The Journal's May 1995 issue (54.2) carried an error in the Japan section of Other Books Received (p. 650). The second citation should have read: Van Staaveren, Jacob. An American in Japan, 1945–1948: A Civilian View of the Occupation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. xvii, 286 pp.

The Journal's November 1995 issue (54.4) carried an error in the obituary for J. Henry Korson (p. 1165). Professor Korson was born in 1910, not in 1930 as stated in the Journal.

Despite its Importance, “the exact course and depth of the recession in the [Philippine] Islands have never been seriously studied” (Richardson 1984:208). Indeed, studies that attempt to calculate the impact of global trade cycles, including that of the Great Depression, on the employment economies of the primate cities of Southeast Asia form a special lacuna within the generally underdeveloped literature on the economic history of Southeast Asia. This article opens both research questions by presenting a time-specific assessment of the impact of this international business contraction on important segments of the economy and society of metropolitan Manila, the capital and major port-city of the Philippines. In particular, this article focuses on the depression experience of the large Filipino bureaucratic middle class, of Filipino manual workers in commodities handling, manufacturing, and construction, and finally of the Chinese commercial sector. The article provides a first-cut disaggregation and analysis of relevant statistical data—much of it assembled here for the first time, as well as commercial reports and the contemporary press. The result is a picture of selective dislocation and hardship but one that is at once more variegated and generally less severe than anticipated.

The fourth of January 1958 was significant in Burma for two reasons; it marked the tenth anniversary of the nation's independence and it also denoted the end of the constitutional limitation on the right of a state to secede from the Union. While the anniversary of independence caused rejoicing throughout the country, the right of secession caused many of the leaders to worry and wonder whether or not this date would become significant as the beginning of the breakup of the Union. Since the right of secession is a unique right, not found in any other modern federal constitution save that of the U.S.S.R., it is useful to examine the background and the contemporary situation in order to see what opportunities there are for a state to secede from the Union of Burma, and what limitations exist to keep it from exercising its right.

There is something particular, though perhaps not unique, about Ceylonese nationalism, or, to be more precise, about recent Ceylonese nationalism. In the last years of colonial rule, Ceylon appeared to be sliding gently and quietly along the road to independence, with properly conducted constitutional change to mark the milestones; when colonial rule ended on February 4, 1948, it seemed that the gentleness and quietness was to continue into the era of independence itself. But with the 1956 elections there came an apparently sudden change. In the elections themselves, a landslide overwhelmed the long-dominant United National Party in a way that has not so far afflicted the Indian Congress or other similar parties, and a new Government came into power borne, it seemed, on the crest of a second wave of nationalism, of a different and more violent quality than its predecessor. There followed a period of rapid change, of communal strife, riots and emergencies, of political assassination; and, in 1962, there was an attempted coup d'état followed by political arrests. Such is still the instability of the contemporary scene in Ceylon that he would be a bold prophet who would dare to forecast the next political surprise.

In the fall of 1922 a School Reform Decree was promulgated by the Chinese Ministry of Education establishing a new school system. The contents of this decree defined the administrative structure and aims of Chinese education in conformity with the democratic principles of a reform movement which had been active during the four preceding years. The new statute appeared to consummate an effort to give the Republic of 1912 a truly democratic educational system. In reality however, this apparent victory of the reformers disguised a dilemma which was paralyzing their reform movement from within. Consumed with their vision of a true republic in which democratic education produced a democratic politics, the reformers had assumed this goal could be made a strategy of reform. As a strategy, it had no way to be effective in a society which was intensely undemocratic to begin with, and success in formulating goals proved quite different from reform in practice.

