A distinctive feature of japanese society is its apparent eagerness to embrace various forms of voluntary death or suicide as legitimate, even positive, behavior with a potentially redemptive value. These forms include the samurai's ritualistic disembowelment (seppuku or harakiri), remonstration suicide (kanshi) in protest against a corrupt superior, and suicide out of devotion to a lord or superior (junsbi), all of which are surrounded by “a heroic, romantic, aesthetic, and moral aura” (Lebra 1976:190). Suicide is, of course, an extraordinary act in Japan as elsewhere in the world (Lifton 1979:24). Though it is not common, it is widely revered by Japanese if committed on the basis of authentic moral intentions in relation to societal pressure—that is, to exorcise shame (haji) and to highlight honor, dignity, and integrity. In a culture that esteems the tragic hero who embodies the “nobility of failure” (Morris 1975), and which regards voluntary death as an experiential transcendence for participants and observers alike, perhaps the most extreme and intriguing example of taking one's own life is the double suicide or love suicide (shinjū).

Some attention has been paid in recent years to the sociological analysis of political élites in the “new nations” of Africa and Asia with a view to understanding better their political behavior. W. H. Morris-Jones and Myron Weiner have both considered the characteristics of some of the politicians in post-independence India. But little has been done on the leadership of minority groups.

In many cases (eg., the Armenians, Copts, and Maronites in the Middle East, the Parsis in India, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia), the members of religious and linguistic minorities adapted more rapidly to modern ways than the majorities among whom they lived. Although the former sometimes enjoyed privileged status as go betweens for the European colonial rulers, they were also among the first to absorb the Western concept of nationalism. They even provided some of the early leadership for nationalist movements, until the mobilization of broader and lower levels of the population around neo-traditional religious symbols began to exclude them from the national self-definition.

Asia as a region bears the brunt of both natural and industrial disasters, and when these catastrophes occur, the consequences are disproportionately deadly. Between 1970 and 2011, 74.6 percent of the world's disaster-related fatalities occurred in the Asia-Pacific region (ESCAP and UNISDR 2012, 5). And the toll may be even worse than these numbers indicate; it is easier to assess gross mortality in the acute period of a disaster than to assess the scope of the long-term health effects. This is especially true in developing areas, where there may be preexisting risks and hazards, such as extreme poverty or endemic infectious disease.

By the 1940's, China already had a well-established tradition of student activism. The most famous of the Chinese student movements had originated with the demonstration of May 4, 1919, against the Versailles Peace Settlement. Punctuating Chinese politics thereafter were numerous student demonstrations: the protest against the unequal treaties on May 30, 1925; the condemnation of Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931; and the demand for resistance to Japan on December 9, 1935. Youth leaders of the 1940's were conscious of the May 4th tradition, as they called it. They were proud of the tradition and felt an obligation to keep it alive. They accepted a role as a politicized elite with the right and duty to speak for the Chinese people. As the competition between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party for control of China's destiny entered its critical stage between 1945 and 1949, Chinese students sought active participation in China's revolution.

This paper uses the cult of Assunta Pallotta, an Italian Catholic nun who died in a north China village in 1905, to critique the existing literature on missionary medicine in China. She was recognized as holy because of the fragrance that accompanied her death, and later the incorrupt state of her body, and her relics were promoted as a source of healing by the Catholic mission hospital, absorbed into local folk medicine, and are still in use today. By focusing on Catholics, not Protestants, and women, not men, the paper suggests similarities between European and Chinese traditional religious and medical cultures and argues that instead of seeing a transfer of European biomedicine to China, we need to think of a single globalized process in which concepts of science and religion, China and the West were framed.

Building on current research regarding constitutional migration, this article shows how constitutional provisions protecting religious freedom (“subject to public order”) arrived in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, not via colonial British or traditional Islamic sources—both explicitly rejected—but via deliberate constitutional borrowing from “anti-colonial” precursors in Ireland and, especially, India. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau's notion of “empty signifiers,” the article highlights the shifting political circumstances that transformed the meaning of Pakistan's borrowed constitutional provisions. Even as core texts guaranteeing an individual's right to peaceful religious practice were imported, political, legal, and conceptual modulations ensured that specific forms of peaceful religious practice were refashioned as a source of religious provocation and, therein, public disorder. Far from protecting religious freedom, this repurposing of imported constitutional clauses tied to “the politics of public order” underpinned the formal legal restriction of an otherwise explicit right.

