European Studies in Asia


Book Description

As countries across Asia continue to rise and become more assertive global powers, the role that Higher Education has played, and continues to play, in this process is an issue of growing pertinence. Furthermore, understanding the relationship between Europe and Asia fostered by historical and contemporary knowledge transfer, including Higher Education, is crucial to analysing and encouraging the progress of both regional integration and inter-regional cooperation. With a specific focus on international Higher Education, European Studies in Asia investigates knowledge transfer and channels of learning between Europe and Asia from historical, contemporary and teaching perspectives. The book examines a selection of significant historical precedents of intellectual dialogue between the two regions and, in turn, explores contemporary cross-regional discourses both inside and outside of the official frameworks of the European Union (EU) and the Asia--Europe Meetings (ASEM). Drawing on extensive case studies based on many of his own teaching experiences, Georg Wiessala addresses key questions, such as the nature and construction of the European Studies in Asia curriculum; aspects of ‘values’, co-constructed learning and adult pedagogy in the discipline of European Studies in Asia; the politics of Asian host cultures, the ‘internationalization’ of Asian Higher Education and the experiences and expectations of tertiary sector students of this subject in Asia, Australia and New Zealand. In doing so, the author articulates a range of outcomes for the further development of Higher Education cooperation agendas between Asia and Europe, in the discipline of European Studies, and in related fields such as International Relations. This case study-led book makes an original and novel contribution to our understanding of European Studies in Asia. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian Education, Comparative Education, European Studies and International Relations.




Defining Engagement


Book Description

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Interdependent Partners: The Shogunate, Satsuma, and Tsushima -- The Reaction against Globalization -- Guarded Engagement -- Domestic Demand and Foreign Trade -- Local Japan Encounters the West -- The Transition in Foreign Trade -- Defending the Domain and the Realm -- The End of Domain Agency and the Adoption of International Relations -- Works Cited -- Index -- Harvard East Asian Monographs.




The Gods of the Sea


Book Description

Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In this innovative new study, Fynn Holm argues that for centuries some regions in early modern Japan did not engage in whaling. In fact, they were actively opposed to it, even resorting to violence when whales were killed. Resistance against whaling was widespread especially in the Northeast among the Japanese fishermen who worshiped whales as the incarnation of Ebisu, the god of the sea. Holm argues that human interactions with whales were much more diverse than the basic hunter-prey relationship, as cetaceans played a pivotal role in proto-industrial fisheries. The advent of industrial whaling in the early twentieth century, however, destroyed this centuries-long equilibrium between humans and whales. In its place, communities in Northeast Japan invented a new whaling tradition, which has almost completely eclipsed older forms of human-whale interactions. This title is also available as Open Access.




Sovereignty and Status in East Asian International Relations


Book Description

This book provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of a key concept in East Asian security debates, sovereign autonomy, and how it reproduces hierarchy in the regional order. Park argues that contemporary strategic debates in East Asia are based on shared contextual knowledge - that of international hierarchy - reconstructed in the late-nineteenth century. The mechanism that reproduces this lens of hierarchy is domestic legitimacy politics in which embattled political leaders contest the meaning of sovereign autonomy. Park argues that the idea of status seeking has remained embedded in the concept of sovereign autonomy and endures through distinct and alternative security frames that continue to inform contemporary strategic debates in East Asia. This book makes a significant contribution to debates in international relations theory and security studies about autonomy and status, as well as to the now extensive literature on the nature of East Asian regional order.




Samurai to Soldier


Book Description

In Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan’s principal arms-bearers. The most common version of this story suggests that the Meiji institution of compulsory military service was the foundation of Japan’s efforts to save itself from the imperial ambitions of the West and set the country on the path to great power status. Jaundrill argues, to the contrary, that the conscript army of the Meiji period was the culmination—and not the beginning—of a long process of experimentation with military organization and technology. Jaundrill traces the radical changes to Japanese military institutions, as well as the on-field consequences of military reforms in his accounts of the Boshin War (1868–1869) and the Satsuma Rebellions of 1877. He shows how pre-1868 developments laid the foundations for the army that would secure Japan’s Asian empire.