Study of the confucian tradition is dominated by historical and philosophical approaches. Religion and spirituality have been neglected with a consistency that would be admirable if it had been used to better ends—one need only remember James Legge's comment on the amount of religious material contained in the Records of Ritual (c. 4th–1st century b.c.), and then reflect on how little work has been done on this material since he published what remains the only English translation of the Records since the late 19th century. Because the accepted frame for the portrait of the Master and his disciples has long been defined in intellectual, or at most ethical, terms, anything that fell outside that frame has been left to gather dust in outer darkness. Confucius, his teachings, and his followers were characterized as agnostic; and once their religious beliefs had been defined as undefined, they could in good conscience be left unresearched.

In 1993, in response to the international Human Genome Project pioneered by the United States, the Chinese government began to sponsor national projects in conjunction with the international effort. The result of this scientific endeavor confirmed international geneticists’ conclusions regarding a very recent “African origin” of all modern humans, or Homo sapiens. This scientific development confronted the longstanding nationalist belief that the “Chinese” had lived in “China” as an independent human group since Homo erectus, represented by the 700,000-year-old Peking Man. By examining the still pervasive political uses of a presumed prehistoric ancestor of the people as well as the controversy sparked by the scientific challenge that has provoked public discussions, this article identifies a potent racial discourse in contemporary Chinese nationalism and connects it to a broader international context.

It was in the autumn of 1912, when Ezra Pound “went to Mr. Yeats' rooms and found him much excited over the advent of a great poet, someone ‘greater than any of us.’” This was the beginning of the rather extraordinary story of Rabindranath Tagore's appearance on the Western literary scene, which was to earn him a great deal of sudden fame, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in November, 1913. The Western appreciation of Tagore had a sensational quality which was striking when it came but looked even more unusual when viewed later after the abrupt craze was over and Tagore was largely forgotten.

Ongoing cultures, by virtue of the personalities they produce and the social arrangements they embody, create tensions or strains for their individual members; and they provide as well for the institutionalized expression and alleviation, if not complete reduction, of these tensions in culturally approved channels. In this view, cultural stability refers not to the absence of persisting conflict on the individual or social level; but rather to a high degree of complementarity between institutionalized sources of strain or conflict for the individual, and institutionalized arrangements for tension reduction or expression. This conception of stability does not assume that all relatively stable cultures are equally productive of psychological well-being, even assuming this nebulous condition could be specified. Nor does it assert that all stable cultures are equally adaptive in the face of external pressures. It does imply, however, that sources of conflict and channels for its expression will be sufficiently balanced to insure perpetuation of culturally standardized social arrangements and beliefs over many generations.

I enter this controversy from a somewhat curious position: I began life as a psysical geographer, graduated in the high tradition of European Sinology, work in the field of economic history, and administer a department of languages and literatures. I suppose I might be said to have a foot firmly in each world, and to be qualified to make a plea for the unity of Chinese studies. Additionally, the circumstances of British university teaching force my colleagues and myself to face this problem continually, since our undergraduates specialize in Chinese studies to the exclusion of all else, and we are forced in our teaching to attempt a broad coverage of both the humanities and the social disciplines, to give our students a reasonably broad academic education oriented around China.

This paper seeks to address the theme of this volume by exploring the place of the fabulous in the imaginary geographies of a lost world in the Indian Ocean.

I begin with three enchanted flights of imagination that seek to convey a useful truth. All three are occasioned by travel to a real place—Kanyakumari, the “Cape Comorin” of colonial atlases, and the land's end of the Indian peninsula and of its Tamil-speaking region (“Tamil Nadu”).

This article discusses the 1903 Human Pavilion's Ainu Fushine Kōzō, who advanced a notion of imperial subjecthood, where one could be Ainu and a loyal subject of the Japanese empire. Fushine urged that the Ainu be treated equitably not because all races were equal, a rather modern and Western notion, but because he viewed imperial subjecthood as predicated upon military conscription and being children of the emperor. I examine the removal of the Okinawan women, Nakamura Kame and Uehara Ushi, from the display, amidst a larger debate where competing visions of imperial subjecthood and what it meant to be civilized were tied up with the charge that the pavilion was a humanitarian concern (jindō mondai). The Human Pavilion became a nexus between colonial and imperial subjects, which, rather than reifying distinctions between the two, called into question the coherence of civilizational taxonomies in Japan and the world.

