Hong Kong's oldest Western cemetery garden is located in Happy Valley. This history and tour highlights the need for urgent action to conserve the built and natural heritage resources of this important cultural landscape. The author challenges the reader to reconsider the basic approach to heritage conservation adopted in Hong Kong where a false dichotomy persists between natural and built heritage conservation initiatives. The Hong Kong Cemetery provides an excellent example of a precious cultural landscape which is deteriorating because simplistic approaches to site management have failed to understand and protect the complex interrelationship between the natural (flora and fauna habitats) and built (monuments and memorials) heritage resources. The first three chapters introduce the cemetery garden concept as it evolved in early nineteenth-century Europe, and was eventually established in Hong Kong by the British. The second half of the book provides a self-guided tour of the cemetery highlighting its resources as well as explaining the main conservation problems and possible solutions to protect the cemetery.

Colonial built environments were an expres­sion of imperial aspirations, a manifestation of power, a tool in the civilization of indig­enous cultures, a re-creation of a home away from home, and a place to live and work for both colonizers and colonized. Experts on city planning, architecture, and Asian and imperial history detail colonization’s influence at both the top and bottom levels of society and its representation in stone, iron, and concrete. Creating the colonial built environment was a multilayered, unpredictable process. This study emphasizes the diversity of the colonial built form from Harbin to Hanoi and differing experiences of foreign rule, as well as the flexible interac­tions between colonizers and colonized and the many risks of building and living in such colonies and treaty ports.

Hard Times in the Hometown tells the story of Kaminoseki, a small town on Japan’s Inland Sea. Once one of the most prosperous ports in the country, Kaminoseki fell into profound economic decline following Japan’s reengagement with the West in the late nineteenth century. Using a recently discovered archive and oral histories collected during his years of research in Kaminoseki, Martin Dusinberre reconstructs the lives of households and townspeople as they tried to make sense of their changing place in the world. In challenging the familiar story of modern Japanese growth, Dusinberre provides important new insights into how ordinary people shaped the development of the modern state.

Chapters describe the role of local revolutionaries in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the ways townspeople grasped opportunities to work overseas in the late nineteenth century, and the impact this pan-Pacific diaspora community had on Kaminoseki during the prewar decades. These histories amplify Dusinberre’s analysis of postwar rural decline—a phenomenon found not only in Japan but throughout the industrialized Western world. His account comes to a climax when, in the 1980s, the town’s councillors request the construction of a nuclear power station, unleashing a storm of protests from within the community. This ongoing nuclear dispute has particular resonance in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis.

Hard Times in the Hometown gives voice to personal histories otherwise lost in abandoned archives. By bringing to life the everyday landscape of Kaminoseki, this work offers readers a compelling story through which to better understand not only nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan but also modern transformations more generally.

15 illus., 2 maps

Founded in 1936 under the auspices of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (HJAS) has without interruption pursued its mission to disseminate original, outstanding research and book reviews on the humanities in Asia, focusing at present on the areas of China, Japan, Korea, and Inner Asia. As scholarship has evolved, so has this Journal, but always while holding constant its commitment to serve authors and readers alike through the careful selection and editing of its contents.

In evaluating manuscripts, the Editor of HJAS is guided by its Editorial Board and acts on the advice of referees worldwide. The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies is a semi-annual publication, appearing in June and December, and has institutional and individual subscribers in roughly forty countries. All back issues of HJAS are available on JSTOR with a five-year moving wall.

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) is one of the world’s leading scientific stations for monitoring the atmosphere. For more than fifty years, beginning with atmospheric chemist Charles Keeling’s readings of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, MLO has provided climate scientists a continuous record of the atmosphere’s increasing concentration of carbon dioxide—and sparked the international debate over global warming. Hawai‘i’s Mauna Loa Observatory tells the story of the men and women who made these and many other measurements near the summit of the world’s largest mountain.

