Two articles published in early 1992 in the monthly opinion journal Chūō kōron set off a minor debate on the essence of Japan's historical experience. The articles were written by Kawakatsu Heita, a professor of economic history at the Waseda University, as a critique of Ueyama Shunpei, a noted cultural historian. A rejoinder by Ueyama was published subsequently in the same journal, and a critique of Kawakatsu by another economic historian, Tsunoyama Sakae, also followed.

Each of these epigrams is from an exemplary work of primary research. While not entirely exclusive—potential for overlap appears in the ideas of “mutual development” and “transfer” of culture—they each exemplify different research agendas that result in competing narratives of Chinese migration. Sucheng Chan's work is part of a larger project of contemporary Asian American studies to incorporate Chinese as important actors in American history. It emphasizes the adaptations of Chinese social organization in the United States, and explains them as necessary and unprecedented responses to unfamiliar challenges. Although Chan pays more attention than many Asian American historians to Chinese nationalism, transnational families, and continued links to China, she does not follow the implications of these descriptions so far as to reformulate her narrative of migration as a monodirectional relocation followed by locally conditioned transformation (see also S. Chan 1991, 63–66,96–97; 1990). In their most extremely America-centered versions, Asian American histories have treated these extra-American phenomena as little more than byproducts of exclusion and racism, and denounced the idea of the temporary Chinese sojourner as an orientalist construction (A. Chan 1981).

In the village of ukegawa there stood, until recently, a large chestnut tree up on the hillside in the garden of the village doctor's family. In the 1960s macaques started to descend from the mountains to feed on the tree every autumn. The old doctor, a kindly man with a well-known fondness for animals, at first indulged the little monkeys. The visitors from the forest also appealed to his curiosity in matters of science, and he even took the opportunity to observe them from the house as they fed. But as their numbers grew and their boldness increased, the doctor's attitude towards the monkeys began to change. His wife made clear her feelings to him about the monkeys stealing all the family's chestnuts, while all he could do was watch them with his binoculars! The doctor reacted by chasing the monkeys away.

Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous” (the Whig Morning Chronicle, cited by Napier 1990, 197), a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the Indian press (the Bombay Times, “without a shred of evidence”) accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad (Napier 1990, xvi). The successful Annexation of Sind made Napier's name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils” (Mehra 1985, 496–97) and was knighted. In 1851 he quarrelled with James Ramsey, the Marquess of Dalhousie (governor general of India from 1847 to 1856), and left India. In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title, “Foreign Affairs”:

The proliferation of hindu temples now spread over the North American religious landscape appear at first glance to be part of a new process of globalization for Hinduism in an era of transnational religions. South India, long a bastion of temple culture, is simultaneously in the midst of a new boom in temple construction. The present resurgence of “Hinduism” in north India, steeped in ideology, nonetheless is written in terms of the alleged destruction of thousands of temples in north India by Muslim rulers and calls for their reconstruction. “My gods are crying,” writes one “angry” Hindu; “They are demanding restatement in all their original glory” (quoted in Bhattacharya 1991, 127).

The literature on nationalism ascribes a pivotal role to schools in creating what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community,” through the formation and dissemination of a common national identity and a shared national consciousness where none existed before (e.g., Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Smith 1991). It is not unusual to find Japan cited as a prime example of this process, not only among theorists of nationalism, but among Japan specialists, as well (e.g., Beauchamp 1988, 226–29; Cummings 1980, 17–25; Hunter 1989, 192–97; Ienaga 1978; Pyle 1996, 125–30; Rohlen 1983, 46–57; Schoppa 1991, 29–31; Thomas 1996, 254–62). In general, they portray the first two decades of the Meiji period, between 1868 and 1890, as the era when a modern national consciousness merged with a revivified nativist identity to form an “emperor-centered nationalism” that was institutionalized and propagated by the state, chiefly through a newly established compulsory, centralized school system. Frequently, this assertion is supported by citing the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), which begins, “Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof.” This distinctive brand of Japanese nationalism is also regarded as a factor contributing to the subsequent development of Japanese imperialism and the country's pursuit of a colonial empire abroad, which began with its victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and concluded fifty years later with its defeat in the Pacific War.

