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.).

This study applies a genealogical mode of enquiry to the history of tigers as a symbol of Korea and the Korean people. The zoomorphic idea of Korea as a tiger is conventionally traced to the writings of the intellectual, Ch'oe Namsŏn (1890–1957). However, we argue that while Ch'oe was the first to link tigers with modern Korean nationalism, low levels of literacy and Ch'oe's later ambiguous status as a Japanese “collaborator” meant his promotion of the tiger symbol failed to gain traction. Instead, we locate the making of the modern Korean tiger metaphor in multiple post-colonial sites of cultural inscription, including national newspapers, zoos and museums, which generate and diffuse narratives about the ancient and continuous origins of the Korean people. In particular, it was during the 1980s that the successful Seoul Olympic bid and the Chŏn dictatorship's cultural policy converged to facilitate the “rediscovery” of the tiger as a national symbol with a supposedly ancient heritage, and with Ch'oe and his problematic legacy effaced. We also observe a continuing resistance to Japanese hegemony and a post-colonial construction of Korean identity through the recasting of the tiger – originally a Japanese symbol of Korea – in a new light.

Covid-19 seems to have unlocked the reality of democracy's ongoing tension in many parts of the world, including India. The present government, led by Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, enjoys absolute majority in the lower House of Samshad (Indian Parliament); thus satisfies WHO requirement of strong political leadership for meeting the challenge of Covid-19 pandemic. Through analysis of various acts, rules, notifications, social media behaviour, media-representations and reports, two aspects of governance become relevant: the process of policy-communication on the pandemic, particularly while declaring and extending lockdowns, through widely publicised speeches of the Prime Minister, packed with emotive appeals and policy-propaganda. However, government's several omissions and commissions have defied the norms of democratic accountability. In response, opposition political parties and civil society activism have continuously contested these trends, for stretching the democratic space wider and achieving better governance outcomes.

China underwent tremendous changes in social systems during the Republican period. Among these changes was the government's introduction into Chinese society of a new legal profession based on Western ideology. Relying mainly on Shanghai archival records, previous scholarship has suggested that, unlike the traditional litigation masters who had always been despised by the authorities, the new Chinese lawyers quickly rose to respectable social and economic status. However, the historical findings presented in the current article challenge this perception by showing that in a city with a more deeply rooted indigenous legal tradition and less influence from Western lawyers, as in Beijing, the new Chinese lawyers faced resistance from the legacy of the old legal culture that permeated the new system. For a considerable period of time after the establishment of the Republic, the people of Beijing still continued to hire unqualified, “phony” lawyers in lawsuits, and some of these phony lawyers had previously been litigation masters under the Qing dynasty. Although legal reform was instigated by the central government as a unified policy, its implementation was bound to vary in different regions according to the influence of the traditional legal culture. It is clear that the situation in Shanghai and other treaty ports does not represent the situation throughout the entire country, nor even in other coastal regions. Therefore, to make more sense of legal reform in China, one should evaluate the development of legal reform in a particular city or region against its social and ideological backdrop. This approach may provide insights not only into the legal reform of the Republican period, but also into the post-Mao era when once again a modern legal system based on the Western model has been introduced, this time within a socialist system.

The ethnolinguistic history of early East Asia depends on the comparative-historical study of the different languages. Scholars have long studied the early interrelationships among the major languages of East Asia, but only rarely according to the theory and methodology of scientific comparative-historical linguistics and linguistic typology, in which theories are expected to conform to the data. Among the many highly contested genetic relationship proposals in the region is the “Korean-Japanese theory”. Despite nearly a century of work by some very prominent scholars, no one has given a convincing demonstration of such a relationship, partly due to the paucity of supporting data, despite the fact that the two languages in question are vibrant and well attested. Now two leading scholars of Japanese and Korean linguistics who are familiar with each other's work, J. M. Unger and A. Vovin, have almost simultaneously published new books on the topic, one in favor of the theory, one against it. The contributions and flaws of the two books, and their position relative to the development of a scientific tradition of comparative-historical linguistics, are discussed. Special attention is paid to Koguryo, the extinct Japanese-related language once spoken on the Korean Peninsula that is crucial to any discussion of the historical relationship of Japanese and Korean.

