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In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The interview covers the writer's view on the oceanic narrative formation in Taiwan, his perspective on non-human agency and Hokkien (Hoklo) language employment in literary writing, as well as his dedication in Pacific ocean conservation. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, hence tailored to both English and Chinese audience.
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Many of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the first global trading networks. Historians have since challenged the idea that there really was such an organized network, instead seeing it as a nineteenth-century metaphor that obscures as much as it explains.
But Xin Wen, the author of The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), tries to revive the idea that there really was a “Silk Road,” at least for the people of Dunhuang, in what is now China’s Gansu Province. His book explains that there really were convoys traveling back-and-forth along an established route–though they likely saw themselves as diplomats more than merchants.
“People in Dunhuang, of course, did not not exactly call the road that connected them with their neighbors the “Silk Road.” Nevertheless, had they been asked about it, they likely would have found the phrase entirely intelligible, even meaningful,” he writes.
Xin Wen is assistant professor of East Asian studies and history at Princeton University. His research interests in medieval China also include manuscript culture, urban history, and digital humanities.
Today, Xin Wen and I talk about the Silk Road, the Dunhuang Archive, and the risks of orienting too much of the history of Central and East Asia around China.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The King’s Road. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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To fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and practices from around the world. By the 1880s, this included the introduction of Western-derived psychiatry and its ideas about mental illness. The first Japanese psychiatrists claimed that mental illnesses required medical treatment in specialized institutions rather than confinement at home, as had been common practice. Yet the state implemented no social welfare policies to make new medical services more accessible and affordable to the public. The family, especially women, thus continued to carry the burden of caring for those considered mad.
Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford UP, 2022) examines how the family in Japan came to be seen as the natural provider of care for those suffering from mental illnesses. It centers on the experiences of women and families, which have long been obscured by the voices of male psychiatrists, state officials, and lawmakers. H. Yumi Kim traces how women and families negotiated a dizzying array of claims about madness and its proper management across various settings. In the countryside, psychiatrists tried to refute the notion that fox spirits could cause madness, and the government regulated the use of cage-like structures inside homes. In cities, a booming medical marketplace spread ideas about feminized illnesses such as hysteria, and female defendants were evaluated for menstruation-induced disorders. As women and families navigated this shifting therapeutic landscape, they produced their own gendered approaches to madness that would take precedence over the claims of psychiatry, the law, and the state in
everyday life.
Decoupling the history of mental illness from the discipline and institutions of psychiatry, Madness in the Family reveals the power and fragilities of gender, kinship, and care in the creation of different modes of caring for and understanding mental illness that persist to this day.
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In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the film director, Huang Chia-chu about his making of the eco-film, Whale Island (2020). The interview covers the Director's engagement with this amazing project to tell a "sea story" of Taiwan, his encountering with the writer, Liao Hung-chi and the photographer, Jin Lai, his choice of film translated title as well as movie soundtracks. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, hence tailored to both English and Chinese audience.
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Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived.
Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Martin K. Dimitrov shows in Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China (Oxford UP, 2023), substantial variability exists in the survival of nondemocratic regimes, with single-party polities having the longest average duration. Offering a systematic theory of the institutional solutions to the dictator's dilemma, Dimitrov argues that single-party autocracies have fostered channels that allow for the confidential vertical transmission of information, while also solving the problems associated with distorted information.
To explain how this all works, Dimitrov focuses on communist regimes, which have the longest average lifespan among single-party autocracies and have developed the most sophisticated information-gathering institutions. Communist regimes face a variety of threats, but the main one is the masses. Dimitrov therefore examines the origins, evolution, and internal logic of the information-collection ecosystem established by communist states to monitor popular dissent. Drawing from a rich base of evidence across multiple communist regimes and nearly 100 interviews, Dimitrov reshapes our understanding of how autocrats learn--or fail to learn--about the societies they rule, and how they maintain--or lose--power.