During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), China's leading cartoon artists formed patriotic associations aimed at repelling the Japanese military. Their stated propaganda goals were to boost morale among the troops and the civilian population by circulating artwork that would ignite the spirit of resistance among Chinese audiences. In keeping with the genre, racialized and sexualized imagery abounded. The artists created myriad disturbing visions of how militarized violence impacted men's and women's bodies differently. By analyzing the two major professional journals, National Salvation Cartoons and War of Resistance Cartoons, this article shows that depictions of sexual violence inflicted on Chinese women were integral to the artists' attempts to arouse the spirit of resistance. By comparing their depictions of different types of bodies (Chinese and Japanese, male and female, soldiers' and civilians') the article argues that the cartoonists believed that the depiction of sexually mutilated Chinese women would build resistance and spur patriotism while equivalent depictions of mutilated male soldiers would sap morale and hamper the war effort. The article concludes with a discussion about the dubious efficacy of propaganda that invokes a hypersexualized, masculine enemy other.

This paper deals with ideal masculine types in the gender discourse of Korea's modernizing nationalists during the late 1890s and early 1900s. It begins by outlining the main gender stereotypes of Korea's traditional neo-Confucian society, and it argues that old Korea's manhood norms were bifurcated along class lines. On one hand, fighting prowess was accepted as a part of the masculinity pattern in the premodern society of the commoners. On the other hand, the higher classes' visions of manhood emphasized self-control and adherence to moral and ritual norms. The paper shows how both premodern standards of masculinity provided a background for indigenizing the mid-nineteenth century European middle-class ideal of “nationalized” masculinity—disciplined, self-controlled, sublimating the sexual impulses and channeling them toward the “nobler national goals,” and highly militarized—in early modern Korea.

Thailand has seen a growing number of women elected to Parliament in recent decades. Yet, little research has been done on who these women are and how they affect the quality of democracy. This article is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Drawing on previously untapped Thai-language primary sources, it argues that the majority of female members of Parliament elected since 1975 have contributed to entrenching family-based rule and stunting the growth of political pluralism. This argument is based on the finding that most female MPs are related, by blood or marriage, to former male MPs. These women from political families constitute one part of the long historical process through which Thailand has lapsed increasingly into a family-based patrimonial polity since the absolute monarchy was abolished in 1932. The importance of families remains undiminished over time; the advent of electoral politics has only accentuated it by bringing more women with powerful family connections into Parliament.

During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print. Most of these were published in the People's Republic of China, where they represented an effort to create a new revolutionary history of class struggle, intended to replace the elite history written by Confucian historiographers under the empire. Embodying Mao Tse-tung's belief that “the ruthless economic exploitations and political oppression of the peasantry by the landlord class forced the peasants to rise repeatedly in revolt against its rule” (Mao 1961, Vol. III, p. 75), these studies of popular uprisings describe a bewildering variety of social phenomena.

As katherine verdery notes, dead bodies have had political lives in virtually every civilization since antiquity. They frequently emerge as powerful metaphors of change, especially after a time of crisis when the meaning of political symbols is redefined. This is vividly exemplified by what happened to the exhumed bodies of various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia (Verdery 1999, 1–22). Postwar discourse is another site in which dead bodies frequently emerge as metaphors. Some of the most unforgettable sights concerning World War II are pictures of huge piles of exhumed human bodies from the mass graves of Jews. We know that these are not skeletons of those who have died natural deaths because these images have often been shown along with the pictures of inmates of the concentration and death camps, emaciated to the point of nonrecognition as living human beings. Through this process, the pictures have acquired an independent status as encoded language: they signify unbelievable evil committed against humanity, and they display the moral weakness of the rest of humanity that failed to resist and end such atrocities.