Wakimura Yoshitarō, a prominent Japanese economics professor and art collector, helped establish or sustain at least eight art museums in postwar Japan. He did so to create important institutions of democratic empowerment rather than nationalist displays of power. The crucial context was defeat in World War II, which left many Japanese, including Wakimura, committed to taming capitalism. Wakimura was particularly interested in creating new practices of art appreciation that could mediate relations between potentially antagonistic groups of Japanese, and in building museums as fresh spaces to house these newly egalitarian relationships. He emphasized the value to society created when individuals developed their aesthetic and thus political judgment. His efforts help explain the proliferation of both public and private art museums in postwar Japan as well as the nature of postwar political culture.

Historiography has long been concerned with the problem of determining standards for evidence. For traditional Chinese historians, it was Confucius who provided the model for historical writing. As the attributed author of the Springs and Autumns, Confucius demonstrated qualities of narratival restraint, historical factuality, moral profundity, and a refusal to engage in idle speculation. Of course, his model was not an easy one to emulate, and later historical writings have drawn on both the factual records of the imperial court (which were not always factual or free of ideological interests) and nonofficial sources, such as private accounts, anecdotal literature, and hearsay. The present essay focuses on this intersection between anecdotal sources and historiography. This is precisely the point when historiography must reflect on its narrative condition, as narrative has interests other than factuality or moral truth. The author shows how the historiographic anxiety over unreliable sources has often coexisted with a fascination with anecdotal stories and gossip.

This article explores the history of intraracial (Indian-on-Indian) rape in early colonial India. Though at times uneven and unpredictable in their rulings, British judges created a set of evidentiary requirements and a body of legal decisions that were as harsh on rape victims as the precolonial Islamic system was presumed to be. Despite the colonial promise of a more modern and humane criminal law, the gradual displacement of Islamic law did little to widen rape victims' path to legal remedy. English common law presumptions about the frequency of false charges and a suspicion of women's claims combined with a colonial insistence on the peculiarity of Indian culture to make it difficult for victims of rape to prevail in court. The colonial legal treatment of the “unsensational” crime of rape was rather unsensational. It largely reflected contemporary trends in England, which raises the important question of what was distinctively colonial about it. 

In a performance of Ōdaiko, arguably the most iconic and widely performed piece in Japanese taiko drumming, a loincloth-clad man pounds furiously on a huge Japanese drum to the point of near exhaustion. Although this piece often is assumed to descend from Japan's rich heritage of folk drumming, this article argues instead that Ōdaiko was inspired by a fictional representation of festival drumming in the mid-century Japanese film The Rickshaw Man (Muhōmatsu no isshō). In addition, the revealing clothing worn in the performance derives not from Japanese custom but from the input of the French designer Pierre Cardin. Tracing the emergence of Ōdaiko in the influential taiko ensemble Ondekoza, this article sheds light on the potent mixture of folkloric instrumentation and modern sensibility that distinguishes contemporary taiko drumming.

Influenced by Orientalist assumptions and Utilitarian ideals, and needing to enforce a system of adjudication that responded to their interests, the East India Company's officers selected among varied religious texts a set of norms and tried to apply them consistently. The decision to rely on texts rather than practice, the choice of certain precepts at the expense of others, and their rigid application ran counter to the traditional administration of justice, which had been fluid, contextual, and plural. They also distorted the meaning of Hanafi fiḳh, turning what had been an instrument of legitimation, a moral reference, and a source of social standing into a system of organized dispute settlement. The emphasis on religious textual sources and the attempt to use them as a basis for codification coincided with the idea, which gained ground in the nineteenth century among Muslim reformist movements, that political weakness could be countered by returning to a pristine scripturalist Islam, focused on its legal aspects and seen as a systematic doctrine devoid of ambiguities. These ideas can be also found in the Islamist thought that subsequently spread among urban reformist movements and in legal reforms adopted in Pakistan. A review of case studies, however, suggests that the flexibility and contextuality that characterized the enforcement of Islamic law in precolonial Islam is still to be found in legal practice.

In October 2007, Malaysia celebrated sending its first astronaut into space, as part of a cooperative venture on board a Russian space mission. As Malaysia's first astronaut was a Muslim, the Malaysian government commissioned, through its Department of Islamic Development, a project to create a definitive set of guidelines for the practice of Islam in outer space, specifically on board the International Space Station. What may on the surface appear to be a practical exercise in clarifying religious practice reveals upon closer examination to be a complex restructuring of Malaysia's domestic and international politics, with the role of Islam as the catalytic and somewhat controversial centerpiece.