This essay is a comparative legal study of the use by the United States and South Korea of state of emergency powers before and during the Korean War. Beginning with the violent suppression of the Cheju Uprising in 1948, a succession of states of emergency was proclaimed in South Korea and the United States throughout the Korean conflict (1948-1953). The essay examines the context in which these emergency laws were conceived and their relationship to state-sponsored mass violence against the civilian population.

Following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11th, 2011, on my first visit that fall to the Rikuchū Coast of Iwate Prefecture, Japan, one of the first questions local residents asked me was, “Are you coming to the matsuri?” Three years and many subsequent visits later, this cheery inquiry, typically delivered upon my arrival - usually by friends but sometimes by strangers - has not changed. Initially, I was quite taken aback (even a little offended) by this seemingly trivial query, as enjoying a matsuri seemed contrary to my “more serious” purpose for being there - to clear tsunami debris, identify local residents' needs, and to help clean up or rebuild their houses and schools as requested. But quickly, I came to realize the sincere intent of this question as I experienced how matsuri, often described in English as “folk festivals,” are taking on a special new meaning and significance for the residents of local communities on the tsunami ravaged Iwate coast. The study of matsuri in general has been a mainstay of Japanese ethnology and folklore studies during the pre and postwar periods, a literature and topic with which I am quite familiar (Yanagida 1946; Minakata 1951, and Miyamoto 1960). But never did I imagine that my own presence at a local matsuri in a coastal Iwate town post 3.11 would become such an important way to build mutual trust with coastal residents, delineate their most important priorities, or to learn about the powerful historical ties that bind these communities together. This experience contrasts sharply with the historical literature on matsuri such as is cited above, which has often focused on its inherent ritual and belief systems, and considered folk festivities to be a fairly static repository of the nation's (and that particular region's) historical beliefs and customs. While this monograph is informed by this heritage, my ethnographic experience in Iwate coastal communities post 3.11 reveals the more dynamic role of local folk festivities as espoused by contemporary Japanese ethnologists such as Shinno (1993), Iijima (2001), and Naito (2007), who conceive local matsuri to be fluid, malleable, reactive, and adaptive constructions – the products of historical precedents but also of contemporary social and cultural values that reveal and reflect the many ongoing sociocultural processes in that locale.

Frontier studies have long been a sensitive area for historical research in the PRC, largely because of the demands for increasing autonomy in Tibet and Xinjiang-movements that are regarded as “separatist” by the authorities. This sensitivity makes the study of the 1911 Revolution on the frontier particularly difficult, because it was precisely in 1911 that independence movements manifested themselves in Tibet and Mongolia. Both of these regions had been incorporated into the Qing empire, whose emperors acted as patrons of the Tibetan Buddhism revered by Tibetans and Mongols alike. In Mongolia, the Qing court confirmed the status of Mongols nobles, and intermarried with the families of Mongol princes. But the 1911 Revolution created a secular republic, which made these religious and feudal ties difficult to maintain. More importantly, the revolution was launched with an overtly Han nationalist agenda to “expel the northern barbarians, restore China” that left little political space for the political aspirations of other nationalities. As a result, both Tibet and Outer Mongolia declared independence after the Wuchang Uprising.