Confluences of Medicine is the first book-length exploration in English of issues of medicine and society in premodern Japan. This multifaceted study weaves a rich tapestry of Buddhist healing practices, Chinese medical knowledge, Asian pharmaceuticals, and Islamic formulas as it elucidates their appropriation and integration into medieval Japanese medicine. It expands the parameters of the study of medicine in East Asia, which to date has focused on the subject in individual countries, and introduces the dynamics of interaction and exchange that coursed through the East Asian macro-culture.

The book explores these themes primarily through the two extant works of the Buddhist priest and clinical physician Kajiwara Shozen (1265–1337), who was active at the medical facility housed at Gokurakuji temple in Kamakura, the capital of Japan’s first warrior government. With access to large numbers of printed Song medical texts and a wide range of materia medica from as far away as the Middle East, Shozen was a beneficiary of the efflorescence of trade and exchange across the East China Sea that typifies this era. His break with the restrictions of Japanese medicine is revealed in Ton’isho (Book of the simple physician) and Man’apo (Myriad relief formulas). Both of these texts are landmarks: the former being the first work written in Japanese for a popular audience; the latter, the most extensive Japanese medical work prior to the seventeenth century.

Confluences of Medicine brings to the fore the range of factors—networks of Buddhist priests, institutional support, availability of materials, relevance of overseas knowledge to local conditions of domestic strife, and serendipity—that influenced the Japanese acquisition of Chinese medical information. It offers the first substantive portrait of the impact of the Song printing revolution in medieval Japan and provides a rare glimpse of Chinese medicine as it was understood outside of China. It is further distinguished by its attention to materia medica and medicinal formulas and to the challenges of technical translation and technological transfer in the reception and incorporation of a new pharmaceutical regime.

The Contemporary Pacific provides a publication venue for interdisciplinary work in Pacific studies with the aim of providing informed discussion of contemporary issues in the Pacific Islands region. It features refereed articles that examine social, economic, political, ecological, cultural, and literary topics. It also includes political reviews, book and media reviews, resource reviews, and a dialogue section that allows flexible publication of diverse genres of writing, including interviews and short essays. Each issue highlights the work of a Pacific Islander artist.

After more than two decades of existence, Contemporary Southeast Asia (CSEA) has entered a new phase of specialization to reflect more directly the changing priorities of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) as well as to cater to an increasing demand among our subscribers for a focus on issues related to domestic politics, international affairs, and regional security. This primary emphasis on political developments, socioeconomic change and international relations is in keeping with the rapid advances in the field of strategic studies concerning not just Southeast Asia but, indeed, the larger Asia-Pacific environment. Contemporary Southeast Asia comprises up-to-date analyses of important trends and events as well as authoritative and original contributions from leading scholars and observers on matters of current interest. It is also the policy of the Editorial Committee of CSEA to produce special issues in order to focus attention either on particular national situations or on major strategic trends in both Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region. Contemporary Southeast Asia is published three times a year, in April, August, and December.

A systematic study of Wang Bi's (226-249) commentary on the Laozi, this book provides the first systematic study of a Chinese commentator's scholarly craft and introduces a highly sophisticated Chinese way of reading the Taoist classic, one that differs greatly from Western interpretations. The Laozi has been translated into Western languages hundreds of times over the past two hundred years. It has become the book of Chinese philosophy most widely appreciated for its philosophical depth and lyrical form. Nevertheless, very little attention has been paid to the way in which this book was read in China. This book introduces the reader to a highly sophisticated Chinese way of reading this Taoist classic, a way that differs greatly from the many translations of the Laozi available in the West. The most famous among the Chinese commentators on the Laozi—a man appreciated even by his opponents for the sheer brilliance of his analysis—is Wang Bi (226–249). Born into a short period of intellectual ferment and freedom after the collapse of the Han dynasty, this self-assured genius, in the short twenty-three years of his life, dashed off two of the most enduring works of Chinese philosophy, a commentary on the Laozi and another on the Book of Changes. By carefully reconstructing Wang Bi’s Laozi text as well as his commentary, this book explores Wang Bi’s craft as a scholarly commentator who is also a philosopher in his own right. By situating his work within the context of other competing commentaries and extracting their way of reading the Laozi, this book shows how the Laozi has been approached in many different ways, ranging from a philosophical underpinning for a particular theory of political rule to a guide to techniques of life-prolongation. Amidst his competitors, however, Wang Bi stands out through a literary and philosophical analysis of the Laozi that manages to “use the Laozi to explain the Laozi,” rather than imposing an agenda on the text. Through a critical adaptation of several hundred years of commentaries on the classics, Wang Bi reaches a scholarly level in the art of understanding that is unmatched anywhere else in the world.