Depending on conditions, Chinese peasants strategically adopted one of two types of transactions: either a single one-time transaction without reference to any particular buyer, or repeated transactions dependent on one regular broker. Based on the different sizes of market zones and responding to seasonality, Chinese peasant households allotted their labour to maximize income and avert risk. Generally, in early modern China, the volume of exchanges among peasants was much greater than the volume of exchanges between peasants and merchants from towns. One-time transactions were dominant not only by the choice of peasants for concluding local transactions but also by the petit traders who connected villages and towns. Thus, price movements in local currencies such as copper coins in local marketplaces did not follow the movements of inter-regional trade made in silver. Maintaining the independence of local trade, local merchants established a system for settlements through account books and issued native notes to respond to chronic shortages of currency. In Japan, peasant households showed similar characteristics of seasonal allocation and division of intra-household labour, but in the nineteenth century were less dependent on local marketplaces and maintained more continuous relationships among villagers as well as with merchants from towns. The differences between China and Japan during the early modern era, when economies depended heavily on small-size peasant households with less specialization, reveals the inadequacy of conventional conceptions of markets such as Smithian growth, which ignore the differences between local trade and inter-regional trade, and underestimate the importance of proximate exchanges among peasants, which reflected their desire for a higher degree of freedom when making transactions.

From 1999 to 2004, communal violence between Christians and Muslims broke out in the Moluccas of northeastern Indonesia, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries, and displacing hundreds of thousands of others. Unlike previous studies and analyses that give much attention to the political economy of the conflict, the dynamics of national politics, and the role of security forces – particularly the army and the police – and non-Moluccas Muslim jihadists and combatants in initiating and orchestrating the violence, this article mainly focuses on the contributions of religion, especially Islam, the dynamics of the Moluccas' local history and politics, and the role of Ambonese or Moluccan Muslim social actors and jihadists during the carnage. Focusing mainly on Maluku province, this article discusses how the local militant religious leaders framed the violence, recruited, and mobilized the masses in the combat zone, and how the local ordinary Muslim fighters portrayed – and became involved in – the wars, used religious narratives, discourses, symbols, and teachings to give theological legitimacy to the battle, and transformed their everyday experiences through the fighting. Lastly, it examines factors that contributed to the militancy and radicalism of those involved in the violence and investigates a process of radicalization of various Muslim groupings in the Moluccas that could provide a rationale for the eruption of the interreligious violence.

Scholarship on urban China and urban India has been prolific. Studies have separately addressed urban processes of migration, spatial transformation, governance, infrastructure, land conflicts, policing, and more. However, research on these areas has rarely intersected. This article discusses the challenges of comparison in China–India urban studies, and examines recent works through an analysis of “styles and scales of comparison.” Some seek to explain national-level variations by studying selected cities in each country. Others identify convergence and divergence in the context of broader global processes, and some incorporate historical trajectories to structure a temporal comparison. Because the most rapid periods of urbanization in the first half of the twenty-first century will take place in India and China and will soon account almost half of the planet's urban population, studies of urbanization in India and China are of great importance. Careful reflection on the study of urbanization in China–India studies can also re-center urban studies away from the historically dominant American/Eurocentric perspectives.