The SAGE Handbook of Asian Foreign Policy


Book Description

Comprising 60.3 percent of the world’s 7.2 billion population, Asia is an enigma to many in the West. Hugely dynamic in its demographic, economic, technological and financial development, its changes are as rapid as they are diverse. The SAGE Handbook of Asian Foreign Policy provides the reader with a clear, balanced and comprehensive overview on Asia’s foreign policy and accompanying theoretical trends. Placing the diverse and dynamic substance of Asia’s international relations first, and bringing together an authoritative assembly of contributors from across the world, this is a reliable introduction to non-Western intellectual traditions in Asia. VOLUME 1: PART 1: Theories PART 2: Themes PART 3: Transnational Politics PART 4: Domestic Politics PART 5; Transnational Economics VOLUME 2: PART 6: Foreign Policies of Asian States Part 6a: East Asia Part 6b: Southeast Asia Part 6c: South & Central Asia Part 7: Offshore Actors Part 8: Bilateral Issues Part 9: Comparison of Asian Sub-Regions




The Two Worlds of Nineteenth Century International Relations


Book Description

This edited volume presents a new, grand and global narrative for international relations (IR) history in the pivotal nineteenth century. Typically considered by IR scholars to be a long century of relative peace after 1815, the contributors offer a reconceptualization of IR in this century, arguing that it is temporally bifurcated, with very different patterns of behavior in the first and second halves. A mid-century discontinuity – a "pivot period" – marks the transition phase in Europe and globally when, in the space of a few years, a shift occurred from a comparatively calm, politically disconnected world under loose British free trade hegemony to one of scrambles for territory and keen interest in imperial possessions and conquest. All the book’s chapters deal with characterizing patterns of relations in the first half of the century or the second, with two addressing the discontinuity in the middle. In the first half aspects of regional orders are described (in Latin America, East Asia and Europe) alongside crucial developmental processes (missionaries and colonial expansion, the agency of regionally localized actors, of leading elites). In the second half, there is again discussion of regional developments (East Asia, Europe), but now under the onslaught and pressures of the latter half of the century, and spotlighting industrialization’s impact and the role of status competition and international law. In presenting this new narrative for the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that an era long considered uninteresting on Eurocentric grounds is in fact crucial and pivotal in global terms. This work will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the history of international relations.




Plucking Chrysanthemums


Book Description

Plucking Chrysanthemums is a critical study of the life and works of Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–1884): Confucian scholar, world traveler, pioneering journalist, and irrepressible satirist. A major figure on the nineteenth-century Japanese cultural scene, Ryūhoku wrote works that were deeply rooted in classical Sinitic literary traditions. Sinitic poetry and prose enjoyed a central and prestigious place in Japan for nearly all of its history, and the act of composing it continued to offer modern Japanese literary figures the chance to incorporate themselves into a written tradition that transcended national borders. Adopting Ryūhoku’s multifarious invocations of Six Dynasties poet Tao Yuanming as an organizing motif, Matthew Fraleigh traces the disparate ways in which Ryūhoku drew upon the Sinitic textual heritage over the course of his career. The classical figure of this famed Chinese poet and the Sinitic tradition as a whole constituted a referential repository to be shaped, shifted, and variously spun to meet the emerging circumstances of the writer as well as his expressive aims. Plucking Chrysanthemums is the first book-length study of Ryūhoku in a Western language and also one of the first Western-language monographs to examine Sinitic poetry and prose (kanshibun) composition in modern Japan.




East Asia's Haunted Present


Book Description

This collection of essays by leading scholars from Japan, China, South Korea, and the United States examines how and why bitter historical memories have resurfaced in recent years as freshly virulent and contentious issues between Japan and its neighbors—especially China and South Korea. Moreover, it seeks to identify what set of conditions and what sequence of measures will enable these modern nations to manage, palliate, and exorcise the wrongs of the past in a spirit of reconciliation, so that the dangerous growth of nationalist resentments and revanchism can be checked. Comfort women ... the Yasukuni Shrine ... the history textbook controversies ... The single sorest issue confronting East Asia today is the growing animosity and conflict between Japan and its neighbors—especially China and South Korea—over their respective and collective memories of Japan's pre-1945 militaristic aggression, oppression, and atrocities. Even as East Asia has established itself as one of the most vibrant economic regions of the world, the strident nationalisms that have emerged here in the post-Cold War period have exacerbated historical grievances and heightened the international tensions that separate Japan from China and South Korea, blocking the development of an international system based on comity and cooperation.