Studies of the East Asian Institute

A Chinese Pioneer Family: The Lins of Wu-feng, Taiwan, 1729-1895 Johanna Margarete Menzel Meskill

In an absorbing account of a frontier family's rise to local eminence, from its pioneer days in eighteenth-century Taiwan through its attainment of gentry status there a century later, Johanna Meskill presents not just a family history...

How the Conservatives Rule Japan Nathaniel Bowman Thayer

Dr. Thayer, who was American press attaché in Tokyo from 1962 to 1965, presents a detailed account of conservative politics in Japan. Although he makes some historical comparisons, Dr. Thayer's main focus is on the contemporary...

Teachers and Politics in Japan Donald R. Thurston

The Japan Teachers' Union, which represents 500,000 elementary and lower secondary school teachers, is an important interest group in Japanese politics. It is especially significant as a radical group operating both within and outside...

Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu Alan Stephen Wolfe

Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) is one of Japan's most famous literary suicides, known as the earliest postwar manifestation of the genuinely alienated writer in Japan. In this first deconstructive reading of a modern Japanese novelist, Alan...

The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo: Modernism in Translation Hosea Hirata

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valéry. Exploring both his...

Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period Carol Gluck

Ideology played a momentous role in modern Japanese history. Not only did the elite of imperial Japan (1890-1945) work hard to influence the people to "yield as the grasses before the wind," but historians of modern Japan later...