Our Cover

This month's cover illustration is the “Surrender of Japan, Tokyo Bay, 2 September 1945: Japanese representatives on board USS Missouri (BB-63) during surrender ceremonies.” Standing in front are: Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu (wearing top hat) and General Yoshijiro Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff. Behind them are three representatives each of the Foreign Ministry, the Army, and the Navy. They include, in the middle row, left to right: Major General Yatsuji Nagai, Army; Katsuo Okazaki, Foreign Ministry; Rear Admiral Tadatoshi Tomioka, Navy; Toshikazu Kase, Foreign Ministry; and Lieutenant General Suichi Miyakazi, Army. In the back row, left to right (not all visible) are Rear Admiral Ichiro Yokoyama, Navy; Saburo Ota, Foreign Ministry; Katsuo Shiba, Navy; and Kaziyi Sugita, Army. Identities for rows two and three are from an annotated photograph in the Naval Historical Center files. The source of this photograph is Naval Historical Center Photo # USA C-2719, from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives. This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain. The photograph and the descriptive text above are from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Surrender_of_Japan_-_USS_Missouri.jpg (accessed September 21, 2015).

In This Issue

We begin with a quartet of essays that are directly related to both a trio of commentaries that we published in August and our cover photograph. It is the second in a two-part series of “Asia Beyond the Headlines” pieces that look at the meaning of the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The trio that opened the series found leading historians specializing in the study of China, Japan, and Korea, respectively, looking forward to what to expect from the commemorative activities and speeches that we slated for August and September, while this quartet is retrospective—examining and placing into immediate historical perspective such things as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's mid-summer speech and the late-summer parade held in Beijing. The participants in the current set of essays are: John Delury, who was trained in Chinese history but is now based in Seoul and toggles between writing about the past and the present and between focusing on China and on Korea; Sheila A. Smith, a political scientist at a Washington, D.C., think tank who has worked on the relations between China and Japan; Maria Repnikova, a specialist in Chinese and also Russian politics now a postdoctoral fellow in communications at the University of Pennsylvania; and Srinath Raghavan, a scholar of Indian politics now based at a think tank in New Delhi.

While the issue opens with a look back seventy years, the presidential address by historian Mrinalini Sinha of the University of Michigan, “Premonitions of the Past,” moves readers three decades further back in time than that to a pivotal decade in the history of Asian anti-imperialism. She offers a sophisticated intervention into ongoing debates on the ways that nations are imagined and anti-colonialist struggles defined and carried out, taking as her starting point Mohandas Gandhi's return to India a century ago. She moves backwards and forwards from that 1915 moment, as well as the turning-point events of 1919, when protests erupted across Asia after it became clear that the post–World War I settlement would not bring the end to colonial rule in many parts of Asia that some hoped would be the result of Woodrow Wilson's talk of the Great War as an effort to bring about an era of self-determination. Central to her argument is the role that discourses taking place within empires play in structuring the new nations that take shape in postcolonial times.

Following the presidential address is a “Reflections” essay by Northern Arizona University historian of South Asia Sanjay Joshi, “Juliet Got It Wrong: Conversion and the Politics of Naming in Kumaon, ca. 1850–1930,” a deeply personal as well as scholarly discussion of religion and identity. “Clearly,” Joshi writes, after describing the links between shifts in what his mother was called and in her spiritual affiliations, “William Shakespeare knew very little about India. If he had, he could not have had Juliet ask, ‘What is in a name?’ When a name can locate you by religion, divulge your geographic origins, reveal your mother tongue, and indicate caste and hence social strata, a rose by any other name is definitely not a rose. In fact, a name might well determine whether we are talking about a rose or its Other.”

JAS at AAS Forum: The State of Democracy

This cluster of essays, all but one of which is a revised version of a presentation made at the AAS annual meeting in the spring, opens with “The Long Struggle: Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and the Importance of Ideas in Democratization.” An early version of this wide-ranging essay by Daniel Chirot, a sociologist known for his past work on many specific parts of the world, including Indonesia and Romania, as well as for broad comparative studies of such topics as tyrannical rule, was distributed in advance of the annual meeting to three political scientists working on different parts of Asia who presented commentaries at the JAS at AAS session. Those commentaries, which were revised in light of discussion at the meetings and during our vetting process, are published here, and each comes at Chirot's sophisticated but clearly stated framework for placing democratic surges and retreats in contemporary Asia into a global and historical framework. The first, by Mark R. Thompson, Director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre at the City University of Hong Kong, called simply “Democracy with Asian Characteristics,” revisits and puts into new perspective the so-called “Asian values” debates, while moving between Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast and East Asia. Next comes “The Surprising Democratic Behemoth: Indonesia in Comparative Asian Perspective,” which is by Edward Aspinall of the Australian National University; as its title indicates, its focus is a country that is Southeast Asia's largest democracy and the second-largest democratic nation in all of Asia. Following that is “The Populist Dream of Chinese Democracy,” a work by former AAS President Elizabeth J. Perry, who teaches in Harvard's Government Department and heads the Harvard-Yenching Institute, that places Xi Jinping's policies and ideas into historical perspective. The forum concludes with a wrap-up commentary, “Asian Democracy through an Indian Prism,” by Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist who directs the Brown-India Initiative at Brown University; he was not a participant in the “live” version of this symposium, but as in the past we again supplement works based on presentations with additional materials solicited to add extra dimensions to a debate afterwards. His focus is on the ways that bringing South Asia into a discussion focused on Southeast and East Asia places key issues into a sharper perspective.

Research Articles

The rest of the main body of the issue, before the usual mix of book reviews, is made up of three articles, each by a scholar in a different discipline. The first, by geographer Gaerrang (Kabzung), who is based in Chengdu at Sichuan University's Centre for Tibetan Studies, is titled “Development as Entangled Knot: The Case of the Slaughter Renunciation Movement in Tibet, China.” Gaerrang explores the contrasting views toward livestock and divergent ideas on development among various state, religious, and civic groups in Tibetan regions, suggesting that, to understand the complex interplay among these actors, we need a “much more sophisticated conceptual tool than the simple dichotomous conceptualization of development” often applied in discussions of the topic.

This is followed by University of Vermont historian Erik Esselstrom's “Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan,” which explores representations of Red Guards and related groups and individuals in texts such as Japanese editorial cartoons and manga. Esselstrom posits that “Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture during the late 1960s era of high-speed growth”—and found a “surprisingly receptive audience for such criticism” among members of the urban middle class.

The article section closes with UC Irvine political scientist Dorothy J. Solinger's “Three Welfare Models and Current Chinese Social Assistance: Confucian Justifications, Variable Applications,” which examines state policies toward caring for the disadvantaged during the Late Imperial, Republican, and Communist eras. Solinger is interested in, among other things, looking at how references to “Confucian dicta” have shown up in each of these periods, though often deployed to different effect, due partly to alterations in strategies of thinking about and dealing with the indigent.

—JNW