Suchergebnisse

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise of populism and decline of public confidence in many of the formal institutions of democracy. This crisis of democracy has stimulated searches for alternative ways of understanding and enacting politics. Against this background, Tessa Morris-Suzuki explores the long history of informal everyday political action in the Japanese context. Despite its seemingly inflexible and monolithic formal political system, Japan has been the site of many fascinating small-scale experiments in 'informal life politics': grassroots do-it-yourself actions which seek not to lobby governments for change, but to change reality directly, from the bottom up. She explores this neglected history by examining an interlinked series of informal life politics experiments extending from the 1910s to the present day.

Why is it that we so readily accept the boundary lines drawn around nations or around regions like 'Asia' as though they were natural and self-evident, when in fact they are so mutable and often so very arbitrary? What happens to people not only when the borders they seek to cross become heavily guarded, but also when new borders are drawn straight through the middle of their lives? The essays in this book address these questions by starting from small places on the borderlands of East Asia and looking outwards from the small towards the large, asking what these 'minor pasts' tell us about the grand narratives of history. In the process, it takes the reader on a journey from Renaissance European visions of 'Tartary', through nineteenth-century racial theorising, imperial cartography and indigenous experiences of modernity, to contemporary debates about Big History in an age of environmental crisis.

"This book takes a fresh look at the Korean War by considering the conflict from a Northeast Asian regional perspective. It highlights the connections of the war to earlier conflicts in the region and examines the human impact of the war on neighboring countries, focusing particularly on the ways in which the Korean War shaped regional cross-border movements of people, goods, and ideas (including hopes and fears). It also considers the lasting consequences of these movements for the region's society and politics."--Provided by publisher

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Tables -- Figures -- Contributors -- 1 Introduction: Japanese Economic Growth, Images and Ideologies -- 2 A Radical Interpretation of Postwar Economic Policies -- 3 Land Reform and Postwar Japanese Capitalism -- 4 The Structure and Operation of Monopoly Capital in Japan -- 5 Problems of the Japanese Working Class in Historical Perspective -- 6 Foreign Trade, Investment, and Industrial Imperialism in Postwar Japan -- Bibliography -- Index

Through travels that range from Geneva to Pyongyang, this remarkable book takes readers on an odyssey through one of the most extraordinary forgotten tragedies of the Cold War: the ""return"" of over 90,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward. For most, their new home proved a place of poverty and hardship; for thousands, it was a place of persecution and death. In rediscovering their extraordinary personal stories, this book also casts new light on the politics of the Cold War, and on present-day tensions between North Korea and the rest

Despite predictions of the "death of the past" and the "end of history," the past refuses to go away. In fact, the start of the twenty-first century has seen an upsurge of interest in popular representations of history on the large and small screen, and of impassioned political conflicts over rival understandings of the past. Historical responsibility and apology have become contentious topics of domestic politics and of international diplomatic relations, and memory a profitable commodity for sale to mass markets. Against this background, how do historians deal with the problems of the search for "historical truth"? The Past Within Us approaches these issues by examining the problems of representing history in the popular media. Drawing on examples from East Asian and American as well as European history, it poses the question: What happens when accounts of history are transferred from one medium to another? How far does the medium shape the message? How can historians deploy contemporary media in ways which evoke and develop the historical imagination? From the romances of Walter Scott to Steven Spielberg blockbusters, from online Irish nationalism to Japanese revisionist comic books, The Past Within Us explores some of the more dramatic modern popular representations and reflects on the key challenges and possibilities for the communication of history in a multimedia age.