This article describes the manner in which the English language took root in modern India. It does so by using gender as the unit of analysis. Building a feminist analysis on the symbolic role of culture, the author traces the history of English education in Bombay and Poona. The rise of English as the language of power in the nineteenth century was actively enabled—and further legitimated—by the patriarchal interests of Indian class and caste formation. The author analyzes English- and Marathi-language memoirs, school reports, debates in the “native” press on the content of the English education curriculum, and other cultural productions by men and women detailing their experiences and opinions of English education. Based on those sources, the author demonstrates that upper-caste masculine authority came to be yoked to the charisma of colonial English and, with that, subtly coded the English language as masculine. Consequently, the power of Indian English emerged from its ability to evade charges of cultural mimicry for certain classes, to organize native gender difference, and to express and orient (hetero)sexual desire.

The current political crisis in Hong Kong is characterized by a level of social unrest that the city has not seen since the riots of 1966–67. After that earlier round of turmoil, the British colonial regime secured legitimacy through socioeconomic improvement in Hong Kong. “Prosperity and Stability” became the hallmark of Hong Kong's success, which extended into the period of political uncertainty in the 1980s. Transcending the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, this catchphrase was adopted as the slogan of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government in its bid for legitimacy through socioeconomic appeals. Against this perennial state rhetoric, grassroots protesters began to demand “Democracy and Freedom” around June Fourth. These public demands have escalated since the Umbrella Movement in an environment of socioeconomic regression. Examining these two pairs of keywords—prosperity/stability and democracy/freedom—this article underscores the contention in the legitimacy of governance in Hong Kong since the closing decades of British rule. This analysis indicates that it would be unproductive for the governing authorities or the protesters to deny the earnestness of either the political or socioeconomic assertions in the ongoing contention of legitimacy to govern Hong Kong.

Visions of a grand hydraulic civilization and a pastoral ideal of paddy cultivation–based village life have shaped Sinhala nationalist discourse since the late nineteenth century. Derived from colonial sociology, the local political elite fashioned these ideas into a discourse of Sinhala authenticity that positioned themselves as legitimate representatives of the people while simultaneously placing them as custodians of national culture. However, this was a fraught dynamic given the elites’ highly Anglicized nature and their inability to maintain control over this discourse in the face of wider participation in public culture in the first half of the twentieth century. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, who became prime minister in 1956, eight years after Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule, is popularly seen as one of the few elite politicians of the late colonial period who sought to engage substantively in mass-based politics and is remembered as a heroic anti-colonial figure. This article explores the contradictions and ironies in Bandaranaike's turn to indigeneity and the political and cultural implications of this turn. It also briefly discusses authenticity's continued resonance in contemporary Sri Lanka.

The six conditions for good painting set by Hsieh Ho in the fifth century a.d. were apparently the first Chinese attempt at a systematic approach to the theory of the art. Their primacy ensured them the respect of later centuries; and since they satisfied the general requirements of classical lore by being at once ancient, terse, and superficially simple about a core of mystery, they came as early as T'ang to acquire a unique weight of authority. The emphasis given them, by quotation and long discussion, in the theoretical sections of the first two grand histories of Chinese painting–Chang Yen-yüan's in the ninth century and Kuo Jo-hsü's in the eleventh–is an obvious sign of high esteem. To these instances might be added countless others, throughout the later literature of the art, in which the Six Laws or the name of their author appear in a place of honor.

Early modern rulers in asia and europe frequently sought to secure a better grasp of the land and other resources that provided them with the economic resources t o maintain their governments, expand their power, and permit them to conquer new lands (see, for example, Tilly 1985; Hellie 1971; Ali 1966). The “reunification” of Japan and consolidation of authority in the hands of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his Tokugawa successors is generally viewed in this same light. There is widespread scholarly agreement that Hideyoshi's authority and that of the early Tokugawa shoguns represented a new, unprecedented level of political centralization in Japan. Hideyoshi's edicts on class separation, pacification of the countryside through sword hunts, and inventories of daimyo financial resources are all taken as emblematic of this new authority. So, too, are the Laws of the Military Houses, Tokugawa edicts compelling the destruction of castles, and related measures.

The Social organization of the Chinese in Singapore is so complex that many studies of it will have to be made before we can understand it as a whole. Three anthropologists and one sociologist have worked among the Singapore Chinese, two of them concentrating on religious organization. In this essay we try to give an outline of the sociology of Chinese religion in Singapore, making use of our incomplete knowledge and pointing out what seem to be reasonable conclusions from it.

Sites, here the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur and other remains of the Hindu-Buddhist past located in colonial (predominantly Islamic) Java, are in this article our analytical tool to provide insight into the local and transnational dimensions of heritage politics and processes of in- and exclusion in Asia and Europe around 1900. Because we recognize these “sites” as centers of multiple historical, political, and moral spaces that transgress state boundaries, we take this concept beyond the nation-state-centered lieu de mémoire. By exploring how site-related objects traveled from temple ruins in Java to places elsewhere in the world (here: Siam, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain) and back to Java, we show the transformation of heritage engagements around 1900 at multiple locations, and we make clear why, despite professionalizing state-centered heritage politics, state control was limited. We argue that the mechanisms of exchange and reciprocal interdependence, as theorized by Marcel Mauss, are crucial to understand the moral and economic engagements that define the problem of heritage, at local and transnational levels.

