka's poly-ethnic social system is examined by comparing the role of the Kataragama pilgrimage in the religious lives of Hindu and Buddhist villagers. These roles are radically different; indeed, most Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims find themselves in disagreement about the qualities of the deity and about the way he ought to be worshipped. Despite the appearance of ethnic harmony at the site, pilgrims are today likely to leave with a sharp impression of the gulf that separates Tamil and Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka—yet there is evidence that the site may come to play a different role in the future.

Many asian cultures have rich traditions of self-cultivation that exercise mind and body through physical and meditational training. Research and scholarship with respect to those traditions have focused fruitfully on how the body is cultivated to serve as an agent of resistance against various forms of social control. Of these many writings on this subject, I will here name only a suggestive few: Joseph Alter's study of Indian wrestling (1993), for example, tracks the wrestlers' self-conscious reappropriation of their bodies from the power of the state through a regimented discipline aimed at resisting docility. John Donohue's study of the Japanese martial art karate (1993) explores how, in the West, karate's symbolic and ritual functions create a psychological dynamic that counters the prevalent fragmentation of urban life. Douglas Wile's research on Chinese taiji quart (1996) similarly reconstructs the cultural/historical context in which this martial art was created. He shows that what motivated nineteenth-century literati to create taiji quan was its representational function rather than its practical utility. That is, Taiji quan “may be seen as a psychological defense against Western cultural imperialism” (p. 26) insofar as it produced a secure sense of the national self that helped China adapt to a new international environment (p. 29). All of these studies place the body-in-cultivation in a specific historical context; they maintain that the individual, physical body both registers and reveals the national sociopolitical landscape.

Early on the morning of February 24, 1989, my companion and I set out from our lodgings in central Tokyo for the Imperial Plaza. Though we knew that Emperor Shōwa's funeral procession would not be leaving the Palace until 9:35, we planned our arrival for 6:30 because a policeman had told us the day before that a huge crowd was expected. He suggested we arrive at 4:30, but 6:30 seemed early enough since we surmised that the rain and the near-freezing temperatures would keep the crowds away. Later, we would discover that the crowds that day were indeed smaller than had been expected—570,000 people along the funeral motorcade's route rather than the 870,000 spectators that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had originally projected (Asahi jaanaru, March 10, 1989; Asahi shinbun, February 25, 1989)—but by around 7:30 people filled the area fronting the Palace's main gate.

According to official PRC reports, on the night of April 4, 1952, hundreds of small rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county. The next morning, villagers in this remote corner of western Heilongjiang province awoke to find sickly voles scattered in haystacks, piled on rooftops, and even squirming on kangs next to slumbering women and children. Government reports praise the inherent wisdom and decisiveness of the Gannan villagers. Well-versed in the natural flora and fauna of the region, they immediately suspected that these rat-like animals were an alien species, a form of biological weapon disseminated by American planes that had crossed the Yalu River from the Korean front. By noon the villagers had killed, burned, and buried every vole they could find (ISC 1952, 40–3).

Many scholarly articles and some of a polemical nature have been written on the 1971 insurgency in Sri Lanka. Recent studies of this movement (Fernando 1972, Egan 1972, Kearney 1973, Arasaratnam 1972, Warnapala 1972) have helped us to understand some of the underlying political, social and economic causes of the uprising. These articles have dispelled early speculations regarding the social backgrounds of the insurgents, particularly by government apologists and theoreticians from the traditional left parties of Sri Lanka.

Rajasthan, a large, arid state in northwestern India, is widely known to have an excess of males over females. When we consider how such a high sex ratio usually affects the relative availability of potential spouses (i.e., the marriage market), it seems logical that the scarcity of females would generate a “marriage squeeze”— an asymmetry in the availability of potential spouses—against males and thereby give females an advantage in the marriage market. It would be ironic if the “culture against females” (Miller 1981:15) that characterizes Rajasthan had the unexpected side effect of granting females the competitive edge in choosing spouses and forcing males into marriages based on compromise.

I Approach my topic—the development of the modern Japanese political cartoon—with some trepidation. Humor is a fragile product that can easily be damaged by academic scrutiny. As Evelyn Waugh once remarked, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog—much is learned but in the end the frog is dead. Waugh was right. Most analyses of humor cannot be read for amusement. On the other hand, why should they be? If Shakespeare scholars are not expected to write in iambic pentameter, why should students of humor be expected to keep their readers in stitches? As the editor of the International Journal of Humor Studies recently told a reporter, “We are not in the business of being funny” (New York Times, 19 December 2000).

