That American academic publishers within a short time have put out three monographs this substantial on Lu Xun (1881–1936), often referred to as the founder of modern Chinese literature, is indicative of a new enthusiasm for Lu Xun in the United States and elsewhere in the West. In Japan, South Korea, and of course the People's Republic of China, the study of Lu Xun has been an academic enterprise of considerable standing for some time already. Not that American scholars have failed to make substantial contributions to Lu Xun studies in the past, but such contributions have been relatively far between. Fortunately, there is little overlap between these three exciting new studies.

Lu Xun, a lifelong translator dedicated to introducing foreign thought, “searched for new voices from alien lands” to reinvigorate indigenous culture. Yet, his attitude toward cultural exchange was an ambivalent one. Among the questions that preoccupied him: How are foreign discourses, technologies, and knowledge appropriated and disseminated? Do they enable new frameworks for understanding the self and the world and forward an emancipatory agenda? Or legitimize systems of oppression? While Lu Xun's essays and short stories largely affirm the latter, “Mr. Fujino” imagines a paradigm of relationality that goes beyond the limits of nationalist and colonial discourse. The sentimental account mythologizing his friendship with his Japanese anatomy teacher—one that draws on Confucian notions of benevolence and reciprocity—and, in turn, the positive sentiments and cross-cultural encounters the story has generated, reflects, and in a certain sense, enacts, Lu Xun's more sanguine visions of the transformative possibilities of cultural exchange.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of Islam for prewar Japanese pan-Asianists. Yet, by considering Islam solely as a political factor, this strand of scholarship has largely overlooked the religious dimension of Japanese pan-Asianism. The existence of six different complete translations of the Qur'ān into Japanese, however, amply bespeaks a genuinely religious interest in Islam, an impression that is corroborated by a look at the sociopolitical contexts of the translations and the biographical backgrounds of the translators. While explicitly anti-modern, anti-Western, and anti-Christian notions were at work in these broadly pan-Asianist Japanese appropriations of Islam, an analysis of the terminology used in the translations shows that, ironically, Christian precedents were not easily overcome.

Late eighteenth-century East Asia witnessed similar events with the Qianlong emperor's (r. 1736–96) literary inquisition in China, King Chŏngjo's (r. 1776–1800) fight against heterodoxy in Korea, and Matsudaira Sadanobu's (1759–1829) Ban on Heterodoxy (Igaku no kin, 1790) in Japan. As is well known, Qianlong sought to destroy anti-Manchu writings, whereas Matsudaira sought to impose order by mandating the neo-Confucian orthodoxy of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) in elite education. Chŏngjo's activities are less understood, but equally significant. His own literary inquisition developed around threats Catholicism posed to the centrality of neo-Confucian orthodoxy, but it encompassed wider concerns over heterodox books imported from Qing China (1644–1911). What Matsudaira desired, Chŏngjo took for granted as defining Chosŏn (1392–1910) Korea's historic claim to guard civilization, and his fears over the threats of barbarism intensified as Catholicism and other forms of heterodoxy arrived via Qing China. This study examines Chŏngjo's response to those threats.

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period.

This article takes issue with recent accounts of the evolution of Gandhian ideas that have stressed his importance as a global theorist of principled nonviolence. It suggests that throughout his life Gandhi's writings display a preoccupation with ideas of martial courage and fearlessness; his stance might best be defined as one of nonviolent “martiality” rather than nonviolence per se. His overriding goal was not to proselytize for global “ahimsa” (nonviolence) but to shape the Indian people into a nonviolent army that could wrest freedom from the colonizers. It explains this concern for both nonviolence and martial attitudes by arguing that Gandhi's thought has to be reassessed and placed within several important contexts: the widespread global popularity of militarism before 1914; an influential intellectual critique of Western “materialist” values; Asian nationalist efforts to develop “indigenous” forms of mobilizational politics in their struggles against imperialism; and Indian thinking about caste (varna), which was central to Gandhi's thought and has generally been neglected in the literature. These contexts help us to understand Gandhi's complex and sometimes contradictory thinking on the issue of violence.

A growing body of scholarship on Buddhism is exploring the historical role of warfare and militarism. Buddhist polities have generally exempted monastic communities from military conscription and taxation. Although the monk Khruubaa Srivichai (1878–1938) is revered as a saint in northern Thailand today, during his lifetime he was detained under temple arrest on multiple occasions. He was sent to Bangkok in 1920 and 1935 to face charges that ranged from conducting unauthorized ordinations to treason. For the controversies he generated, the media of the day called him “that puzzling monk.” Prevailing scholarship has explained the controversies as the result of conflicts internal to the Thai monastic order. In this essay, I argue that the puzzle posed by Srivichai is solved by recognizing the importance of changing policies regarding military conscription, changes which sought to restrict the traditional rights of the northern population to ordain and expanded state access to manpower.

Liu Zihua arrived in France in 1919 as part of the Sino-French Work-Study Movement. In 1940, he completed a PhD thesis in which he combined modern astronomy and the Yijing through “analogical reasoning” to discover a planet. After Liu went back to China in 1945, his efforts to win recognition came up against nationalist and communist anti-traditionalism but were eventually integrated into the intellectual revival of the 1980s. This study relies on historical sources and anthropological fieldwork to show that Liu is an emblematic figure of the cultural upheaval caused by the introduction of modern Western categories of science, religion, and superstition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Liu's example reveals the changing status of the Yijing in Chinese society, the cross-cultural understanding of science and sacred literature as embodied in this classic, and the role of analogy in cultural assimilation. It also sheds light on the shaping of academic standards in China and on the connection between traditional literary scholars and contemporary “amateur scientists.”

Contemporary concerns about the difficulties faced by the Japanese economy following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 soon appeared to be unfounded as the economy recovered relatively quickly. This paper suggests that despite its limited impact on Japan's longer-term economic trajectory this disaster can tell us a great deal about the ways in which individuals, organizations, and officialdom respond to a devastating event, and help us better understand the process of transition from immediate relief to longer-term recovery, not just in Japan, but more broadly. It analyzes the impact of the disaster on market transactions, showing that the scale and nature of market disruption went far beyond direct physical destruction; that the collective and individual responses of government, producers, traders, and consumers had the potential to make matters worse, rather than better; and that the existence of integrated markets spread the effects of the disaster across the Japanese archipelago. It also suggests that reestablishing market stability following the crisis was one of the keys to longer-term recovery, and that further research will help us understand the causal factors in that process.