{"title":"Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script by Zev Handel, and: Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia by Peter Francis Kornicki (review)","authors":"Jing Tsu","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0028","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47367079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Slave Donations to Buddhist Parishes in Qing Mongolia","authors":"Sam H. Bass","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0013","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Donations of slaves to Buddhist parishes in Qing Mongolia contributed to growing parish populations and wealth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I argue that Buddhist parish institutions thus benefited from the practice of slavery by encouraging donations of slaves and providing a refuge for former slaves. Mongolian archival testaments document slaveholders—both women and men—offering people, livestock, and other property to parishes. Slaveholders’ stated motivations for donation include protecting the formerly enslaved from predation and re-enslavement, fulfilling an enslaved person’s request to enroll in a parish, and generating merit for donors. Buddhist parishes’ self-interested administration of the transition between slave and nonslave nevertheless led to moderation of some of the worst practices of slavery and to a reduction in the number of enslaved people.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42081811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remember Girl Zero: Asia-Pacific Patriliny and Female Slavery","authors":"K. Roebuck","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0018","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In 1872, Maria Luz, a Peruvian ship transporting indentured Chinese “coolies” from Macau to Peru, stopped in the international treaty port of Yokohama, Japan. Amid intense international scrutiny, governor Ōe Taku investigated and then liberated all male coolies on board. However, Ōe left the ship’s captain, Ricardo Hereiro, in possession of an unnamed girl he had purchased in Macau. Since 1872, the Maria Luz incident has been incessantly narrated as a triumph of global abolitionism and evidence of Japan’s progress toward civilization and enlightenment. Historical amnesia has reigned regarding the un-liberated girl. Rethinking the incident from this girl’s perspective reveals less rupture than continuity in the flourishing Asia-Pacific traffic in women and girls—framed as patrilineal kinship and licensed by abolitionists’ gendered double standards. The resulting moral and legal blind spots continue to obscure female enslavement in present-day scholarship.摘要:1872 年のマリア・ルス号事件で、神奈川県長の大江卓が船上の清国人の男の 苦力を解放したが、無名の少女は解放しなかった。少女は忘れ去れ、世界中の奴隷 解放運動と日本の文明開化との勝利として事件が語られてきた。ただ父系性下盛ん な女の奴隷化・人身売買が継続された。","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45489929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Circling In on “Asian Media Studies”","authors":"Alexander Zahlten","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44771317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resilience of Korean Slavery: Tyrannical Owners, Resourceful Slaves, and the Equivocal State","authors":"S. Kim","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this article, I seek to understand the longevity of Korean slavery, the social and economic foundation of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). The tension of the competing economic needs of the state and yangban elites versus the state’s ideological commitment to benevolent governance led the state to formulate pliable policies on slavery. Legal cases concerning slaves’ oppression by slave owners reveal that owners exercised tyrannical power over their slaves. Yet laws also restrained slave owners in their dealings with slaves. Slaves, though subject to constant exploitation and unjust social conditions, took advantage of their economic, social, and familial resources as well as their legal rights in managing their precarious lives. This structural malleability enabling slaves’ agency created a form of slavery in Korea that endured for centuries.초록:이 논문은 조선왕조의 사회 경제적 근간을 이룬 노비제도가 장기지속된 원인을 노비들이 자신들이 갖고 있는 사회 경제적 자원과 법적 수단들을 이용 하여 자신들의 삶을 주체적으로 영위해 나갈 수 있게 한 구조적 유연성에서 찾 는다.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49659877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim (review)","authors":"Grace Huxford","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 81 (2021): 370–375 that leave people isolated from their cities, sites that even now offer little space or tolerance for heterogeneity. These novellas “transport both female narrators/protagonists back in time and space to show the contradicting experiences of colonialism and modernity by inscribing their experiences onto the city” (p. 165). In addition, both critique the standard binaries of resistance versus submission and nationalist versus antinationalist. As Kim argues, these post colonial novellas “pointedly question how to make sense of the Japanese colonial presence in the putatively postcolonial while also challenging the applicability of the very idea of the postcolonial in contemporary Seoul and Taipei” (p. 165). Urban Modernities brims with insights. It is a timely monograph that will be of great interest to scholars and students in a range of fields. This book is well-researched and clearly written. It skillfully intertwines Western theory while at the same time eschewing jargon. Drawing from a range of scholarship on East Asia in English, Chinese, and Korean, Kim’s book advances multiple fields, including the still relatively young field of modern intra-Asian comparative literature. It will almost certainly inspire significant transnational and transregional scholarship.