This research note explores an iconic female fraudster, who achieved celebrity criminal status with a substantial fanbase, by analyzing her status as an empowering female figure and the sociocultural context in contemporary Japan. In due course, we attempt to fill the notable research gap regarding the phenomenon of a female fraudster becoming a “celebrity criminal” from a post-feminist perspective. By analyzing online and interview materials, this article demonstrates that the highlighted otherness in Young’s “transgressive other” (Young 2007, 2011) is hardly applicable. We shed light on instrumentalized femininity shared among young women challenging the pre-existing normative femininity in contemporary Japan.

Huainanzi 淮南子 contributes a model of sage rulership as, among other things, rule through wuwei 無為, or “non-action.” Through analysis of several concepts core to the text’s political cosmology of governance by wuwei—qi 氣 (vital breath, energy-matter), resonance (gan-ying 感應), and sincerity (cheng 誠)—this article suggests that Huainanzian sagely wuwei refers to an act that seemingly straddles a patterned level of reality of distinct forms, on the one hand, and a primordial, chaos-like reality, beyond the bounds of form, on the other. In an effort to grasp, first, how a singular Huainanzian cosmos may present two seemingly structurally antithetical faces, and second, how the sage-ruler’s program may not only embrace, but put to powerful political effect, the paradoxical union of these two “faces,” this paper draws on a heuristic of fractal and Euclidean geometries, simplified from modern mathematics. The article thereby contributes a further representational modality for thinking through Huainanzi’s extensive, multi-faceted political cosmology, joining in discourse a recent swell of research interested in the same.

This article examines Himizu (2012) by Sono Shion, analyzing the protagonist’s classroom and shanty house as key sites in post-3/11 Japan. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the study shows how these spaces function as zones where discourses of reconstruction, wa, sontaku, kizuna, and gaman are enforced and contested. While the classroom shifts from ideological apparatus to heterotopia of deviation, the shanty house enables care amid exclusion. Overall, the article advances debates on post-disaster cinema and spatialized trauma.

In 1782, Zhang Peifang, then serving as magistrate in Sizhou, Anhui, returned briefly to his family home in a small village in central Shanxi. While there, he visited a local temple, the Guangyu Shrine, where villagers typically made prayers concerning childbirth, and then penned an inscription in which he makes an elaborate argument about the identity of the temple goddess. Zhang’s stele inscription is an interpretive powerhouse of classical erudition, but moves to a surprising conclusion that reveals complex issues of agency imbricated into the scholar-official’s role as negotiator between the canonical values of the imperial state and the informal institutions and practices of local communities. The inscription records valuable details concerning local religious practices and gender roles, analysis of which can provide nuance to our understanding of the dynamic social tensions below the surface of Watson’s “standardization model.”

The Dengjue Si 等覺寺 (Dengjue Temple) may be regarded as the most significant Buddhist temple in the Menghua region of Yunnan Province during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). The building dates back to the Nanzhao Kingdom (738–902), underwent significant expansion during the Ming Dynasty, and housed the Menghua prefectural Buddhist registry in both the Ming and Qing (1644–1912) periods. The article analyses an important inscription—Chongxiu Dengjue si beiji 重修等覺寺碑記 (Stele of the restoration of the Dengjue Temple)—which meticulously records the historical context of the temple’s construction and restoration, the individuals involved, its architectural layout, and its rise and fall during the early to mid Ming Dynasty. What distinguishes this case is Menghua’s unique status as the reputed birthplace of the Nanzhao royal lineage. The Ming Dynasty conquered Yunnan in 1382, after which it introduced new Confucian ideologies and Buddhist practices, and gradually initiated a programme of social reconstruction. The Zuo family, who claimed descent from the Nanzhao royal family to legitimise and consolidate their authority as native officials (tusi 土司) in Menghua, became the temple’s principal benefactors. Within this context, the restoration of the Dengjue Temple was the result of collaborative efforts among the Ming government, local officials, regional elites, and monastic leaders. By tracing the temple’s history with reference to the roles of these actors, this study presents the Dengjue Temple as a microcosm of Ming frontier governance, religious adaptation, and cultural negotiation.

This article presents the first study of an oath-letter (sawgand-nāma) from medieval Anatolia. It is drawn from the recently rediscovered Qiṣṣa-yi Salāṭīn, an anonymous inshāʾ work from the mid-thirteenth century. This text exemplifies a typical bottom-up oath in which the oath-taker pledges loyalty to Sultan Ghiyāth al-Dīn Kay-Khusraw II (d. 644/1246), while the oath also ensures a clear line of dynastic succession in favour of his son, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Kay-Qubād II (d. 655/1257). A comparison with similar texts from Iran reveals the extent to which Turkish states in Anatolia adhered to the norms established under the Great Saljuqs, although the Rum Saljuq version is noted to be more severe in ideological terms in cases of perjury, yet less demanding in practical aspects. This sawgand-nāma also highlights how the Qiṣṣa-yi Salāṭīn might have functioned as a sort of “para-archive”, potentially supporting the claims of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn, who was sidelined after his father’s death.

This article recovers the history of the first systematic British attempts to survey the languages of India. Long before George Abraham Grierson proposed his monumental survey of Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century, the Scottish judge James Mackintosh suggested a similar undertaking to the Literary Society of Bombay in 1806. This article follows those who pursued the project over the next several years. Their efforts stretched across India, the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, east into Burma, as far north as Nepal, and all the way south into Ceylon. Almost all of those involved in these efforts were Scots who were educated at the University of Edinburgh and so, as well as reconstructing a forgotten chapter in the history of British imperialism, this article supplements our pictures of the histories of imperial knowledge production and Scottish orientalism.