University of Hawai'i Press
vydavateľstvo
Observances, Feasts, and Scripts
Observances, Feasts, and Scripts is the first monograph written in English to offer a comprehensive analysis of the varieties of zhai, a multifaceted term with deep historical and religious significance in Chinese Buddhism. Drawing on a wide array of sources—including canonical texts, apocryphal writings, hagiographies, and ritual documents—this book unveils zhai as a ritual complex encompassing temporary observances, communal feasts, and modes of interaction between the seen and unseen realms. These practices, rooted in both lay and monastic traditions, illustrate the intricate interplay between food, community, and ritual in Indian and Chinese Buddhism. Part I traces how Indian Buddhist temporary observances were adapted, debated, and reimagined in the Chinese context. Part II explains the sponsored feast as a mechanism for lay-monastic interaction and merit-making. It also examines how Buddhists engaged with deities and spirit saints through remote invitations and ritual offerings. Part III focuses on "scripts" used for receiving the Eightfold Observance and conducting sponsored feasts, thus revealing their evolution from simple master-disciple interactions to complex communal events. Observances, Feasts, and Scripts is an essential resource for scholars interested in food-related religious practices and the history of Buddhism. Through its meticulous examination of Chinese, Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan materials, the book offers a fresh perspective on Chinese Buddhism as an intercultural endeavor. It sheds light on relevant scholastic debates, the creation of apocrypha, translation strategies, and ritual innovations in medieval China. By moving beyond teleological frameworks such as Sinicization, it emphasizes the agency of cultural, doctrinal, and social factors in shaping these practices. Additionally, it engages with the cognitive dimensions of ritual and highlights ritual logic as a cross-cultural analytical lens.
Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away
In Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away, Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson tell the stories of twelve people who were convicted of war crimes in Allied courts in the Asia-Pacific region after the Second World War. Included is the story of one man who escaped prosecution. The crimes were committed in the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Java, Malaya, Singapore, the Maluku islands, New Guinea, and Japan. The characters examined range from senior figures—General Honma Masaharu, who was convicted for the Bataan "death march," and Japan’s wartime prime minister Tojo Hideki—to lower-ranking and lesser-known people: a POW camp commander, a camp doctor, a Korean guard, a nurse charged with assisting in vivisection, a doctor convicted of cannibalism, a pimp, a Taiwanese interpreter, a businessman convicted of assault, an officer convicted of massacre, and another convicted of a single execution. Tsuji Masanobu, the man who escaped, was responsible for at least two massacres. He was eventually elected to parliament, indicating the willingness of some elements in postwar Japanese society to overlook wartime atrocities. The book examines the backgrounds and careers of each character and explains how they came to commit the acts for which they were convicted. It also considers their subsequent careers, if they survived (several were executed for their crimes). Based on years of meticulous research, the book brings to life the texture of individual action and experience in the tumultuous years of conflict and occupation during the Pacific War. The authors recognize Japanese cruelty but also suggest that most of the convicted war criminals were not inherently evil. Some were out of their depth or were forced into circumstances where they made bad decisions; some obeyed illegal orders or were caught in impossible situations in a war that Japan fought with insufficient resources. Ironically, the one who got away was probably the worst of them all.
An Unfamiliar Place
In mid-fourteenth-century Japan, amid decades of civil unrest caused by a violent rivalry over imperial succession, three men embarked on journeys that would lead them to reimagine their world: the second Ashikaga shogun and general Yoshiakira (1330–1367), the Buddhist lay priest Sokyu (ca. 1350), and the statesman Nijo Yoshimoto (1320–1388). All three shared elite social status, political connections, and a deep engagement with poetry. Yoshiakira traveled from Kyoto to Sumiyoshi Shrine in Osaka to pray for poetic skill; Sokyu left his home in Kyushu and wandered for three years across Honshu, visiting sites celebrated in traditional waka poetry; and Yoshimoto, after fleeing an attack on his home in Kyoto, found refuge in distant Ojima and comfort in composing poetry surrounded by "the scene of an unfamiliar place." Their memoirs, written within a decade of each other, offer important insights into how their worldviews—formed by centuries of canonical literature and court traditions—were increasingly challenged by their encounters with new situations and territory, landscapes they would capture from perspectives of absence and erasure. An Unfamiliar Place examines how these three traveler-poets used both literal and metaphorical "unfamiliar places" as sites of expressive power, to not only explore novel ways of existing in and moving through the world, but also reassess their assumptions about the social and cultural significance of geographic space.
Voices Beyond the Grave
Voices Beyond the Grave uncovers critically understudied histories of Japanese internment and labor diasporas in the French Pacific. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, French colonial authorities, following Charles de Gaulle’s orders, detained over a thousand Japanese civilians residing across French-Pacific island territories and deported them to Australian internment camps. France’s logics of colonial racial capitalism maintained far-reaching impacts on wartime Japanese emigrant communities in the francophone territories of Tahiti, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and New Caledonia. In this book, New Caledonia, a strategic outpost in de Gaulle’s Free French empire and a U.S. stronghold during World War II, is a focal point for exploring the complex structures of power and resistance that arose from settler colonialism, Native dispossession, and the mass incarceration of Japanese civilians. Through rare letters from Japanese internees and interviews with their descendants, this book unveils the emotional and political struggles of mixed-race, Japanese-Melanesian children and families caught in the crossfire of racial settler coloniality. Drawing from military archives in Japanese, French, and English languages, this work also connects the internment of the French-Pacific Japanese to broader, global economies of racialized incarceration and labor, extending to Japanese American internees in the United States. Finally, the author delves into the fate of Japanese detainees sent to Australia, tracing their harrowing experiences from being perceived as enemy aliens during the war to displaced strangers in their postwar lives in Japan. This book goes beyond history—it is a call for racial justice. At the heart of Voices Beyond the Grave is the author’s global humanitarian project that has reunited descendants of Japanese internees living in Japan with their long-lost families in New Caledonia, resolving eighty-year-old historical enigmas while healing the wounds of wartime injustice. Voices Beyond the Grave sits at the interdisciplinary nexus of empire history and decolonial activism, charting new directions in transpacific studies. With insights into the lives of the Melanesian, Japanese, and French children and families that the vicissitudes of World War II irrevocably shaped, this book reveals the Indigenous and Japanese afterlives that have haunted the French Pacific.
Vypredané
71,99 €