China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922

China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922 PDF Author: Susanna Soojung Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415629217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Throughout the centuries, as Russia strove to build itself into an imperial power equal to those in the West, China and Japan came to occupy a special place in Russians' view of the orient. Never colonised by Russia or the West, China and Japan were linked not only to the greatest of Russian imperial fantasies, but also, conversely, to a deep sense of insecurity regarding Russia's place in the world, a sense of insecurity which deepened as China and Japan began to modernise in the later nineteenth century. Drawing on a wide range of works by Russian writers and thinkers, Lim sets out how Russian perceptions of China and Japan were formed from Muscovy's first contacts with China in the late seventeenth century, through to the aftermath of Russia's defeat by Japan in the early twentieth century.

China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922

China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922 PDF Author: Susanna Soojung Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415629217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
Throughout the centuries, as Russia strove to build itself into an imperial power equal to those in the West, China and Japan came to occupy a special place in Russians' view of the orient. Never colonised by Russia or the West, China and Japan were linked not only to the greatest of Russian imperial fantasies, but also, conversely, to a deep sense of insecurity regarding Russia's place in the world, a sense of insecurity which deepened as China and Japan began to modernise in the later nineteenth century. Drawing on a wide range of works by Russian writers and thinkers, Lim sets out how Russian perceptions of China and Japan were formed from Muscovy's first contacts with China in the late seventeenth century, through to the aftermath of Russia's defeat by Japan in the early twentieth century.

China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922

China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922 PDF Author: Susanna Soojung Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135071616
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Throughout the centuries, as Russia strove to build itself into an imperial power equal to those in the West, China and Japan came to occupy a special place in Russians’ view of the orient. Never colonised by Russia or the West, China and Japan were linked not only to the greatest of Russian imperial fantasies, but also, conversely, to a deep sense of insecurity regarding Russia’s place in the world, a sense of insecurity which deepened as China and Japan began to modernise in the later nineteenth century. Drawing on a wide range of works by Russian writers and thinkers, Lim sets out how Russian perceptions of China and Japan were formed from Muscovy’s first contacts with China in the late seventeenth century, through to the aftermath of Russia’s defeat by Japan in the early twentieth century.

The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570-1610

The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570-1610 PDF Author: Ana Carolina Hosne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135018332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The rulers of the overseas empires summoned the Society of Jesus to evangelize their new subjects in the ‘New World’ which Spain and Portugal shared; this book is about how two different missions, in China and Peru, evolved in the early modern world. From a European perspective, this book is about the way Christianity expanded in the early modern period, craving universalism. In China, Matteo Ricci was so impressed by the influence that the scholar-officials were able to exert on the Ming Emperor himself that he likened them to the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic. The Jesuits in China were in the hands of the scholar-officials, with the Emperor at the apex, who had the power to decide whether they could stay or not. Meanwhile, in Peru, the Society of Jesus was required to impose Tridentine Catholicism by Philip II, independently of Rome, a task that entailed compliance with the colonial authorities’ demands. This book explores how leading Jesuits, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) in China and José de Acosta (1540-1600) in Peru, envisioned mission projects and reflected them on the catechisms they both composed, with a remarkable power of endurance. It offers a reflection on how the Jesuits conceived and assessed these mission spaces, in which their keen political acumen and a certain taste for power unfolded, playing key roles in envisioning new doctrinal directions and reflecting them in their doctrinal texts.

Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship

Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship PDF Author: David Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134512910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Japan’s Household Registration System (koseki seido) is an extremely powerful state instrument, and is socially entrenched with a long history of population governance, social control and the maintenance of social order. It provides identity whilst at the same time imposing identity upon everyone registered, and in turn, the state receives validity and legitimacy from the registration of its inhabitants. The study of the procedures and mechanisms for identifying and documenting people provides an important window into understanding statecraft, and by examining the koseki system, this book provides a keen insight into social and political change in Japan. By looking through the lens of the koseki system, the book takes both an historical as well as a contemporary approach to understanding Japanese society. In doing so, it develops our understanding of contemporary Japan within the historical context of population management and social control; reveals the social effects and influence of the koseki system throughout its history; and presents new insights into citizenship, nationality and identity. Furthermore, this book develops our knowledge of state functions and indeed the nation state itself, through engaging critically with important issues relating to the koseki while at the same time providing a platform for further investigation. The contributors to this volume utilise a variety of disciplinary areas including history, gender studies, sociology, law and anthropology, and each chapter provides insights that bring us closer to a comprehensive grasp of the role, effects and historical background of what is a crucial and influential instrument of the Japanese state. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese history, Japanese culture and society, Japanese studies, Asian social policy and demography more generally.

Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900

Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900 PDF Author: Gerald Groemer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317409906
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.

The Post-war Roots of Japanese Political Malaise

The Post-war Roots of Japanese Political Malaise PDF Author: Dagfinn Gatu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317526473
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Writings on post-war Japanese politics have tended to take for granted the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as inevitable, without questioning how this came about. This book analyses the nature of Japanese party politics over the first four decades following the Second World War, assessing how the chief contenders – the conservative LDP and the socialists JSP (Japan Socialist Party) – competed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses relative to the other. Throughout, it addresses the questions: How effectively were the parties’ strengths harnessed? How did they alter over time? To what extent was the winning formula challenged? Did the loser have access to strengths with a major potential, and, if so, why did these remain underdeveloped? It extends widely to include discussion of the political system, the social and economic environment in which parties operated, internal party matters, especially factions, personal support groups, special interest groups, and the role of government bureaucracy. It shows why the Liberal Democratic Party was dominant, why the Japan Socialist Party remained out of power, and how successive prime ministers conducted policymaking in ways which often resulted in the bureaucracy taking the lead. Overall, the book shows how precedents for the political system and for policymaking were set in this important period, precedents which continue, and which have contributed significantly to the present conservative stance on many key issues.

Opium’s Long Shadow

Opium’s Long Shadow PDF Author: Steffen Rimner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674976304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I. Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage. The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.

Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan

Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan PDF Author: Francesca Di Marco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317384296
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Japan’s suicide phenomenon has fascinated both the media and academics, although many questions and paradoxes embedded in the debate on suicide have remained unaddressed in the existing literature, including the assumption that Japan is a "Suicide Nation". This tendency causes common misconceptions about the suicide phenomenon and its features. Aiming to redress the situation, this book explores how the idea of suicide in Japan was shaped, reinterpreted and reinvented from the 1900s to the 1980s. Providing a timely contribution to the underexplored history of suicide, it also adds to the current heated debates on the contemporary way we organize our thoughts on life and death, health and wealth, on the value of the individual, and on gender. The book explores the genealogy and development of modern suicide in Japan by examining the ways in which beliefs about the nation’s character, historical views of suicide, and the cultural legitimation of voluntary death acted to influence even the scientific conceptualization of suicide in Japan. It thus unveils the way in which the language on suicide was transformed throughout the century according to the fluctuating relationship between suicide and the discourse on national identity, and pathological and cultural narratives. In doing so, it proposes a new path to understanding the norms and mechanisms of the process of the conceptualization of suicide itself. Filling in a critical gap in three particular fields of historical study: the history of suicide, the history of death, and the cultural history of twentieth century Japan, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Japanese History.

International Competition in China, 1899-1991

International Competition in China, 1899-1991 PDF Author: Bruce A. Elleman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317537777
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
China's recent economic reforms have opened its economy to the world. This policy, however, is not new: in the late nineteenth century, the United States put forward the Open Door Policy as a counter to European exclusive 'spheres of influence' in China. This book, based on extensive original archival research, examines and re-evaluates China's Open Door Policy. It considers the policy from its inception in 1899 right through to the post-1978 reforms. It relates these changes to the various shifts in China’s international relations, discusses how decades of foreign invasion, civil war and revolution followed the destruction of the policy in the 1920s, and considers how the policy, when applied in Taiwan after 1949, and by Deng Xiaoping in mainland China after 1978, was instrumental in bringing about, respectively, Taiwan's 'economic miracle' and mainland China’s recent economic boom. The book argues that, although the policy was characterised as United States 'economic imperialism' during the Cold War, in reality it helped China retain its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Qing Encounters

Qing Encounters PDF Author: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606064576
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West examines how the contact between China and Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the arts on both sides of the East-West divide. The essays in the volume reveal the extent to which images, artifacts, and natural specimens were traded and copied, and how these materials inflected both cultures’ visions of novelty and pleasure, battle and power, and ways of seeing and representing. Artists and craftspeople on both continents borrowed and adapted forms, techniques, and modes of representation, producing deliberate, meaningful, and complex new creations. By considering this reciprocity from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Qing Encounters offers a new and nuanced understanding of this critical period.