Analyzing the messages and the responses that Chinggis Khan sent to and received from Ong Khan and his allies after his defeat at the hands of the latter at the battle of Qalaqaljit Elet in the spring of 1203, and explicating the terms of cimar (chimar) and törü that appear in the messages, this article looks at the political order and culture where the Chinggisid state rose. The article argues that pre-modern Mongolian and Inner Asian politics was guided by the idea of törü, which resembles the Indo-Buddhist idea of dharma, the Chinese idea of dao, and the European idea of natural law. It also argues that the hereditary divisional system that the Inner Asian state builders regularly employed to govern their nomadic populations, the institutions of dynastic succession, and the hereditary rights of princes and the nobility for inheritance fundamentally structured Inner Asian politics. Hence, it questions the conventional wisdom that depicts pre-modern Inner Asian politics not only as pragmatic, fluid, and fractious but also dependent on the personal charisma of leadership, and the personal bond and loyalty between leaders and followers, as if it were lacking enduring social, political institutions and order.

2010 saw the millennial celebration of Thăng Long/Hà Nội as capital of an independent Vietnam, and archaeology has tended to confirm this strong sense of continuity. Yet study of written texts shows us how political power, administrative style, and religious belief have shaped the city and how a cyclical pattern in this history has appeared twice and may be in its third time. In this pattern, each cycle saw the city begin as the provincial capital of an external power before becoming capital of an independent Vietnamese state. Then a local base draws power to itself and displaces Thăng Long, eventually dismantling it, before a new external power enters and begins the cycle anew. In this way the Tang and Ming dynasties of China and the French made the site their local administrative center. Lý Công Uẩn, Lê Lợi, and Hồ Chí Minh in succession drove them out and established Thăng Long/Hà Nội as their capital, bringing Buddhism, Confucianism, and Socialism to it. But first the Trần and Hồ, then the Mạc, Trịnh, and Nguyễn, shared power with, and eventually displaced, the Royal City. Will it happen again?

While the literature on modern Tibetan history is far from comprehensive, contributions to this field of studies have been formative over the last twenty years. With an ever-increasing availability of Tibetan-language source material along with new theoretical insights, the horizons for understanding modern Tibetan history are still expanding.

This article studies the role copper coinage, mainly of Chinese origin, played as the currency of preference in medieval Japan and the process by which it replaced commodities as the main medium of exchange. By the late fifteenth century a major watershed in the development of a money economy had been reached, when distinctions began to be made between good-quality coins and others. The practice of shroffing then became widespread. Though both the Bakufu and local magnates attempted to forbid the practice, local needs dictated which coins were circulated. A contrast in usage grew up between “pure coins” (seisen), that is authentic or standard coins, and “inferior coins,” such as those privately minted in Japan and certain Ming coins. Attention is drawn to the need to distinguish between the monetary policy and their financial policy in the anti-shroffing decrees issued by the authorities.

Due to the introduction of the market economy, in the past four decades China has switched from being a “planned country” – planned economy, planned art – into a domestic version of cultural pluralism. Consumerism has refilled the vacuum left by the retreat of Maoist ideology. However, the overwhelming success of mass culture is sided by the progressive marginalization of the intellectuals or elite, featuring a culture that is kitsch in its ideological twist. In China, present-day cultural constructions provide a forum of debate for the identity of the whole nation, no more traditional, and not yet modern. In other words, consumerism and commercialism, triggered by products of market economy, have generated a cultural consumption of redundant bad taste. Kitsch indeed.1

Within the Japanese Empire, the Manchukuo bureaucracy was unique for its high level of centralization and standardization. This study argues that Manchukuo's bureaucratic recruitment and training processes molded civil officials into a paramilitary force, dedicated to developmentalism and a radical belief in the transformative power of the state. It approaches the institutional and cultural development of the Manchukuo bureaucracy as an evolutionary process. As pan-Asian radicals, military officials, and reform bureaucrats competed for control of Japan's imperial project, their ideas and agendas merged into a hybrid system of bureaucratic management that served as a model for the wartime empire. Looking past the temporal juncture of August 1945, this study also foregrounds the legacy of the Manchukuo bureaucracy on postwar East Asia. Manchukuo's government institutions recruited and indoctrinated not just Japanese but Korean, Taiwanese, and other imperial subjects in the name of ethnic harmony. Back in their homelands, these men adapted to their experience and training into the foundations of developmental nationalism and authoritarian state structures during the Cold War.

This paper presents micro finance as a traditional system of mutual help networks in East Asia. These are called “Rotating Savings and Credit Associations” (ROSCAS) and can also be seen in other areas. Micro finance means that invested money is small and managed by members. Mutual help actions are divided into three categories: reciprocal, redistributional, and unidirectional action. The content of redistribution is labor, goods, and money. ROSCAS are the distributional action of money. It has been called tanaomoshi or mujin in Japan. ROSCAS have different names: South Korean ke, Chinese kai (huì), and Taiwanese hyokai (biāo huì) can be compared with the already well-studied Japanese case through the results of an interview survey and fact-finding fieldwork study. The purpose of the paper is to show that ROSCAS are important not only economically but also socially in terms of friendship and bonds. The economy is embedded in social relations and institutions. Although ROSCAS have almost disappeared from modern life and some are interest-oriented, they contributed to sustainable communities and can still be identified in East Asia. The paper concludes that modern societies might do well to reconsider ROSCAS as mutual help networks in search of ways of reconstructing communities.

The present article explores health as a factor in the understanding of Edo-period male sexuality. This notion was systematically propagated by a genre of health guides on ‘Nurturing Life’, which came to circulate widely at the time. Sexuality was seen as an integral element of a healthy life-style in these didactic texts, which aimed to instruct people on how to live a long life unharmed by disease. In order to achieve this goal, the health-seeker was to strictly control his everyday activities, including eating, drinking alcohol, sleeping – or sexual intercourse. By consequence, a certain kind of sexual behaviour emerged from these works as ‘healthy’, while deviations from the prescribed standards are medicalized away as harmful to the body, in extreme cases even fatal. At the same time, bodily health is presented as inextricably bound up with moral ‘health’. Thus, the rhetoric of control imposed on the body was extended from the purely medical to the moral, making the health-seeking individual at the same time a good (male) subject and model head of household within an ideal Confucian-inspired society. The ‘healthy’ sexuality of writings on Nurturing Life therefore has to be situated at the crossroads of medical beliefs and moral parameters.

Until a few decades ago, most labour histories did not bother to address women as workers in the domestic or public domain who contributed to a household income or the overall economy. Patriarchal spaces of historical discourse rendered women invisible (or effected distortions) that can only be contested by a rigorous study of women's unrecorded presence in the economy of the household and the broader domain of production. This article is an effort to understand the “being” and “doing” of women, and to map the interrelations of women and work over a vast historical span of time, beginning with women's writings on the theme of women and work and going on to plot women's agency historically in labour processes. In order to make the historical evidence more cohesive, it has been written with special reference to Peninsular India, while also drawing comparisons from the regions to the north of the Vindhya mountains that geographically and culturally mark the north–south divide.

Mysore Fort, now situated in the centre of Mysore city, former capital of Mysore princely state, was effectively the city itself in pre-modern times. During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, however, the fort changed its form from a residential town into a modern garden or empty space where now only the palace and several temples remain. This transformation was intended to serve not only to improve the sanitation and hygiene of the city but also to beautify and glorify it as the capital of a Hindu kingdom. In the process, the modern western idea of “improvement” and the traditional Hindu idea of dharma (moral order) were somehow reconciled and mutually strengthened. This paper aims to demonstrate how the two concepts worked together during the period of indirect rule. More broadly, the transformation of space in Mysore city reveals the nature of Hindu kingship under British rule. The colonial power did not simply diminish the authority of the Indian kings, but rather enhanced their presence at a supra-local level. The fundamental paradox of Hindu kingship, in which kings have to be transcendent, above society, and at the same time to be rooted in society, remained a conundrum for Indian kings to resolve.