Drawing on both Canadian and Japanese sources, this book investigates the life, work, and attitudes of Canadian Protestant missionaries in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (the three main constituent parts of the pre-1945 Japanese empire) from the arrival of the first Canadian missionary in East Asia in 1872 until 1931. Canadian missionaries made a significant contribution to the development of the Protestant movement in the Japanese Empire. Yet their influence also extended far beyond the Christian sphere. Through their educational, social, and medical work; their role in introducing new Western ideas and social pursuits; and their outspoken criticism of the brutalities of Japanese rule in colonial Korea and Taiwan, the activities of Canadian missionaries had an impact on many different facets of society and culture in the Japanese Empire. Missionaries residing in the Japanese Empire served as a link between citizens of Japan and Canada and acted as trusted interpreters of things Japanese to their home constituents.

The influx of Protestant missionaries from Britain to Japan, Korea and Taiwan was an integral part of the British presence in East Asia from 1865 to 1945. Ion draws on both British and Japanese sources to examine the life, work and attitudes of the British missionaries, women and men, who ventured far from their homeland to preach the gospel. He explores the role played by British Protestants as both Christian missionaries and informal ambassadors of their own country and civilization. Through their educational, social and medical work the missionaries helped introduce Western ideas and social pursuits which in turn affected different facets of society and culture in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The study illustrates how the British missionaries’ intent to introduce Christianity was affected by the response of the East Asians to Western ideas.

In describing the high drama of the British missionary movement’s pioneering days in the late nineteenth century to its persecution during the late 1930s, Ion casts light on a particular, yet important, aspect of the changing tides of Anglo-Japanese relations. This book will ably complement his previous study of Canadian missionaries in East Asia during the same period.

Chosen as one of the 15 outstanding books of 1993 for mission studies by the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review offers its readers up-to-date research findings, emerging trends, and cutting-edge perspectives concerning East Asian history and culture from scholars in both English-speaking and Asian language-speaking academic communities.

In this pioneer study, Ion investigates the experience of the Canadians who were part of the Protestant missionary movement in the Japanese Empire. He sheds new light on the dramatic challenges faced by foreign missionaries and Japanese Christians alike in what was the watershed period in the religious history of twentieth-century East Asia.

The Cross in the Dark Valley delivers significant lessons for Christian and missionary movements in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe which even now have to contend with oppression from authoritarian regimes and with hostility.

This new book by A. Hamish Ion, written with objectivity and scholarly competence, will be of interest to all scholars of Japanese-Canadian relations and missionary studies as well as to general historians.

Cultivating Commons challenges the common understanding of Japanese economic and social history by uncovering diverse landholding practices in early modern Japan. In this first extended treatment of multiple systems of farmland ownership, Philip Brown argues that it was joint landownership of arable land, not virtually private landownership, that characterized a few large areas of Japan in the early modern period and even survived in some places down to the late twentieth century. The practice adapted to changing political and economic circumstances and was compatible with increasing farm involvement in the market. Brown shows that land rights were the product of villages and, to some degree, daimyo policies and not the outcome of hegemons’ and shoguns’ cadastral surveys. Joint ownership exhibited none of the “tragedy of the commons” predicted by much social science theory and in fact explicitly structured a number of practices compatible with longer-term investment in and maintenance of arable land.

Exploring early modern society from the ground up, this work provides new perspectives on how villagers organized themselves and their lands, and how their practices were articulated (or were not articulated) to higher layers of administration. It employs an unusually wide array of sources and methodologies: In addition to manuscripts from local archives, it exploits interviews with modern informants who used joint ownership and a combination of modern geographical tools (hazard maps, soil maps, digital elevation models, geographic information systems technologies) to investigate the degree to which the most common form of joint ownership reflected efforts to ameliorate flood and landslide hazard risk as well as microclimate variation. Further it explores the nature of Japanese agricultural practice, its demand on natural resources, and the role of broader environmental factors—all of which infuse the study with new environmental perspectives and approaches.

Cultivating Commons will be welcomed by Japanese historians, those in other regional-national fields, and social scientists concerned with issues of resource management, economic development, and rural society.

Drawing from an extensive archival base of government, military, and popular records, Chamorro scholar Keith L Camacho traces the formation of divergent colonial and indigenous histories in the Mariana Islands, an archipelago located in the western Pacific and home to the Chamorro people. He shows that US colonial governance of Guam, the southernmost island, and that of Japan in the Northern Mariana Islands created competing colonial histories that would later inform how Americans, Chamorros, and Japanese experienced and remembered the war and its aftermath. Central to this discussion is the American and Japanese administrative development of "loyalty" and "liberation" as concepts of social control, collective identity, and national belonging. Just how various Chamorros from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands negotiated their multiple identities and subjectivities is explored with respect to the processes of history and memory-making among this "Americanized" and "Japanized" Pacific Islander population. In addition, Camacho emphasizes the rise of war commemorations as sites for the study of American national historic landmarks, Chamorro Liberation Day festivities, and Japanese bone-collecting missions and peace pilgrimages.

Ultimately, Cultures of Commemoration demonstrates that the past is made meaningful and at times violent by competing cultures of American, Chamorro, and Japanese commemorative practices.