Botanist Archibald Menzies, who trekked up Mauna Loa’s rough, lava-encrusted slopes in 1794, was the first to make scientific measurements from the summit. In the winter of 1840, the US Exploring Expedition spent a grueling three weeks at the edge of the summit crater. Their scientific achievements remained unsurpassed for more than a century and anticipated the research that was begun in 1951, when a primitive weather station was built atop the mountain. Serious research began in 1956 when the first building of the present observatory was erected a few thousand feet below the summit. Recollections of past and present MLO staff detail the historic beginning of carbon-dioxide measurements and many exciting discoveries and near disasters at the remote observatory in this colorful account of the evolution of MLO into a world-class facility.

Today more than a hundred experiments are carried out at MLO, including precise measurements of the ozone layer, the sun’s ultraviolet, the dust and air pollution drifting across the Pacific from Asia, and a wide assortment of gases in the atmosphere. These and other measurements have provided ground truthing for satellite-borne sensors and led to major scientific findings, some of which have influenced public policy decisions.

Hawai‘i’s Mauna Loa Observatory should be read by atmospheric science students to gain an appreciation for the enormous effort required to generate high quality data. Much more than a strict scientific biography of Mauna Loa, this work will also be appreciated by anyone interested in a highly accessible history of the human side of atmospheric observations at a remote, high-altitude observatory.

165 illus., 110 in color

In 1972 a North Vietnamese offensive of more than 30,000 men and 100 tanks smashed into South Vietnam and raced to capture Saigon. All that stood in their way was a small band of 6,800 South Vietnamese (ARVN) soldiers and militiamen, and a handful of American advisors with U.S. air support, guarding An Loc, a town sixty miles north of Saigon and on the main highway to it. This depleted army, outnumbered and outgunned, stood its ground and fought to the end and succeeded. Against all expectations, the ARVN beat back furious assaults from three North Vietnamese divisions, supported by artillery and armored regiments, during three months of savage fighting. This victory was largely unreported in the U.S. media, which had effectively lost interest in the war after the disengagement of most U.S. forces. Thi believes that it is time to set the record straight. Without denying the tremendous contribution of the U.S. advisors and pilots, this book is written primarily to tell the South Vietnamese side of the story and, more importantly, to render justice to the South Vietnamese soldier.

On the eve of the war against the South Vietnamese regime in 1964, the communist party strove to carve out a new productivist and political elite from the towns and villages of the country. According to a categorization of patriotic exemplarity devised by Ho Chi Minh, "avant-garde workers", "exemplary soldiers" and "new heroes" would fill the ranks of a "new model society", one in which political virtue would serve as the principle to mobilize the masses. This study present and analyzes the process by which "new heroes" were invented. It first develops a picture of what constituted heroes in Vietnamese tradition and history, and then shows how the new model, effectively a Sino-Soviet import, was imposed, only to be slowly distorted by its own cultural rationale and by specific objectives. Far from being a transitory phenomenon, this model has contributed for more than half a century to the reconstruction of the national imagination and the development of a new collective, patriotic and communist memory in Vietnam.

In June 2001 Rahna Reiko Rizzuto travels to Hiroshima to research and interview survivors of the atomic bomb, leaving her husband and two young sons in New York. Her work does not go well until September 11, when the survivors finally open up as they share Americans’ fears and relive their own trauma. But Rizzuto’s marriage is crumbling. On her own in Japan, she questions her role as a mother and wife and ultimately makes the painful decision to get a divorce and have the children live with her ex-husband.

Intended both for students and scholars, this book of personal essays is the first by a group of historians as researchers, writers and teachers specializing in Southeast Asia. The group has not, to our knowledge, as a collective unit at least found any biographers before. They consist of a number of "veterans" who have been invited by Professor Nicholas Tarling to comment on the way they got into Southeast Asian history, its development over the past decades and its future. As result, the essays mainly semi-autobiographical innature, are not only illuminating, but also revel many "trade secrets", why they chose their particular area of specialization, andhow they went on to pusue their research interests, academic careers and writings on their chosen subjects. This is companion volume to New Perspectives and Research on Malaysian History, which is a collection of essays on Malaysian historiography, and is also published by MBRAS to coincide with the celebration of its 130th anniversary in August 2007.

Comprehensive overview of the work of Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh.