Seung Hyok Lee, Japanese Society and the Politics of the North Korean Threat, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016, 200 pp. (ISBN 9781442630345) North Korea has been portrayed in various guises in Japanese media, such as a «paradise on earth»; a socialist regime that enforces the unique socialist ideology of Juche; a hermit kingdom isolated […]
Reviews
The Worlds of Words of the Ibis trilogy by Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, London: John Murray, 2008. 471 pp. (ISBN 978-0-7195-6895-4 hb). Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke, London: John Murray, 2011. 522 pp. (ISBN 978-0-71956-898-5 hb). Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire, London: John Murray, 2015. 616 pp. (ISBN 978-0-7195-6900-5 hb). When Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies was published in 2008[1] as the first […]
Reconsidering Tokugawa Japan: Finding Christians where they should Not Be
A Christian Samurai. The Trials of Baba Bunkō. William J. Farge, SJ-Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2016, pp. XXV/300. At least since George Elison’s Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan was published by Harvard University Press in 1973, historians of early modern Japan have been inclined to accept Elision’s […]
A (new) revisionist history of early modern China
Evelyn S. Rawski, Early Modern China and Northeast Asia. Cross-border Perspectives, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 339 pp., (ISBN 9781107471528) Early Modern China and Northeast Asia. Cross-border Perspectives represents the culmination of a long research work dedicated to the study of Chinese history through a new perspective that goes beyond national histories, while the […]