Rural settlement patterns on the island of Java conform in general type to the dominant mode throughout the rest of monsoon Asia: a nucleated residential unit surrounded by the lands cultivated by the residents, forming a community with political, economic, and religious dimensions. The dominant form of agriculture depends upon irrigated lands planted primarily with rice. In upland areas, where the topography has limited the spread of the irrigated land, the residential units are relatively small and isolated, and a characteristic village organization has developed in which the daily patterns of interaction can encompass the entire village. The much larger part of Java's population, however, lives in lowland areas where gentle, even gradients, plentiful sources of water, and the seasonal rains have permitted the establishment of widespread systems of irrigation. Here the residential units have expanded and coalesced into large blocks and strips of several square miles, alternating with large uninterrupted areas of irrigated land. Under these conditions, village units have expanded far beyond the daily interaction group, and vaguely denned neighborhoods (barisan or lingkungan) have developed within which most of the daily patterns of mutual interest and aid take place. Within the area studied, the average population of the lowland rural village is roughly 600, with a range from 200 to 2000. The average area encompassed by each village is roughly a quarter square mile, with a range approximately proportional to the population.

This paper examines the causes and processes of a popular tax-resistance movement by adopting a multidimensional approach that considers dynamic rural power relations, popular responses to social and economic changes, and cultural practices that both united and divided rural communities. Popular rebellions in 1862 reflected not only the social and economic distress that the peasantry experienced in everyday life but also the inability of the dynastic structure to accommodate the social, political, and economic changes that were occurring in the nineteenth century. This work pays close attention to the particular historical and cultural context of 1862 Korea, such as various rural conditions and the workings of dynastic institutions at the local level, and discovers that different patterns of popular protest grew out of the competition, division, and conflict that had developed along class, social status, village community, and political lines.

The study of chinese religions is a lively and growing field. Its major bibliographer in the West, Laurence G. Thompson, comments that in revising his bibliography of Western-language publications through 1980 to include those published in the following ten years, the index of various types of contributors increased by over 1,100 names, and the number of research categories grew from eighty-four to one hundred and three (Thompson 1985, 1993). Anna Seidel of the École Françhise d'Extrême-Orient, Section de Kyoto, published in 1990 a discussion and bibliography of Taoist studies in the West from 1950 to 1990 that for this topic alone is 124 pages long (Seidel 1989–90). New documents, from Shang oracle bones to twentieth-century spirit-writing texts, are being discovered, the Taoist canon has been systematically surveyed for the first time, and fresh interpretations

Biography in the People's Republic of China is not exempt from the ubiquitous slogan: “politics in command.” It is a highly purposeful craft, but rarely, if ever, is its primary purpose to portray an individual personality for his own sake, to inform objectively, or to entertain. The aim, instead, is to convince, enshrine, or inspire. Biography is didactic, hagiolatrous, or propagandistic. It is but one among many methods used in Communist China to support Marxist-Leninist views of history, provide sanction for the leaders of the Chinese Communist party, and fire enthusiasm for the acceptance and fulfillment of party programs. The accuracy, art, treatment of character, and probably even the quantity of biography published are limited by party preconceptions and enforced through party control over all media of information.

Our Association has met this year in Philadelphia, a city of historic memories, an appropriate place in which to contemplate anniversaries. There are several which come to mind.

First, the Association for Asian Studies is itself twenty years old this spring, a fact in which we can all take pride; for we have grown as a professional society from a mere handful of scholars in 1948 to an organization of over 4000 members today.

Next there is Japan, which in its modern incarnation is one hundred years old this year—a memorable national and even international event.

And finally, I am put in mind by our presence in Philadelphia, that by a bit of stretching we can think of the United States as being roughly 200 years old. (In fact it was just 200 years ago that the citizens of this city banded together to prevent imports from Britain. And in 8 more years we shall be able to celebrate the bicentennial of the moment when Philadelphia's Liberty Bell rang out the news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)

The revolution that erupted in China in 1911 came as a shock to Japan. The Japanese had taken advantage of the opportunity created by their victory over Russia in 1905 to annex Korea and extend their influence into China. Their chief aim was to use the Korean peninsula as a base for an advance into Manchuria. Encouraged by various interests acquired through the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan already had begun to exercise some control in Manchuria.