When the famously nationalistic Japanese author Hyakuta Naoki published his best-selling novel A Man Called Pirate (Kaizoku to yobareta otoko) in 2012, which subsequently became both a manga and a major film, he renewed interest in the midcentury oil baron Idemitsu Sazō, using him as the model for the novel's lead character. Hyakuta claims to have aimed to inspire the country, reeling from decades of slow growth as well as the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, by featuring a visionary Japanese leader motivated primarily by love for his employees and his country. This article traces the efforts across these media to render Idemitsu as a credible character, particularly in dealing with his real-life family as well as his “family” of employees. It argues that the partial disappearance of the “real” Idemitsu in these versions of Hyakuta's novel allowed the production of a more believable one—made believable in part because of the essential Japanese values that he ostensibly represents, even as the constraints on these representations hint at fissures and tensions in contemporary political use of biographical fiction and film.

The purpose of this JAS roundtable is to reflect on the Cold War in Asia. Even to frame the issue in such terms is to confront the “formidable semantic contradiction that is inherent in the idea” of the Cold War (Kwon 2010, 7). For the very notion of the Cold War—as a “long peace” in which bipolar tensions did not lead to hot war—sits uneasily with the reality that in Asia bipolar tensions were imbricated in horrific conflicts that left millions of human casualties. On the other hand, to use the term “Cold War” simply as a label for a historical period, or “epoch” in Alfred McCoy's terms, is to invite imprecision. Moreover, even as a label for a historical period, the term still effaces the experience of much of the world, since the end date of the period is defined by the experience of Europe and the superpowers.

This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.

This article analyzes the ways that Korean Chinese migrants are exploited aesthetically in their ancestral homeland by focusing on their mass-media refiguration. These return migrants, or the Chosŏnjok, have been received by their South Korean co-ethnics into what may be called a “hierarchical nationhood.” The strategies of temporal displacement, this article contends, are employed in South Korean cinema and television dramas in order to contain the uncanny cultural difference embodied by these ethnic returnees. As a result, a certain sense of belatedness is inscribed on the bodies of these migrants. If this temporal refiguration wards off the psychological discomfort of dealing with difference in the midst of sameness, it may be said at the same time to fetishize its object within an archaic constellation that South Koreans find endearing, yet disturbingly absent, from their highly consumerist contemporary society. In attempting to delineate the “nostalgia politics,” the article aims to shed light on the function of certain mass media representations, including Hongjin Na's movie The Yellow Sea, in the context of the socioeconomic realities of South Korea.

Ancient Sinhalese rulers had a right to a share of agricultural income, a right which embraced the produce of the land as well as irrigation rates and was generally paid in kind. In effect, there was a land tax; but the term used (bojika-, bojiya-, or bojaka-pati) was more than mere land tax and connotes a tax on income corresponding to bhaga in Indian law books. By the fourteenth century, if not earlier, there had been a fundamental change. Rather than a tithe from each class of land in the village, the king received the whole of the produce of certain fields, the muttettu, which were cultivated gratis by the villagers who possessed other fields either in return for this service or in recognition of the king's suzreignty. This meant that there were no intermediaries farming (renting) the right to collect the tithe. It also meant that the villager held his paddy fields on an individual and hereditary (paraveny) basis. There was, however, no concept of freehold ownership. Authority was political. One could not distinguish private rights from political allegiance. Landholders combined rights in land with duties to the king. Service was attached to the land and was obligatory to any transferee. In some cases, this service was rendered to the king's chiefs and nominees or to the temples, for the kings distributed largesse in the form of lands and the services attached to them; these were known as nindagam, viharegam or devalegam as distinct from the king's villages, the gabadagam; such recipients were more like feudal overlords than farmers of the revenue. In other cases, villagers of certain castes performed certain specified services for the king, for other castes (usually higher castes) in their village, or for neighboring villages, and in return enjoyed certain fields. It was a system of service tenure that was girded and threaded by the caste system.

The number of persons who perished in the so-called Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756 has long been a matter of controversy, especially intense since the Indian viceroyalty of Lord Curzon of Kedleston. Two scholars, C. R. Wilson and S. C. Hill, and their patron, Lord Curzon, have maintained that HolwelPs narrative declaring that 123 persons perished in the Black Hole is substantially true. On the other hand, J. H. Little has argued that the Black Hole tragedy is a “gigantic hoax,” exaggerated beyond all proportions, since only a few men, in his opinion, were confined in the Black Hole, and of them only those who had received severe wounds during the actual fighting died. While English scholars have generally followed the Curzon- Wilson-Hill school, Indian scholars have recently come to accept Jadunath Sarkar's opinion that probably not more than sixty were confined in the Black Hole.

The term “Southeast Asia” is coming steadily into greater use. The termis a convenient geographic expression, but is it anything more? Do the countries of this region have very much in common? Do they have enough in common to suggest the possibility of fruitful cooperation? These questions take on added significance because of the present political upheavals and unrest in nearly all of the countries of this region.

A. The peninsula before the conquests by Funan. The first known contact of the Khmer Empire or any of its antecedents with what is now called the Malay Peninsula1 occurred when Fan Shih-man of Funan conquered a considerable portion of that peninsula early in the third century; although it is believed, from the terms in which the account of his voyage are expressed, that Hun-t'ien, or Hun-shen (Kaundinya), who conquered the native queen, Liu-yeh (Willow Leaf), and founded the kingdom of Funan about the middle of the first century, came from an Indian settlement on the eastern side of that peninsula.

Most Americans have observed individual Filipinos going about their business, as student, taxi driver, domestic servant, gardener, politician or journalist. Their acculturation to the principles and surface manifestations of modern western civilization is increasingly apparent, despite three centuries of indoctrination in Spanish customs and traditions and many centuries more of Arabic and Hindu influences. Indonesian culture survivals are, however, everywhere manifest in their daily life, beliefs, thoughts and actions.

A disproportionate amount of scholarly attention has already been lavished upon the provision for communal electorates in the 1909 Morley-Minto reform scheme, imparting to it a significance which it lacked during both John Morley's secretaryship of state for India and his lifetime. Most recently, M. N. Das has stretched the elastic material in the Morley and Minto collections—his only sources—over a prefabricated ideological structure; he portrays Lord Minto as a Machiavellian schemer, who introduced communal electorates in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the forces of Indian nationalism and thereby perpetuate the British Raj, and he assumes that Morley—who chose the Florentine statesman as the subject of his 1897 Romanes Lectures—was unable to recognize a twentieth-century facsimile. Without attempting to absolve two centuries of British rule in India of its Divide and Rule stigma, one may confidently assert that during the first decade of the twentieth century, neither the Viceroy nor the Secretary of State consciously implemented the pernicious theories which allegedly produced two warring nations within the bosom of Mother India.