Listeners interested in how authoritarian regimes gather information and use it to maintain political control should also check out the NBN interviews with Iza Ding, on how China's bureaucrats make a show of responsiveness even when they can't deliver, Jeremy Wallace, on the role of quantification in China's authoritarianism, Daniel Treisman, on how dictators around the world try to control their public image, Jennifer Pan, on how China uses its limited welfare state to hold power, journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin on China's surveillance state, and Yao Li, Manfred Elfstrom, and Lynette Ong on China's protests.
Martin K. Dimitrov is Professor of Political Science at Tulane University.
Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.
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Timothy Benedict’s Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan (U California Press, 2023) is an exploration of spiritual care in the context of the Japanese hospice. The book is rooted in Benedict’s experience as a hospice chaplain in Japan and his extensive fieldwork and interviews with patients, medical personnel, and other chaplains. The author thoughtfully problematizes the application of ideas about spiritual care in end-of-life care that are not necessarily well rooted in the culture and life experience of Japanese patients, and proposes that greater attention should be paid to the care of the heart-mind (kokoro) as a central concept for attending to their needs. In this sense, Spiritual Ends contributes to a better understanding of the ways in which specific beliefs and practices of religion, spirituality, and medicine affect both patients and their loved ones on the one hand and the institutions providing end-of-life care on the other.
This book is available open access here.
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
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In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Beatrice Zani, author of the book Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions, published by Routledge in 2021. The two scholars chat about novel ethnographic methods, such as itinerant ethnography and digital ethnography, solidarity between migrant women, the role of emotions in research. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in understanding globalisation from the perspective of contemporary Chinese migrant women, e-entrepreneurship and petit-capitalism.
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In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang, author of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. The two scholars chat about important turning points in the production of the book, the author’s positions. Most importantly, how the author proposes solutions to decolonise trauma and find reconciliation in Taiwan. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in historiography, diaspora studies, trauma theory and Cold War period in relation to Taiwan.
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Especially within the last decade, the word "nationalism" often evokes images of bombastic demagogues and democratic backsliding. But does nationalism always hurt liberal democracy?
In Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell UP, 2022), Aram Hur argues that the answer might be "no". Instead, under specific circumstances, national attachments can actually strengthen democracies.
Hur—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri—explores this phenomenon through a close examination of South Korea and Taiwan. She finds that, if a strong linkage between a national people and their democratic state exists, then nationalism may inspire a greater sense of civic duty, and build democratic resilience.
Amidst rising demographic challenges and geopolitical tensions in East Asia, Narratives of Civic Duty helps readers rethink the role nationalism plays in the continued health of democracies in the region, and beyond.
Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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What can a classroom experiment teach us about how and when we start shaping our ideas of ‘the other’? Can the results from such an experiment help us challenge the ideas and preconceptions that we have on our own as well as other cultures? In this episode, Tyra Orton speaks to Marie Roesgaard about an ongoing project that she is the participant of, titled; “Programme development for intercultural understanding education for the understanding and coexistence of ‘Iko’”. Born out of discussions from an open forum on how to enhance Japan’s foreign relations at a conference in Japan in 2013, the project has brought together scholars from Japan, China, Korea, and most recently Denmark in a collaboration on fostering intercultural understanding education. Hear Marie’s take on the lessons we can learn from the Iko-project and how it can contribute to intercultural understanding and coexistence across cultures.
Marie Roesgaard is an associate professor of Japan studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the Japanese education system, especially topics relating to the reform, globalization, global citizenship, sustainable development goals and moral education.
Tyra Orton is a Master's student of Japan Studies at the University of Copenhagen and a student assistant at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia
About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk
Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast
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John and Elizabeth, in this special Centennial episode of Recall this Book, explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Grey Zone (University of California Press, 2023) is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Ryo's book shows how residents of the region live with and through the "nuclear ghost" that resides with them.
The trio discuss ways that residents acclimatize themselves to the presence of radiation, efforts to live their lives in ways not only shaped by catastrophe and irradiation, and the Geiger counter as a critical object.