This paper examines the benefits and the liabilities in Gandhi's exploitation of his own Gujarate regional and bania caste heritages in mobilizing political support.

From his father, a prime minister in a small, princely state in Kathiawad, Gujarat, Gandhi learned of methods of nonviolent political protest including the fast, passive resistance by sitting dharna, and organized disobedience to law. Later he employed these Kathiawadi techniques, designed for local struggles, in his national program. Recognizing the political potential of bania financiers, Gandhi chose in middle life to work in Ahmedabad, the business capital of Gujarat, and won the community's support for the Congress. In turn, Gandhi's swadeshi campaigns, proclaimed to encourage cottage industry, also stimulated Ahmedabad's textile industry. Gandhi also found organizational support in Gujarat: a nascent labor union; a press; efficient, nationalistic civic leadership; and caste-based agrarian groups chafing under British land policies.

Gandhi's innovative use of various Gujarati and bania heritages won many supporters across India, but is also alienated important groups: many Bengalis favored violence; Marxists called Gandhi a capitalist stooge; princes and landowners feared his mass-organizations; and Muslims found his Hinduism unsympathetic.

My lecture is a lecture on biology. Therefore we will not be dealing with venereal diseases or perversions but with perfectly normal sexual phenomena. From my experience during the past two semesters I know that most of my students, or about sixty percent, still live chaste lives. We will become familiar with many technical terms and foreign (European) words. On the one hand, using technical scientific terminology is unavoidable, and on the other, we use it to avoid making obscene associations … I expect you to be familiar with the textbooks in physics and naturalhistory and urge you to also take a look at the textbooks from girls' schools … I consider knowledge a product, lecturers like myself both the creators of knowledge and at the same time original researchers and brokers of knowledge.

Indonesians, like other Southeast Asians, have been extensive users of mild narcotic analgesics throughout history. Until a century ago the most widespread narcotic was the chewed quid of betel, comprising the areca nut, betel leaves, lime, and sundry optional additives. Europeans introduced both tobacco and opium around 1600, and Indonesians quickly took up the growing of tobacco. Initially smoked by a relatively small elite, tobacco became used almost universally as part of the betel chew by the end of the eighteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century cigarette-smoking for men became associated with the transformation to “modern” attitudes, and it rapidly replaced betel-chewing. Today virtually all Indonesian men smoke and virtually none chew betel. Among women betel-chewing has no such substitute and is disappearing more slowly.

Tobacco has relaxant and sedative effects similar to betel. Whereas the betel ingredients were very cheap, tobacco now consumes about 5 percent of the incomes of Indonesian families, including the poorest. Although betel-chewing provided protection against tooth decay, intestinal parasites, and bacteria, tobacco-smoking is injurious to health in a variety of ways.

Justice in chinese society was literally of cosmic importance. Traditional Chinese thinking considered man and nature organic elements of a seamless cosmic web. Injustice of any kind did not simply rend the web in one place but placed tension on the entire structure. To restore equilibrium, the injustice had to be perfectly redressed, no more, no less. To ignore the injury was to risk catastrophe. As one late-Qing official wrote, “The recent natural disasters and interferences with heavenly harmony [i.e., the droughts and famines of the late 1870s and early 1880s] are a product of the countless number of cases where no appeal could be made, where there were no impeachments of the delinquent officials, and where consequently the innocent suffer deep injustices in the underworld” (Xinzeng XAHL 1886, 50:5a).

Mainstream Chinese discussions of “democracy” have long betrayed a decidedly populist understanding of the concept. Xi Jinping draws freely on this tradition in formulating his China Dream. Xi's efforts are part of the Chinese Communist Party's “re-Orientation” of official propaganda to showcase the glories of the ancient civilization that it claims to represent and rejuvenate. The idea of “democracy” (minzhu 民主)—understood in populist rather than institutional terms—plays an important role in the process. This populist interpretation of “democracy” seeks to elide the fundamental contradiction between Enlightenment values and illiberal politics. Whether it will prove persuasive to contemporary Chinese intellectuals remains to be seen.

Although the Ch'ing period is generally regarded as one of the better studied and understood periods of Chinese history, the existing fund of our knowledge is actually far from adequate. A systematic discussion of the significance of the entire period from 1644 to 1912 would require a large number of articles, monographs, and fresh syntheses. Since the purpose of this paper is merely to stimulate further discussion and research, I hope to be excused for making a few highly tentative generalizations.

