As a research subject, Japanese animation or anime is like a nue, an imaginary Japanese bird that has the head of an ape, the torso of a raccoon, the tail of a snake, and the limbs of a tiger. Depending on the perspective from which you are looking at it, and what you want to see in it, you can academically approach anime from numerous angles. Furthermore, contemporary anime is increasingly and inextricably entangled with other media, such as manga, videogames, novels, and live-action films in terms of content, distribution, and consumption. As such, it is very difficult to single out anime as a research subject. The global popularity of anime in the past twenty years adds a further twist by introducing numerous voices from fans and scholars from different parts of the world as well as Japan.

This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture during the late 1960s era of high-speed growth; moreover, it contends that there was a surprisingly receptive audience for such criticism among the rank-and-file “salarymen” of the urban Japanese middle class. Finally, the precisely informed humor found in these comics also suggests that their target audience possessed detailed familiarity with contemporary events on the continent and interpreted those events through a deeply embedded cultural framework of ambivalence concerning modern Chinese society.

Wondrous Brutal Fictions and Publishing the Stage will together expand and enrich the scholarly conversation on the theater of Tokugawa-period Japan and its interfaces with various genres of literature and the visual arts. The former volume consists of translations by R. Keller Kimbrough of seventeenth-century sekkyō and ko-jōruri (old jōruri) preceded by an informative and insightful introduction. It will be of great interest to scholars specializing in early-modern Japanese literature, history, and religion, and would lend itself to inclusion in reading lists for both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses. Publishing the Stage, edited by Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki, gathers together a wide-ranging assortment of papers on the symbiotic relationship between theater and publishing in Edo- and early Meiji-period Japan, all presented in March 2011 at an interdisciplinary conference held at the Center for Asian Studies of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Its eleven essays (seven written in English and four in Japanese) will be of use not only to scholars in the fields of Japanese literature and performance but also to historians and specialists in art history.

To situate today's social assistance program conceptually and historically, this paper presents three ideal-typical stances states may adopt in welfare provision, especially for indigent populations: (1) extend assistance to accord with social citizenship rights—or to fulfill the Confucian concept of the rite of benevolence; (2) offer subsidies to attain support or to pacify anger and silence demands from the poor; or (3) grant benefits (education, health care) to enhance the nation's productivity. The intended beneficiaries of these projects are, respectively, individuals, society and the state, and politicians. This categorization can distinguish, in broad-brush fashion, official handouts at diverse historical moments; the models are meant not so much to characterize entire eras as to illustrate differential styles of allocation. Moreover, each era justifies its practice with reference to Confucian dicta. In this comparative context, today's political elite bestows financial aid—but just a conditional kind—mainly to preempt disturbances and prevent “instability,” in line with the third of the types.

In 2009, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan, which had successfully formed governments either alone or as the largest partner in a coalition government for all but a single year since 1955, suffered a devastating electoral defeat when the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won nearly two-thirds of the seats available in the House of Representatives. The landslide DPJ victory was seen by many commentators and academics as the culmination of a decade-long trend toward two-party politics, driven in large part by party and voter adaptation to the electoral reforms of the 1990s, which introduced single-member districts as the means for electing a majority of members of parliament. The three books reviewed in this essay were written primarily in the two years following the 2009 DPJ victory, and each attempts, in quite distinct ways, to update our accounts of electoral and party politics and policymaking in Japan to account for the changes in Japanese politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

I think it is fair to say that Keith Taylor's new history of the Vietnamese peoples, A History of the Vietnamese, is long awaited in at least two senses. Those who were aware that Professor Taylor was working on this project were eager to see how a senior scholar would present the broad sweep of the Vietnamese past. But even those who were not anticipating this particular work must have been waiting for the first serious and detailed English-language survey of Vietnam's long history. While there exist, for example, hundreds of such surveys in English on the history of China, until now there had been no serious effort by a respected scholar to set forth a similar work for Vietnam. In short, such a work is long, long overdue, and the field is deeply in Taylor's debt for having tackled such a daunting project.