Ryo relates the astonishing--but when you stop to think unsurprising—fact that "once you have [a Geiger counter] you actually want to see higher scores."
Mentioned in this episode:
Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Roadside Picnic
Tarkovksy, Stalker (the film)
Stalker (the video game)
Haruki Murakami 1Q84
Pat Barker The Ghost Road
Read the episode here
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How is China trying to influence media across Asia and indeed globally? Why has this ambitious project achieved rather mixed results so far? And how should the rest of the world respond? In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, CFR's Josh Kurlantzick talks to NIAS Director Duncan McCargo about his important new book, Beijing's Global Media Offensive (Oxford UP, 2022).
His book is a major analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower around the world, seeking to shape the politics, local media, and information environments of both East Asia and the World. Since China's ascendancy toward major-power status began in the 1990s, many observers have focused on its economic growth and expanding military. China's ability was limited in projecting power over information and media and the infrastructure through which information flows. That has begun to change. Beijing's state-backed media, which once seemed incapable having a significant effect globally, has been overhauled and expanded. At a time when many democracies' media outlets are consolidating due to financial pressures, China's biggest state media outlets, like the newswire Xinhua, are modernizing, professionalizing, and expanding in attempt to reach an international audience. Overseas, Beijing also attempts to impact local media, civil society, and politics by having Chinese firms or individuals with close links buy up local media outlets, by signing content-sharing deals with local media, by expanding China's social media giants, and by controlling the wireless and wired technology through which information now flows, among other efforts.
In Beijing's Global Media Offensive - a major analysis of how China is attempting to build a media and information superpower around the world, and how this media power integrates with other forms of Chinese influence - Joshua Kurlantzick focuses on how all of this is playing out in both China's immediate neighborhood - Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand - and also in the United States and many other parts of the world. He traces the ways in which China is trying to build an information and influence superpower, but also critically examines the new conventional wisdom that Beijing has enjoyed great success with these efforts. While China has worked hard to build a global media and information superpower, it often has failed to reap gains from its efforts, and has undermined itself with overly assertive, alienating diplomacy. Still, Kurlantzick contends, China's media, information and political influence campaigns will continue to expand and adapt, helping Beijing exports its political model and protect the ruling Party, and potentially damaging press freedoms, human rights, and democracy abroad. An authoritative account of how this sophisticated and multi-pronged campaign is unfolding, Beijing's Global Media Offensive provides a new window into China's attempts to make itself an information superpower.
Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of five previous books about China and Southeast Asia. Duncan McCargo is Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk
Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast
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Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrates that colonial Taiwan was an imperial center in its own right, a political, social, and economic hub for the southern expansion of Japan’s empire led by officials with agendas that did not always match those of the government in Tokyo. In addition to this contribution to the study of Japanese empire, Imperial Gateway highlights two aspects of the history that are often underappreciated in the Anglophone literature. First, Shirane expands the aperture of his narrative beyond bilateral Sino-Japanese relations to encompass a dynamic multilateral milieu that includes colonial Taiwan, the region’s Western powers, and the Taiwanese subjects of the empire called “overseas Taiwanese” (sekimin) by Japan. Second, Shirane pays particular attention to the agency not just of the Government-General installed by Japan to rule over Taiwan, but also the “overseas Taiwanese” both wooed by the Japanese to advance imperial ambitions and also pursuing their own autonomous interests.
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
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Owing to Taiwan’s multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation.
Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers’ creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality.
Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers’ experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors’ co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination.
Pei-yin Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is author or editor of multiple books, most recently Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day (2021) and Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (2019, co-edited with Bi-yu Chang).
Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. He and Colin Bramwell won first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. In Taiwan, Li has published three poetry collections as well as co-edited the book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBT.
Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
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What is the nature of language? This is the question that Nathan Vedal’s book, The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge (Columbia University Press; 2022), explores. And ‘explore’ is indeed the best word to describe what this beautifully rich book does, for it looks at how language was conceived, discussed, and debated in a wide range of little-known texts from the Ming and Qing, including works of philosophy, philology, literature, and music.
Through this exploration, The Culture of Language in Ming China looks at how a community interested in philology formed in the sixteenth century. More importantly, this book examines Ming philology on its own terms, making the point that constrained disciplinary boundaries around philology and around what constitutes the study of language simply didn’t apply in this period; such restrictions would come later. As such, this book should be of interest to anyone curious in learning more about Chinese intellectual history, the history of the Ming and Qing, and the study of language in East Asia — but also anyone interested in thinking critically about the formation and history of disciplinary boundaries.
Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]
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In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy.
Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations (Cambridge UP, 2022) reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, Pete Millwood argues that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.
Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.
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The second half of the nineteenth century is correctly known to have culminated in the emergence of the gold standard as the first truly international monetary regime. The processes leading up to this remarkable feat are, however, far less documented or understood. Economic historians have only recently started digging into the causes behind the 'fall of silver' that preceded the scramble for gold. It is nowadays clear that its effects were felt worldwide. Not in the least, silver depreciation severely affected East-West trade. It was, among other factors, behind the bankruptcy of several powerful institutions as the Oriental Bank Corporation. Yet at the same time, it cemented the position of other banks, some of which exist until this very day (HSBC, Standard Chartered). What did these banks know that others did not?
In Accounting for the Fall of Silver: Hedging Currency Risk in Long-Distance Trade with Asia, 1870-1913 (Oxford UP, 2020), Michael Schiltz explains that the 1870s and 1880s witnessed furious experiments with new financial products and, equally important, strategies for hedging exchange rate risk. Drawing on archives that have never been used before, the book throws new light on an important episode of nineteenth century world history. At the same time, it illuminates lesser known aspects of the first gold standard period. It draws attention to the existence of 'carry trades' between European money markets and the lesser liquid Asian periphery; and describes the creation of financial contracts with the sole aim of enabling commodity finance among Asian mercantile centers.
Michael Schiltz is associate professor at Hokkaido University. His has published widely on the financial history of modern Japan, including his first book The Money Doctors from Japan – Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the ‘Yen Bloc’ (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
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With her book Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market (New Press, 2022), media scholar Ying Zhu explores the 100+ year relationship between what are now the world's two largest movie markets: China and the United States.
Zhu is a Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University's Academy of Film, and the founder/chief editor of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. Hollywood in China (July 2022, The New Press) is her fourth book, and it offers a comprehensive chronology of the Hollywood-China relationship, with numerous specific case studies.
In this podcast, Anthony Kao chats with Zhu about the book, and delves into matters like reactions to "China-humiliation films" during the 1911-1949 Republican Era, Madame Mao's penchant for Hollywood classics, and what the future might hold for relations between China and Hollywood.
Some movie recommendations from Ying Zhu (learn more by listening until the end of this episode):
From the 1990s: Zhang Yimou's To Live and Tian Zhuangzhuang's Blue Kite (discussed more in one of Ying's earlier books)
From the 2000s: Li Yang's Blind Shaft (analyzed in one of Ying's articles)
From the 2010s: Feng Xiaogang's I Am Not Madame Bovary (explored in Hollywood in China)
Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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"Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War. The role of comfort women in history remains a topic of importance — and emotion — around the world. It is well-known that an elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, were organised by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945.
So why did no local former comfort women come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s? To understand this silence, The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory (National University of Singapore Press, 2022) by Dr. Kevin Blackburn details the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Could it be that no former comfort women remained in Singapore after the war? Dr. Blackburn shows through a careful weighing of the different kinds of evidence why this was not the case. The immediate post-war years, and efforts to repatriate or ‘reform’ former comfort women fills in a key part of the history.
Dr. Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore's memory: newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale UP, 2021) is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.
Brian Lander is assistant professor of history at Brown University and a fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.
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