Many asian cultures have rich traditions of self-cultivation that exercise mind and body through physical and meditational training. Research and scholarship with respect to those traditions have focused fruitfully on how the body is cultivated to serve as an agent of resistance against various forms of social control. Of these many writings on this subject, I will here name only a suggestive few: Joseph Alter's study of Indian wrestling (1993), for example, tracks the wrestlers' self-conscious reappropriation of their bodies from the power of the state through a regimented discipline aimed at resisting docility. John Donohue's study of the Japanese martial art karate (1993) explores how, in the West, karate's symbolic and ritual functions create a psychological dynamic that counters the prevalent fragmentation of urban life. Douglas Wile's research on Chinese taiji quart (1996) similarly reconstructs the cultural/historical context in which this martial art was created. He shows that what motivated nineteenth-century literati to create taiji quan was its representational function rather than its practical utility. That is, Taiji quan “may be seen as a psychological defense against Western cultural imperialism” (p. 26) insofar as it produced a secure sense of the national self that helped China adapt to a new international environment (p. 29). All of these studies place the body-in-cultivation in a specific historical context; they maintain that the individual, physical body both registers and reveals the national sociopolitical landscape.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's suicide in July 1927, coming little more than half a year after the beginning of the Shōwa period, seemed to many at the time to signify the end of an era. A number of writers and critics, for example, interpreted his death as marking the defeat of an intellectual (or aestheticized) literary practice disengaged from historical and social reality. This point was particularly emphasized by several prominent Marxist critics, who read his personal crisis as “one aspect of a collapsing bourgeoisie” (Sekiguchi 1993, 4: 334). Miyamoto Kenji crystallized this sentiment in his landmark 1929 essay, “Haiboku no bungaku” (The Literature of Defeat), in which he wrote that Akutagawa's late writings and death constituted a warning to bourgeois intellectuals of the inevitable and disastrous result of their aestheticism and hermeticism (Sekiguchi 1993, 6: 222–46). Indeed, Akutagawa's expression of “vague anxiety” as the cause of his suicide, coupled with the turbulent and transitional character of the 1920s, transformed his death from a personal, private catastrophe into a general historical allegory, an empty vessel into which a variety of narrative interpretations could be projected. In this way, Akutagawa's suicide achieved the status of an eminently historical gesture.

While the men worked in the fields in the wine-like [winter] air, the women sat in the afternoon sun spinning and embroidering while they sang together, before starting to cook for their men. They embroidered phulkaris….” (Tandon 1968, 65). These stereotypes of feminine and masculine work in Prakash Tandon's memory book Punjabi Century illustrate dominant literary representations of economic production in Punjab, a province of the British Raj from the mid-nineteenth century until it was partitioned between independent India and Pakistan in 1947 (see fig. 1). Many Punjabi women used phulkari (literally, “flower-work”) embroidery to decorate their daily garments and handmade gifts in the nineteenth century. Illustrations only partially convey the vibrant visual impact of phulkaris, and even color photographs fail to capture fully the sheen of the silk thread. The embroidery ranges from striking geometric medallions in reds, shocking pinks, and maroons, through almost monochromatic golden tapestry-like, fabric-covering designs, to narrative embroideries depicting people and objects of rural Punjab. Women stitched phulkaris generally on handwoven cotton cloth (khadi), and phulkaris shared linked construction techniques, a dominant embroidery stitch (the darning stitch), and several distinctive motifs (Frater 1993, 71–74; Yacopino 1977, 42–45; Askari and Crill 1997, 95–101).

For many decades, Japan was the only advanced industrial country in the world that did not rely on unskilled foreign labor. For many observers, the Japanese case demonstrated that a country could fully industrialize and sustain high levels of economic growth without becoming dependent on large populations of immigrant workers. Instead of importing immigrants, Japan was able to meet its increasing demand for unskilled labor power by effectively mechanizing and rationalizing production and further utilizing untapped sources of labor (female and elderly workers). Because of the country's insistence on ethnic homogeneity and its refusal to accept unskilled foreign workers, Japan had been forced to optimize domestic labor productivity and supply, creating a highly efficient and competitive industrial system capable of economic expansion without immigration. This implicitly sustained a “myth of Japanese uniqueness”—the notion that Japan's economic system was unique because it was based on distinctive Japanese ethnocultural qualities.

An essential feature of beijing's long history as China's imperial capital was the ability to feed its population despite a geographical location distinctly unfavorable to agricultute. For all ancient and modern states, provisioning the capital is not only a matter of pride and prestige but a question of survival. The failure to feed civil officials, military supporters, and the urban population that serves them is a visible sign of a government's inadequacy and easily leads to political unrest. For these reasons, all states have tended to favor the food security of their cities, and especially their capital cities. In this China has no claim to uniqueness.