The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein—to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system—has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians. While a few social scientists interested in the past have sought to apply his model, the majority of historians have either gone no further than to acknowledge the importance of bilateral relations with imperial Britain in the construction of modern South Asian society, or else—it would seem increasingly—have retreated behind the walls of the “indigenous,” the “local,” the “particular,” and, at times, the just plain “peculiar” in their interpretations of South Asia's modern experience. But few historians of imperial Britain see it as a completely freestanding and self-determining entity, able to direct its relationships with India or elsewhere in a manner unconstrained by developments in other areas of the world. And on closer examination, many of the most quintessentially South Asian institutions and structures, including a large number of those that twentieth century modernization theorists please to call “traditional,” can be seen to have been shaped by global forces.

More than sixty-five years after the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, controversy about partition, its causes and its effects, continues. Yet the emphases in these debates have changed over the years, and it is perhaps time, in the wake of India's recent elections, to take stock once again of how these debates have developed in the last several decades and where they are heading. What gives these controversies particular significance is that they are not just about that singular event, but about the whole trajectory of India's modern history, as interpreted through partition's lens—engaging academic historians, even as they continue to be deeply enmeshed in ongoing political conflict in South Asia, and, indeed, in the world more broadly.

In 1924 a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese man travelled from Japan to Shanghai to study French at the Jesuit Université L'Aurore. He was young, flamboyant, and rich, and eventually used his own personal funds to found two bookstores and three journals in Shanghai. Despite his ambiguous national identity and lack of formal Chinese education, he also became the founder of a Chinese modernist literary movement called new sensationism (xinganjue pai), earned substantial notoriety, and attracted a host of followers. Murdered by an unidentified assassin in 1939, in his shorr life Liu Na'ou (1900–39) mirrored the literary movement that he created and that died with him. But this was not before he had published an intriguing collection of short stories entitled Scène (his own French title, 1930a), which was in some measure to define what urban writing meant for Chinese writers in Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1927–37), as the quotation above suggests.

Tibet is the most numerically significant society practicing Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism. The unusual features of religion in Tibetan society are often understood in terms of differences between Vajrayana and other forms of Buddhism. The author suggests here that Tibet is not a “typical” Vajrayana society compared to the Newars or the Balinese, and that what is special about religion in Tibet is related to structural differences between Tibetan society and Buddhist states elsewhere in Asia. Tibet historically has been a region where a centralized state was barely achievable, and Tibetan political structures have more in common with stateless societies than with states. Buddhism in Tibetan society has analogies with Islam in structurally similar Islamic societies.

This paper analyzes the role of rumor as a mobilizing agent in communal violence. Taking as its point of departure a series of violent clashes in North Maluku in Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, it shows that rumor often took a written form. Outlining the contested origins and composite effects of a particular rumor—as it appeared on the political scene in leaflet form—I argue that these “hardcopy rumors” became social agents in the paranoid politics of the “Maluku wars.” Recent scholarship has rightly stressed the mobilizing role of rumor. This paper demonstrates how the affectivity of rumor, usually attributed to its spontaneous and anonymous nature, may in fact be boosted by the authority of writing. It suggests that “xeroxlore,” the circulation of written and photocopied rumors, may play an essential role in generating the murky political atmosphere in which sectarian violence is instigated, enacted, and justified.

By definition, the cold war was understood on both sides of the conflict to be a global struggle that stopped short of direct military engagement between the superpowers (the U.S. and the USSR). In Europe, the putative center ofthat struggle, the geopolitical battle lines were fixed after the early 1950s, or they at least could not be altered by normal military means without provoking World War III—which would result in mutual annihilation. Therefore, each side hoped to make gains over the other by using more subtle, political, and often clandestine methods, winning the “hearts and minds” of people in the other bloc (as well as maintaining potentially wayward support in one's own bloc), hoping to subvert the other side from within. The cold war was an enormous campaign of propaganda and psychological warfare on both sides. A vast range of cultural resources, from propaganda posters and radio broadcasts to sophisticated literary magazines, jazz bands, ballet troupes, and symphony orchestras, were weapons in what has recently come to be called the “Cultural Cold War” (Saunders 1999). Studies of the cultural cold war have proliferated since the late 1990s, most of which focus on U.S. cultural policy and are concerned with the European “theater” of this conflict (Hixson 1997; Fehrenbach and Poiger 2000; Poiger 2000; Berghahn 2001).