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47428439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch (review)","authors":"Timothy J. Van Compernolle","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0001","url":null,"abstract":"An essay I read in graduate school—Peter Kornicki’s “The Survival of Tokugawa Fiction in the Meiji Period,” published forty years ago in this very journal—provided me with my first intimation that early modern Japanese literature was still popular in the modern era.1 It has taken the field considerable time to take seriously and to explore fully the implications of this survival, but the effort to find continuity amid change across the once unbridgeable Tokugawa–Meiji divide has now gained a great deal of traction. Daniel Poch’s Licentious Fictions, a bold, ambitious, and deeply researched monograph, takes a prominent place among these studies. Focusing on the historically specific discourse about ninjō 人情 (lit. human emotion; treated in the book as a form of desire), Poch’s book traces the “narrative practices surrounding ninjō” (p. 4) across a long nineteenth century, from the late Tokugawa era to the final decade of the Meiji period. Its focal points are the literary projects of Kyokutei Bakin 曲亭馬琴 (1767–1848), Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859–1935), and Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916). The book details the need to unleash the representation of desire in fiction, as well as the urge to control its unruly aspects, with a didactic framework that legitimizes some expressions of desire while making others illicit. The specifics of these impulses differ depending on the writer and the historical era. Poch’s book is adept at handling the variability and historical specificity of these twin claims on fiction to unleash and control desires. It also convincingly reveals continuity across the entire century. Poch’s attention to historical specificity is evident in chapter 1, which presents a wide-ranging account of the “interlocked historical layers that informed the understanding of ninjō in the nineteenthcentury Japanese novel” (p. 29). This historically specific discourse on desire was influenced by the import of vernacular Chinese fiction into","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42266410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"That Dynamic Spectrum","authors":"J. Ransmeier","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"E philosophers, from ancients like Aristotle to Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, no matter how radically different their attitudes toward slaveholding, articulated a mutually constitutive relationship between “freedom” and “slavery.” Each recognizes the character of the other in its negative reflection; resulting, according to Hegel, in a (life-or-death) negotiation between extremes.1 For the slave societies of Ancient Rome or the Atlantic world, a theoretical bifurcation of the population reigned. The line between free and unfree proved politically useful not just to those who sought to preserve the institution of slavery but to later abolitionists as well. It demarcated the lines of struggle and the wrongs of slavery. By highlighting how the proposed dichotomy fails to capture the multiplicity of forms slavery takes around the world—and in the East, Inner, and Southeast Asian contexts described in this special issue—I do not wish to undercut this politics of liberation or to minimize the absolute degradation enacted by slave traders and slaveholders. Close examination of global practices of enslavement, however, tests the proposition that these two concepts need each other. The supposedly tidy binary between free and unfree has become a kind of zombie idea, one that scholars of slavery must always and repeatedly dispatch, before proceeding to describe the evidence of exploitation they find in the archive at hand. And, it is not so much that the two terms are not opposites—for in many ways, they are—but rather that, as we encounter freedom or slavery in the world, the concepts operate in radically diverging ways.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42708182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan by Franz Prichard (review)","authors":"Michael P. Cronin","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46396942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Temporarily for Your Majesty: Debates on Abolishing Courtesan Slavery in Chosŏn Korea","authors":"Hyunsun Park","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0017","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:I identify the institution of government courtesans in Chosŏn Korea as state slavery. Government courtesans, like other government slaves and like private household slaves, were legally defined as chattel property in Chosŏn. Yet courtesans differed from those other types of slaves because their performances—labor mandated by the state— were constantly questioned and delegitimized by the government of nearly every Chosŏn king. Based on an examination of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century court debates about abolishing the courtesan system, I argue that the government’s repeated failures to abolish the use of courtesans produced the Chosŏn courtesan system as an illegitimate, temporary, and dispensable state apparatus. Paradoxically, the repeated designation of ongoing courtesan participation in royal, diplomatic, and military events as temporary in fact perpetuated courtesan slavery, even as the nominal illegitimacy removed any legal, social, or moral justification for the system.초록:이 논문은 조선 정부에서 국가 노예제인 관기 제도를 폐지하기 위한 논쟁 을 거듭했으나 매번 실패하는 지속적 과정이 관기 제도를 부적절하고, 임시적이 며, 제거 가능한 조직으로 만드는 담론적 효과를 창출했으며, 이를 통해 역설적 으로 국가 노예제의 권력 위계 질서를 영속화했다는 점에 대해 살펴본다.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48318744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}