Terms, like monuments, long stand unchanged. They might acquire new contexts, attract new associations, and thus be transformed in content or meaning. Yet the very constancy of the term beguiles us to assume some immutable essence instead. Such has been the case for the term fangsheng, which literally means “releasing lives,” but specifically referred to the practice of freeing animals from captivity or rescuing them from death, and which I therefore translate variously as “releasing,” “liberating,” or “saving” animals. The term fangsheng is usually traced back to the fifth century, when it appeared in the Book of Brahmā's Net (Fanwang jing); and it can be tracked forward to the present, where it is still used for practices observed in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and New York. Understood to have originated in a Buddhist text and to have beenin currency for at least 1500 years, it thus signals the power and durability of a Buddhist belief.

The legal debate in india over the worship and glorification of sati (widow burning, previously spelled “suttee”) stands unresolved at present. After several years of controversy, the practice of worshipping sati was made illegal in 1987 after the death of a young Rajput woman named Roop Kanwar. At that time the Indian government revised the colonial legislation banning widow immolation to include sati glorification and thereby outlawed ceremonies, processions, or functions that eulogize any historical person who has committed sati. The law furthermore prohibited the creation of trusts or fundraising to preserve the memory of such persons. This legal debate over sati worship provides the context in which this essay examines the cultural politics of how Calcutta Marwaris, a wealthy business community, have been among the most vehement defenders of sati worship in the last several decades.

The hit was typical in many ways. A gunman fired a nine-millimeter pistol into the car of Mass Communications Organization of Thailand chief Saengchai Sunthonwat, then fled with the driver on a waiting motorcycle. Two other members of the gang who had identified the victim also escaped. Due to the prominence of widely respected Saengchai, the police devoted a great deal of attention and resources to solving the crime. Ultimately, they traced the gunmen, who led them to the alleged mastermind. The assassination, according to police, was the result of a conflict of interest in the granting of concessions for provincial radio stations. When the accused mastermind had offered Saengchai a gift of an expensive gold chain and a valuable Buddha image to smooth relations, Saengchai refused the offer. He further insulted the mastermind by saying that the gift would only be good enough for his dog. This insult, as much as the loss of income, lay behind the killing. Although the hit was typical in many ways, two things, beyond the tragic death of a good man, make this killing academically interesting. First, the alleged mastermind was not a godfather but a godmother. Second, the press paid no attention to the fact that the culprit was a woman. In almost every reference, the word “godfather” could have been substituted for “godmother” with no change in meaning or inference.

In China, the period from 1979 to 1989 was one of thawing and awakening. Moving away from the rigors of the “political winters” in Mao's time, Chinese society revived its diversity and vigor that had been harshly depressed for a long time by a revolutionary-totalitarian regime (Tsou 1986). One of the tremendous changes occurred in the cultural realm. In the mid and late 1980s thousands of Chinese cultural intellectuals, from well-known professors to junior university students, were caught up in a nonofficially initiated cultural movement, which has been widely called the “culture fever” (wenhua re). They engaged with great eagerness in searching for an alternative intellectual framework, derived from modern Western theories in social sciences and humanities, to replace the official ideology. They undertook a passionate reexamination of the virtues, weaknesses, and possibilities of Chinese traditional culture. They warmly debated what should make up the cultural prerequisites for China's modernization and whether or how Chinese traditional culture could be relevant to China's present and future. With the alteration of the structure of ideological alternatives, the legitimacy of the Party's orthodox ideology—Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Mao Zedong—became marginalized. As many China scholars have pointed out, the legitimacy crisis was one of the most important historically contextual factors to play a key role in the events leading to the 1989 Tiananmen movement (see, for example, Tsou 1991, 277–80; and Ding 1994, 145–48).

Some historians who study medieval Chinese women have tended to neglect the situation of common women who stayed at home dealing with family affairs, preferring instead to examine the far more complete documentation on exceptional women who gained power or prominence outside the home in the largely male-dominated world. In recent years, as more historians have paid closer attention to women's daily life in medieval times, they have made great breakthroughs in drawing on a multiplicity of sources (Ebrey, 1993). Yet sometimes they are still embarrassed by the problem of insufficient materials. The oasis of Turfan, lying on the Silk Road between China and India, contains the Astana-Karakhoja graveyards that have been excavated by different explorers, both Chinese and not, since the beginning of the century. The tombs contain many goods preserved by the dry desert climate, including paper shoes, belts, and hats which Chinese scholars have pieced together to form documents. This paper draws primarily on those materials shedding light on women's activities, which most historians interested in women have yet to utilize.